Holocaust Diaries - Chaim Kaplan

The Chaim Kaplan Diary 

Selected Extracts
                                                                  

Chaim Aaron Kaplan was born in a village called Horodyszcze near Baranovichi, today it is the town of Gorodische in Belarus in 1880. He received a Talmudic education at the famous Yeshiva of Mir and later studied at the Government Pedagogical Institute in Vilna.

In about 1902 he settled in Warsaw, where he founded an elementary Hebrew school, of which he was the principal for the next forty years. He visited America in 1921 and Palestine in 1936 and published a number of books including a Passover Haggadah for children.

He kept a detailed personal diary starting in 1933 written in Hebrew, which is one of the rare original documents of its kind that has survived the Nazi era. It describes the decline of Jewish Warsaw and the holocaust period in general, the diary as Kaplan put it became my soul brother, my colleague and companion.

Until the beginning of the Second World War it was a private personnel account, but when the war erupted the diary changed its character and in addition to his own experiences and troubles, Kaplan recorded the story of the Jews of Warsaw, his own speculations on future developments, the behaviour and policies of the Germans as they unfolded before his eyes, and his opinions about the Poles.

Chaim Kaplan had a penetrating mind and a sharp eye and his diary faithfully reflects the events of most of the ghetto’s existence. The War diary begins on the 1 September 1939 and ends on the 4 August 1942, during the height of the mass deportation of the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka death camp.

Selected extracts from his diary: