Scroll of Agony

Chaim Kaplan, born in Gorodishche, Belorussia, was the founder and principal of an innovative Hebrew elementary school in Warsaw, where he had settled in 1902 after studying at the Mir yeshiva and at the Government Pedagogical Institute in Vilna. An ardent Hebraist, he visited Palestine in 1936 with plans to emigrate, but he returned to Warsaw. In 1933, Kaplan began keeping a diary and, while in the ghetto, recorded the harrowing physical and psychological conditions under which Jews were forced to live. He smuggled this record out of the ghetto in 1942 before being deported to Treblinka.