Coping with Holocaust Trauma Through Music

Poems set to music by Jewish women who survived the Holocaust are featured in the album “Silent Tears.” The Yiddish album won an award.

When psychologist Paula David started her new job as a social worker at Baycrest Centre, a Jewish retirement home for seniors in Toronto, Canada, in the early 1990s, she had no idea what she was in for.

Although she was trained in group therapy for trauma, that field of study was not as developed as it is today.

Meanwhile, the 14 elderly women who met with her regularly for group therapy were all Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe.

ALSO READ: HT Editorial | Why we must never forget the Holocaust

At first, women did not want to talk about their childhood and youth.

“At first they told me very clearly that they couldn’t tell these stories, that they didn’t have the words to describe them,” David says.

Instead, the psychologist talked to the participants about their daily lives, their children and their grandchildren for a year.

Over time, some women began to show early symptoms of dementia, meaning their earlier traumatic memories were clearer than their more recent experiences.

Eventually, the “dam” broke, as David said in a television interview. Now that women trusted her, she heard shocking accounts of human experimentation, torture, loss of children and other loved ones, sexual abuse, terrible hunger, disease and forced sterilization.

From Holocaust Shame to Poetry

Until then, these women had not even shared their story with those close to them.

“This was before Schindler’s List,” David told DW, referring to the 1993 blockbuster film that highlighted the horrors of the Nazi genocide against European Jews. “The Holocaust wasn’t talked about much. At the time, it was still a subject of shame.”

ALSO READ: International Holocaust Remembrance Day holds special significance for young people of Jewish origin in Poland

From time to time the group made advances, but also setbacks.

“We were often overloaded,” David said. “We needed lots of cups of tea and we would talk about other topics for a while.”

David began recording the reports and transcribing them at home. She realized that the participants, whose first language was not English, were using completely different syntax, melody and vocabulary than people born in Canada.

The language they used was “infinitely more powerful than anything I could have expressed,” David said. She wrote the sentences down and organized them thematically. And so poems emerged, which she presented to the group.

The women could hardly believe they were hearing their own words. One said, “I can’t even write, let alone compose poetry!” Paula David recalls. Realizing that it was their own texts filled them with great pride.

The poems gave structure to the Holocaust survivors and David, and became a kind of emotional outlet for them all. “We became poets,” the psychologist recalls.

ALSO READ: A pen that will never be silent! Remembering Anne Frank through her words for her 93rd birthday

The group therapy sessions have become such an important part of the women’s lives that they’ve arranged family gatherings and hair appointments around them to attend, David says.

Surviving the Jewish Ghettos

Several years later, in 2019, David met journalist and music producer Daniel Rosenberg. He was deeply involved in the Molly Applebaum story at the time. Applebaum had suffered a similar fate to the Baycrest women.

In 1942, Molly began writing her diary at the age of 12. In it, she describes how she survived the extermination of Jews in the Polish ghettos because she and her older cousin were hidden by a Polish farmer in a wooden crate buried in a stable. The girls were only allowed to leave the crate at night. It was often covered in insects, lice and dirt.

Molly’s mother was shot dead in a ghetto in Tarnow, and Molly never saw her younger brother and stepfather again. Molly’s diary, “Buried Words,” was published in 2017. Today, she is 92 and lives in Toronto.

Rosenberg decided to make a music album from Molly’s diary entries and the stories of the Baycrest women. Not with English lyrics, but in Yiddish and Polish, the languages ​​the women spoke as children and young people.

The music also had to be adapted, which is why Rosenberg decided to work with Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk, a great Polish tango specialist.

Before World War II, tango was one of the most popular musical genres in Poland. It was imbued with elements of klezmer and Roma music. This era ended after the outbreak of World War II. Its famous protagonists, lyricist Andrzej Wlast and composer Artur Gold, were both killed in Treblinka.

Creating songs from poems

Nine songs make up the album “Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango”. Four are original compositions from the 1930s, composed by Artur Gold. The others are new compositions by Rebekah Wolkstein and Oscar Strock. The songs are performed by the Canadian chamber orchestra Payadora Tango Ensemble and accordionist Sergiu Popa.

The lyrics by Applebaum and the Baycrest group are sung by Lenka Lichtenberg, Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk, Aviva Chernick and Marta Kosiorek.

Canadian singer Lenka Lichtenberg, originally from Prague, performs two songs. Lenka’s mother and grandmother were prisoners in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and her grandfather died in Auschwitz. On her 2022 album “Thieves of Dreams,” she recalls her grandmother’s experiences after discovering her poems in a desk drawer in her old home in Prague. Lichtenberg recently won a Juno, Canada’s Grammy, for her album.

Lichtenberg is a professional, but “Silent Tears” was always a challenge, she told DW, especially the track “A Victim of Mengele.”

“I’ve been singing since I was nine, but I’d never heard such a horrible subject,” she says. “I asked myself: How can I sing something like this?”

For days, she sat at her piano, “tearing my hair out,” working on the song. Her goal was to find the right balance. As she puts it, “to give the song the emotion it needs without being overwhelmed by it.” In the end, she found exactly the right tone.

Topping the world’s music charts

In March 2023, “Silent Tears” climbed the charts and reached number one on the European World Music Charts. International media outlets including CBC in Canada, Deutschlandfunk Kultur in Germany and ORF in Austria have discussed the album.

Music producer Rosenberg told DW that he and Molly Applebaum’s daughter Sharon Wrock were more than surprised by the situation.

“Eighty years ago, when Molly was buried underground on that farm in Poland, keeping a diary of the horrors she experienced, Hitler controlled radio stations all over Europe,” he said.

“Today, Molly’s words are broadcast as music on these same channels in Austria, Germany, Belgium, Italy, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Latvia and elsewhere. We both nearly burst into tears trying to understand this.”

In the meantime, the women in Paula David’s original group at the Baycrest Centre have all passed away. But many more groups have sprung up since then. David is happy that Holocaust survivors have found new life with “Silent Tears.”

Today, these women’s stories are heard around the world, in the languages ​​they spoke as children and in words that were forcibly taken from them.

“Silent Tears” is an important musical document, especially today, when anti-Semitism is on the rise.

World Music Award for ‘Impressive Account of Jewish Culture’

Germany’s largest folk-roots-world music festival, held in Rudolstadt, Thuringia, now honors “Silent Tears” with the Ruth World Music Prize, which has been awarded annually since 2002.

“Silent Tears” is a powerful testimony to Jewish culture as well as to Germany’s past and its duty to remember the atrocities committed during World War II, said Bernhard Hanneken, the festival’s artistic director.

The poems and music give the survivors’ stories a new dimension and imbue the experiences and traumas reflected in the texts with a deeply moving and often disturbing emotion, he added. “The merit of this project is to bring these memories and poems to life and to be able to pass on the messages they contain to future generations.”

The prize, worth €5,000, will be awarded on July 6 in Rudolstadt.