Chaim Kaplan

(1880 - 1942)

Born in Belorussia in 1880, Chaim Kaplan came to Warsaw in the early 1900s and opened a Hebrew elementary school. He began keeping his war diary on the day of the Nazi’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939; the last entry appeared on August 4, 1942, the month in which the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, including Kaplan, were deported to the Treblinka death camp. The notebooks were smuggled out of Warsaw to the nearby farm of a Polish man who preserved them through the war in a kerosene can.