last word
FORMER INQUIRER REPORTER
Andrew Cassel
Jarrad Saffren | Staff Writer
I n 2015, Andrew Cassel retired
from his career as a newspaper-
man after 35 years, including 23
at The Philadelphia Inquirer. But the
longtime business reporter was not
ready to just kick back. He became a
visiting professor of business journal-
ism at Penn State University. Then,
two years later, he entered a master’s
program in liberal arts at the University
of Pennsylvania.

But it was not until 2018 that Cassel
found his retirement project.

He was on a Google journey into the
story of Dr. Aharon Pick, a Jewish doctor
who lived in Lithuania's Jewish ghetto
under German occupation during World
War II. Cassel knew about Pick because his
grandfather was a friend of the doctor in
Lithuania. And on this Google journey, he
learned that the United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.,
had Pick’s diary. He reached out and
urged the museum to translate it.

The Philadelphia resident and
Society Hill Synagogue member
began working with a translator,
Gabriel Laufer, a museum volunteer
and former engineering professor at
the University of Virginia. The duo’s
work is now a translated journal called
“Notes from the Valley of Slaughter,”
published by Indiana University Press
on April 4.

“It was a labor of love. Once I got
going, it became engrossing,” Cassel
said. “It tells you a lot about the experi-
ence of the Holocaust that you don’t
get from reading popular accounts.”
Cassel first learned about Pick in
1990. He picked up a book in his
parents’ house that his grandfather had
put together containing memoirs from
Keidan, the town in Lithuania where
Cassel’s grandfather and Pick lived.

One article was by Pick, according
36 APRIL 20, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
to an email from the U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Museum about Cassel.

“It was a memoir of growing up in
this town, and it was fascinating,” said
Cassel to the museum’s PR team.

Seven years later, Cassel received a
package from a cousin in Israel about
the Hebrew-language publication of
Pick’s journal from the ghetto. Pick’s
son took it with him when he moved to
Israel after the Holocaust. Sometime
after, “some folks got a hold of it and
decided to publish it,” Cassel said.

Pick “worked in a Lithuanian hospital
for more than a dozen years,” accord-
ing to the email from the museum.

But then the Nazis “outlawed Jewish
doctors from treating non-Jewish
patients.” As the email goes on to
explain, “Pick was forced to move into
the Šiauliai ghetto, where families were
forced into cramped living situations.

Essential food items like bread, milk
and meat were hard to find, and there
was punishment for Jewish people
caught smuggling these items. Vermin
riddled the ghetto, often making edible
provisions scarce.”
The doctor’s journal contained
passages like this one: “Horrible
rumors regarding the fate of the Jewish
population in Poland terrify us by day
and take the sleep from our eyes by
night. The cup of poison which has
been spilled upon us in the last year is
now the fate of our brothers in Poland.

Exterminations of entire communities,
killings of hundreds of thousands of
Jews. They are telling us that tens of
thousands of our brothers had been
killed with poisonous vapors [gasses]
like bedbugs and cockroaches —
they had chosen a beautiful death
for them!”
Pick learned about the Allied invasion
of Normandy on D-Day in June 1944.

His final entry was about how the West
was coming.

“'Maybe this means we’ll survive and
be liberated.’ But he didn’t survive. He
had an illness and he died shortly after
that,” Cassel said.

“It’s frustrating,” Cassel added. “You
see this drama unfolding, and then it
just stops.”
As he read the story and started
working with Laufer to translate it, the
former reporter viewed it as a much
longer assignment.

“You start going from one discovery
to another,” he said.

Now that it’s out, Cassel believes
he’s contributed to Holocaust memory.

“I’m waiting to see if the rest of the
world agrees with us, but we’ll find
out,” he said.

The translator is already working on
his next project: a translation of a book
written in Yiddish and published in the
late 1940s by a survivor, Levi Shalit,
from the same Lithuanian ghetto. Ellen
Cassedy, a Yiddish translator and a
friend of Cassel’s, asked him to join
the project. Cassel thinks they have a
tentative contract with another univer-
sity publisher.

“It’s a fascinating read,” he said. “But
it’ll reach more people when we get it
translated.” ■
jsaffren@midatlanticmedia.com Courtesy of Andrew Cassel
TRANSLATES HOLOCAUST DIARY