My discovery of Chaim A. Kaplan’s diary, written in Hebrew over three decades ago, was first presented in English translation by me and published in 1965 by The Macmillan Company under the title Scroll of Agony. The present edition contains additional portions of Kaplan’s diary that have since been made available to me by Mr. Israel Gutman of Moreshet (Mordechai Anilewitz MemorialInstitute), in Israel. Kaplan’s diary is not merely an echo of the death cries of the Warsaw ghetto; in it are woven the strands of a narrative of martyrdom of the Jews of Poland. It is a record of a bloody period, of persecution, torture, starvation, deportation, and death. It is also a record of the Nazi conquest of Poland, the relationship of the Jews and their Polish neighbors, and the internal life of the Jews within the ghetto.
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