Processing Holocaust trauma through music
In the early 1990s, when psychologist Paula David started as a social worker at the Baycrest Center, a Jewish home for seniors assisted in Toronto, Canada, she had no idea what was to come.
Although she was trained in group trauma therapy, the field of study was not as developed as it is today.
Meanwhile, the 41 elderly women who regularly saw her for group therapy were all Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe.
Women initially 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 for them,” David said.
Instead, the psychologist talked to the participants about their daily lives, their children and grandchildren for a year.
The problem was that many women already had early symptoms of dementia, meaning their earlier traumatic memories were clearer than their more recent experiences.
Finally the “dam broke”, as David once said in a TV interview. Now that women trusted her, she heard shocking testimonies of human experiments, torture, loss of children or other close relatives, sexual abuse, terrible hunger, disease and forced sterilization.
From Shame to Poetry
Until then, these women had not shared their stories even with their closest relatives.
“It was before ‘Schindler’s List,'” David told DW, referring to the 1993 hit film that shed light on the horrors of the Nazi genocide against European Jews. “The Holocaust wasn’t talked about very much. The topic was fraught with shame at the time.”
Every now and then there were breakthroughs with the group – but also setbacks. “Often it was so overwhelming,” David said. “Then we needed many cups of tea and talked about other topics for a while.”
David began recording the reports and transcribing them at home. She noticed that the participants, whose native language was not English, used a syntax, melody and vocabulary completely different from those born in Canada.
The language they used was “infinitely stronger than I could express,” David said. She wrote the sentences and organized them thematically. And so came the poems she presented to the group.
The women could hardly believe they were hearing their own words. One said: “I don’t even know how to write, forget about composing poems!” Realizing that each of them were proud poets.
Holocaust survivors and Paula David herself gave the poems structure. “We became poets”, recalls the psychologist.
Group therapy sessions became such an important element in women’s lives that they worked family gatherings and hairdressing appointments to attend, says David.
In a wooden box for two and a half years
Four years later, in 2019, Paula David met journalist and music producer Daniel Rosenberg. He was deeply involved with Molly Applebaum’s story at the time. Applebaum experienced a similar fate to the women at Baycrest.
In 1942, Molly started writing her diary at the age of 12. In it, she related how she had survived the extermination of Jews in the Polish ghettos because she and her older cousin lived with a Polish farmer.
Hidden in a wooden crate that was buried in a stable, the girls were only allowed out of their cell at night and were covered in bugs, lice and dirt.
Molly’s mother was shot dead in a ghetto in Tarnow and she never saw her little brother and stepfather again. Molly’s diary, “Buried Words”, was published in 2017. Today, she is 92 years old and lives in Toronto.
Rosenberg decided to make a music album out of Molly’s diary entries and the stories of the women of Baycrest. Not in English, however, but in Yiddish and Polish – the languages the women spoke as children and young people.
The music would also have to match, so Rosenberg decided to work with Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk, the leading expert on Polish tango.
Before World War II, Tango was very popular in Poland and there was a special style of the genre with elements of Klezmer and Roma music. The era ended after the outbreak of World War II. Writer Andrzej Wlast and composer Artur Gold were killed in Treblinka.
poems songs
On the album, “Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango”, there are nine songs in all.
Four are originals from the 1930s, composed by Artur Gold. The rest are new compositions by Rebekah Wolkstein and Oscar Strock. They are played by the Canadian chamber orchestra, Payadora Tango Ensemble, and accordionist Sergiu Popa.
Texts by Applebaum and the Baycrest group are sung by Lenka Lichtenberg, Olga Avigail Mieleszczuk, Aviva Chernick and Marta Kosiorek.
Canadian singer Lenka Lichtenberg sang two songs. She comes from Prague. His mother and grandmother were prisoners in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and his grandfather died in Auschwitz.
In her album “Thieves of Dreams” from the year 2022, she works with the experiences of her grandmother, whose poems she discovered in a drawer of her old house in Prague. Lichtenberg recently won a Juno, the Canadian Grammy, for his album.
Source: DW
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