Hanukkah Behind the Ghetto Wall

Hebraist, elementary school principal, and Mir Yeshiva graduate Chaim A. Kaplan was a bookish introvert who dreamed of a quiet life of scholarship and chinuch. Instead he is today remembered as a chronicler of Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto under the Nazi occupation.

Kaplan’s accounts of how Hanukkah was celebrated in the ghetto in 1940 and 1941 offer stark and revealing contrasts.

In 1940, Chanukah arrived just a few months after the ghetto walls were completed, and before the Nazis had fully implemented all their suffocating regulations. “Never before in Jewish Warsaw were there as many Hanukkah celebrations as in this year of the [building of the] wall,” Kaplan wrote.

Although none of the festivities were held in public—“because of the sword that hovers over our heads,” he wrote—“Hanukkah parties were held in nearly every courtyard, even in rooms which face the street; the blinds were drawn, and that was sufficient. How much joy, how much of a feeling of national kinship there was in these Hanukkah parties! After sixteen months of Nazi occupation [since the German invasion of Poland in September 1939], we came to life again.”

In the year to follow, Kaplan’s diary entries were increasingly filled with descriptions of extreme overcrowding, famine, disease, and random Nazi atrocities. Jews were permitted just 181 calories’ worth of food each day. By mid-1941, over 5,000 ghetto residents were dying each month.

Kaplan wrote of once-wealthy people who now filled the soup kitchens, “waiting their turn for a bowl of watery soup,” and “families bundled up in rags, moaning with heartrending voices.” Often he felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of the horror; “My inkwell has grown tired of lamentations,” he wrote.

Kaplan’s descriptions of how Hanukkah was celebrated in the ghetto in 1941 reflected the deterioration of Jewish life. “This year very few Hanukkah candles were lit,” he recorded. “Our holiday has been turned into a day of mourning. The courtyard of the prison on Dzielna Street was turned into a slaughterhouse today,” as fifteen Jews who were caught beyond the ghetto walls were executed.

In June 1942, Kaplan learned from Jewish refugees reaching Warsaw that throughout Poland, Jews were being deported en masse, “in tightly sealed freight cars,” and taken to “the place of their execution, where they are killed.” He realized it was only a matter of time before the Germans did likewise in Warsaw—and he was desperate to make sure his chronicle of the ghetto would survive, even if he did not.

The last words of Kaplan’s final diary entry, on August 4, 1942, read: “If my life ends—what will become of my diary?”

Kaplan stuffed the precious documents in several kerosene cans and gave them to a friend to smuggle out of the ghetto. He, in turn, passed them along to a non-Jewish Polish acquaintance, who preserved them for posterity.

Kaplan did not live to celebrate another Hanukkah. He and his wife were deported to Treblinka and murdered there. But the diaries were saved, and eventually purchased by New York University. They were published in English, in 1965, as Scroll of Agony: The Warsaw Diary of Chaim A. Kaplan and have gone through many editions since then. They remain one of the most valuable eyewitness accounts of the fate of the Jews in the Nazi era.