Chaim Kaplan diary

Chaim Aron Kaplan was born in Horodyszcze (Haradzisca), in what is now Belarus, in 1880. He received a Talmudic education at the Yeshiva of Mir, and then studied at the Government Pedagogical Institute in Vilna (Vilnius). Settling in Warsaw in 1902, he established a Hebrew primary school, which he served as the principal of for the next 40 years. He was an advocate of teaching Hebrew as a spoken language, and published several textbooks based on this method. Kaplan visited Palestine in 1936, hoping to settle there, but returned to Warsaw that same year. Kaplan began keeping a diary in Hebrew in 1933, and with the start of World War II in 1939, made a conscious decision to continue doing so, in order to record the events he was eyewitness to, including after he was interned in the Warsaw Ghetto. His diary ended in early August 1942, at which time he had the diary smuggled out of the ghetto for preservation. It is presumed that he was arrested during the round-ups that were taking place in the ghetto at that time, and deported to Treblinka, where he perished. (Source: adapted from Abraham Katsh, introduction to "Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan")

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection

Funding Note: The acquisition of this collection was made possible by The Abraham and Ruth Goldfarb Family Acquisition Fund.

Funding Note: The digitization of this collection was made possible by the Crown Family.

Funding Note: The accessibility of this collection was made possible by the generous donors to our crowdfunded Save Their Stories campaign.

These volumes, along with other volumes of the diary, were smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1942, and entrusted to Wladyslaw Wojcik. Following the war, Wojcik made some of the volumes available to the Jewish Historical Institute (ZIH) in Warsaw, and others he brought with him when he immigrated to the United States in 1962. All volumes were subsequently translated into English and published by Abraham I. Katsh as "Scroll of Agony," initially in 1965 and in subsequent editions. The extant volumes at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum were acquired from the estate of Wojcik's widow, Irena, in 2009.