The most complete known record of life in the Warsaw Ghetto between 1939 and 1942 — contained in a diary smuggled out of the ghetto and buried for 20 years in an empty kerosene can — was given today to New York University.
Dr. Abraham I. Katsh, director of NYU’s Institute of Hebrew Studies, presented the diary notebooks to the University Libraries. The notebooks will become a part of the manuscript collection of NYU’s Library of Judaica and Hebraica.
Half of the diary, written entirely in Hebrew, was brought to the United States in 1962 by a Polish immigrant, Wladyslav Wojeek. The notebooks had been hidden on his father’s farm in a village near Warsaw. In 1964, Dr. Katsh obtained the remainder of the diary from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, which earlier had obtained it from Wojeek.
The Journal, written by Chaim A. Kaplan, intellectual and Hebrew scholar who is believed to have died in the ghetto, was published yesterday by The Macmillan Company. Under the title “Scroll of Agony,” the work was translated into English and edited, with notes, by Dr. Katsh.
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