Aron Kaplun was born in 1911 in the town of Starokonstantinov (Khmelnytskyi Oblast, Ukraine).
After finishing school, Aron enrolled in the Kiev Institute of Construction. Upon graduation, Kaplun returned to Starokonstantinov and began to work for a local construction company.
Kaplun was drafted into the Red Army in 1933, and served there for a time. Because of this military experience, he was sent to the front immediately after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in late June 1941.
Aron Kaplun served in a machine gun artillery battalion, but he often had to go on reconnaissance missions. Kaplun was wounded twice, but returned to active service after hospitalizations. Having begun the war as a first lieutenant, he was eventually promoted to major of the technical services. His last military engagement was the Battle of Königsberg (present-day Kaliningrad). He was awarded two Orders of the Red Star; the Order of the Patriotic War, 2nd class, and some medals.
His parents and other relatives, who had stayed behind in German-occupied Starokonstantinov, were murdered along with the other Jews of the town and the nearby settlements.
After the end of the war, Aron Kaplun served on the island of Saaremaa in Estonia, and later in the town of Kandalaksha near Murmansk.
In 1956, the unit in which Kaplun served was transferred to Leningrad. Next year, he was discharged from the army, and went on to work as chief engineer in the construction department of the Elektrosila plant in Leningrad.
In the postwar period, Aron Kaplun took part in creating a monument to the Jewish victims of Starokonstantinov. This project required him to engage in tough negotiations with the leadership of the local Town Committee and District Executive Committee of the Party. In the end, he was able to secure a permit for the monument, on condition that it be ethnically neutral, with no reference to the Jewishness of the victims. As a construction engineer, Kaplun himself designed the monument. After being erected, it became the object of an annual commemorative ceremony, which was held on Victory Day. This event would be attended by local residents (both Jews and non-Jews) and by Jewish natives of Starokonstantinov living elsewhere in the USSR, who would come to the town of their birth to honor the memory of their relatives and loved ones, who had died in the Holocaust.
In 1992, Aron Kaplun and his family immigrated to the United States. He died in New York in 1994.
