David Kaplan was born in 1928 in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania. When the Russians occupied this area, his father was arrested for being part of the bourgeoisie and sent to Siberia. A year later Kaunas was occupied by Germany. In 1941, he and his family were forced to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing and were moved into the Slobodka Ghetto. David was 12-years-old and was put to work at an airport outside the ghetto. In 1942, they were sent to the Sanzai concentration camp. David, who was 13-years-old, was spared during a huge campaign to kill all Jewish children because he worked in a factory making boots for the Nazis.
In 1943, his family was taken by train to Stutthof concentration camp, in Poland, where David and his brother were separated from their mother and sister. From there, David was taken to Landsberg, a sub-camp of Dachau, and worked in a factory making airplane parts for the Nazis. He unloaded bags of cement for no less than 14 hours a day. Conditions in this camp were so bad that prisoners were dying from starvation at a rate of sixty to seventy people a day. It was here that David’s brother died.
In April 1945, David was forced on a death march to Dachau, where they were joined by Russian and Polish prisoners and forced on a second death march to a sub-camp at Bad Toelz, where they were liberated by the American Army. At the time of liberation, David weighed no more than 70 pounds.
After a brief recovery in Berlin, David tried to return home but only got as far as Lodz, Poland, where he learned of his mother and sister’s deaths at Majdanek. He returned to Landsberg and became an electrician. With the help of Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), David came to the United States and to El Paso in 1949. He lived briefly in Mexico, where he met his wife. They returned to El Paso, and David served four years in the U.S. Army at Fort Bliss. After his discharge from the military, he became a computer programmer and also went into the finance business. He had four children and six grandchildren.