Chaim Aron Kaplan (1880–1943)

Chaim Aron Kaplan was born to a Jewish family in Gorodishche, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. He received a Jewish yeshivah education and later studied at the Government Pedagogical Institute in Vilnius (Vilna). In 1902, he settled in Warsaw, Poland, where he started a pioneering private Hebrew elementary school and served as its principal for 40 years. He participated in the Society for Jewish Writers and Journalists in Warsaw, wrote Hebrew grammar and children's textbooks, and contributed articles to many Hebrew and Yiddish-language periodicals. In 1936, he visited the British Mandate of Palestine, intending to settle there, but was unable to find a job and so returned to Warsaw. In 1937, he published a collection of his essays and articles on the Hebrew language and Jewish education in a book called Pezurai. He began keeping a personal diary in 1933 and chronicled daily life and experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II. In 1942, he gave the diary to a Jewish friend named Rubinsztejn who was working at forced labor outside the Ghetto. Rubinsztejn smuggled the notebooks out and entrusted them to Wladyslaw Wojcek, a non-Jewish Pole. Kaplan and his wife are believed to have died in the Nazi death camp at Treblinka. Wojcek emigrated to the USA in 1962, taking the notebooks with him. He sold some volumes to Abraham I. Katsh for the New York University Jewish Cultural Foundation Library of Judaica and Hebraica. Other volumes were acquired by the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and by the Mordechai Anielewicz Memorial Institute in Israel. The diary was first published in 1965 as Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan.