'What Will Become of My Diary?'

“During the morning hours of the first of September 1939, war broke out between Germany and Poland and indirectly between Germany and Poland’s allies, England and France. This war will indeed bring destruction upon human civilization which merits annihilation and destruction. There is no doubt that Hitlerian Nazism will ultimately be defeated, for in the end the civilized nations will rise up to defend the liberty which the German barbarians seek to steal from mankind. However, I doubt that we will live through this carnage. The bombs filled with lethal gas will poison every living being, or we will starve because there will be no more means of livelihood.” 

Call it prescience or a realistic assessment of geopolitics. From the first, Chaim Kaplan had no illusions about Hitler or the fate of Europe’s Jews. On this date eighty-five years ago, he started writing in a notebook, published posthumously as Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan (trans., ed. Abraham Isaac Katsh, Macmillan, 1965). I learned of the diary thirteen years ago from my friend the late D.G. Myers, who wrote:

 

“Chaim Kaplan’s is the single most important diary to come out of the Shoah. Kaplan lived in the Warsaw Ghetto and participated in the Oyneg Shabes collective history project. A Hebrew teacher and Orthodox Jew, he watched the approach of the German destruction through the lens of Jewish concepts and categories. Bearing witness through his diary was, for him, as for all of the ‘ghetto scribes,’ a holy obligation.”

 

Kaplan was born in Belorussia in 1880 and early in the twentieth century moved to Warsaw, where he opened a Hebrew elementary school. He started keeping a diary, written in Hebrew, on the day the Germans invaded Poland. His final entry is dated August 4, 1942, when the last of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, including Kaplan and his wife, were deported to the Treblinka death camp. The notebooks were smuggled out of Warsaw to the farm of a Pole who preserved them through the war in a kerosene can.

 

Victor Davis Hanson writes in The Second World Wars (2017):

 

“On average, twenty-seven thousand people perished on each day between the invasion of Poland (September 1, 1939) and the formal surrender of Japan (September 2, 1945)—bombed, shot, stabbed, blown apart, incinerated, gassed, starved, or infected. The Axis losers killed or starved to death about 80 percent of all those who died during the war. The Allied victors largely killed Axis soldiers; the defeated Axis, mostly civilians.”

 

Hanson adds that some 60 million people died in World War II, most of them now nameless and forgotten. Here is the final entry in Kaplan’s diary:

 

“Thousands of people in the Nalewki-Zamenhof block were driven from their homes and taken to the transfer point. More than thirty people were slaughtered. In the afternoon, the furies subsided a bit. The number of passers-by increased, for the danger of blockade was over. By four in the afternoon the quota was filled: 13,000 people had been seized and sent off, among them 5,000 who came to the transfer of their own free will. They had had their fill of the ghetto life, which is a life of hunger and fear of death. They escaped from the trap. Would that I could allow myself to do as they did.

 

“If my life ends -- what will become of my diary?”

 

I’m reminded of Isaac Babel’s last known words. On May 15, 1939 he was tortured into making false confessions against himself and other writers. The transcript of the torture sessions include his final statement:

 

“I am innocent. I have never been a spy. I never allowed any action against the Soviet Union. I accused myself falsely. I was forced to make false accusations against myself and others. . . . I am asking for only one thing--let me finish my work.”

 

He was executed on January 27, 1940.