Scroll of Agony- The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan

Abstract

A precious record of Jewish life under Nazi rule. - New York Review of Books. Not only the material for history; it is history itself, agonisingly, triumphantly alive. - Saturday Review. Twenty years after the Warsaw Ghetto was annihilated, Chaim Kaplan's diary was found carefully preserved in a kerosene can. Originally written in Hebrew, the journal begins on September 1, 1939, as the author, who had been a respected member of the Warsaw Jewish community for forty years, records the Nazi blitzkrieg that stunned the world - the Jews of Poland most of all. It ends in August 1942, when he realised that the Nazi noose was around his neck. The diary is remarkably objective in its firsthand view of the Nazi occupation: the politics, the quartering of the city, the building of the ghetto walls, the choking constriction in all aspects of human life, and the deportations. Today, Kaplan's diary stands as an extraordinary record of the Nazi destruction of Warsaw's Jewish community. It is as timely as ever.

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