The stories of women who survived the Holocaust are reaching new audiences through an award-winning Canadian recording of Yiddish music and live multimedia performance that’s become a global touring presentation.  

Survivors’ stories form the basis for Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango, a recorded album of original compositions based on the writings of those who settled in Toronto. The collaboration among Jewish researchers, writers, and musicians has taken the Canadian production to Brazil, Argentina, Taiwan, Japan and Australia, along with shows last summer in Germany, Poland and Austria, all since the project’s first live performances two years ago in Ottawa and Toronto.

Both the album and the live presentation count on a Toronto-based Argentine Yiddish musical act, to anchor the music. Payadora Tango Ensemble worked on their parts separately over Zoom during the pandemic. One of their first in-person encounters was getting together to shoot videos for Silent Tears tracks in High Park.

The current live production includes narration by project producer Dan Rosenberg, accompanied by a variety of photos and multimedia projections.

Silent Tears’ accolades include Canadian Folk Music Awards for best producers (shared by Drew Jurecka, Payadora’s bandleader, who mixed the album, and Rosenberg); plus Recording of the Year at Folk Music Ontario, both in 2024, in addition to critical nods and “best of” list inclusions from radio music programmers at CBC, the BBC and NPR.

But winning a major German world music prize last year brought the show its most recent gig, a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Hosted by the German Embassy in Washington D.C. on Jan. 22, senior foreign officials and members of Congress were in attendance.

Andreas Michaelis, the German ambassador to the United States, introduced the concert in Washington.

“We Germans can’t and don’t want to wash off the memory of the Holocaust and that’s why it’s so important that we team up with those that help us to work on Holocaust remembrance,” the ambassador said at the concert.

“It is not always understood that for us Germans, the crime, the worst of crimes that has been committed in the German name and by Germans is something that also marks our identity… As the post-war democracy of Germany… our policies always have to be normative, they have to be moral, and they need to be anchored and that is because of this unique crime that is a part of our history.”

The ensemble performed at Germany’s Rudolstadt world music festival to receive the major award (called Weltmusikpreis) during a 2024 summer tour that included Poland and Austria. (The album reached number one on World Music Charts Europe—a first for a Yiddish album, according to Rosenberg.)

“It is kind of remarkable to get to be invited to some of these places,” said Rosenberg from Washington. “The German Embassy of all places… it shows how the world can change.

“If someone had told me back when I was a kid growing up in Pittsburgh in the ‘70s that in 2025, this would happen, that the Germans would be inviting us to do a Yiddish project about what women went through in the Holocaust. I’d say, I don’t think that’s going to happen in 2025.”

The genesis of the words and images encompass poetry, memoir, and testimonials from Holocaust survivors, who lived in Toronto after the war. The Collective Poems was composed during a therapy group at Baycrest, a Jewish seniors’ home, that was organized by Paula David in the 1990s, and self-published in 1995.

Half of the Silent Tears project’s songs also tell the story of Molly Applebaum, who was hidden during the war in Poland in an underground, airless box, along with a cousin, by a farmer who both saved and sexually abused the two girls. Applebaum detailed her experiences in her 1998 memoir Buried Words, which was republished in 2015 along with her recovered diaries.

Lenka Lichtenberg, one of four vocalists who recorded songs on the album and a member of the Silent Tears touring production, had also been at work on an album called Thieves of Dreams, involving poetry she discovered in a notebook that belonged to her grandmother, also a survivor. In some of the Silent Tears shows, Lichtenberg, shares a couple of numbers from her own recent repertoire.

Silent Tears has been performed in Melbourne, Australia, in Japan, and in Taiwan, where 400 people attended.

“A local rabbi, Cody Behir, who speaks Yiddish, told me this was the first Yiddish concert ever presented in Taiwan—and 400 came to hear this concert program based on the experiences of Molly Applebaum and what she endured being buried under a barn in Dabrowa, Poland, and Anna Hana Friesová, Lenka Lichtenberg’s grandmother, when she was imprisoned in Theresienstadt,” said Rosenberg.

Rosenberg reflected on the astonishing, poignant moment after the company presented the work in Dabrowa, the town where the Polish farmer and his family hid Applebaum during the war, buried in a wooden box (with a tiny airhole) underneath the farm’s barn.

“Here you are in a small town in Poland, zero Jews live in Dabrowa, you have no home team whatsoever with zero Jews in the city, and that place was sold out. They had to turn people away. And they came to learn about what had happened in their town, about this girl [Applebaum] who miraculously survived.”

After the concert at the city’s cultural centre, a former synagogue, Rosenberg learned how committed one local teacher was to keeping these stories alive.

“That teacher got up after the concert and [said]: ‘I’m so glad you came all the way from Canada. I teach Molly’s book in my history class… and I could take you to the house where all of this happened.’

“We drove to this house that was on the small farm, and inside the house is a woman named Barbara, who was the youngest daughter of the family that hid Molly all those years ago… 87 now,” Rosenberg said.

During the war, Barbara and the other children on the farm were not told that Applebaum and her cousin were being hidden, for fear they would let the secret slip out.

Rosenberg notes that the complications in Applebaum’s story are part of what makes it fascinating.

The farmer was abusing Applebaum, who was 12, but at the same time he risked his life and those of his sister and her children who lived at the farm, Rosenberg notes.  

“Hollywood portrays people as good and evil, and often life is much more complicated than that… and this farmer, who did a lot to save these two Jewish girls, also did some terrible, terrible things.”

The project’s musical-cultural inspiration is tango, which was popular in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, Rosenberg explains.

“Most of the composers were Jewish, and tragically most of them were murdered by the Nazis… I wanted it to sound like that period of Jewish music in Poland, and I figured Payadora would be perfect because they do tango.”

Violinist and composer Rebekah Wolkstein, who co-founded Payadora Tango Ensemble with Drew Jurecka, her husband and musical collaborator, originally came on to play violin, though wound up writing the majority of the Silent Tears material.

“It’s an honour to be given the opportunity to tell these women’s stories through the music. It feels very heavy, but also poignant,” said Wolkstein. “I learned that I can take stories and tell them through music of all kinds.”

Wolkstein says her musical studies of the great classical composers as well as her experience with tango and jazz music informed her compositions.

She calls Silent Tears “probably the most powerful and meaningful project I’ve ever been involved with,” though she found some material “particularly difficult… in terms of the stories and the lyrics.”

‘Victim of Mengele’

There’s a particularly harrowing track from the album called “Victim of Mengele.”

“I found it very disturbing, and to be able to compose music that was fitting, it had to be violent,” she said. “I grew up going to synagogue and so I found there were parts that should convey almost a prayer-like quality, like you would hear music in shul.”  

She says it was profound to play last summer, “all over Europe… for Jewish festivals created and led by non-Jews and synagogues that have been rebuilt with such care and love. And there are no Jews to attend services, so they’re turned into museums,” recalling one restored synagogue in Austria.

“I leaned against a wall and they said, ‘no, you can’t touch the walls’… It was so ornate and beautiful, and so strange to be in this place that was sort of not real… The whole reason for the building had been destroyed and so it had turned into this museum piece of grandeur—but the history there was hard to fathom.”

Wolkstein says the project has helped her grow musically, and pushed her to delve into a topic that she had resisted for a long time.

“Having grown up hearing stories about the Holocaust, they were very scary as a young girl… I did not want to read any books about the Holocaust or watch any movies. It was just too upsetting.”

She found herself playing a more visible role in Silent Tears, which provided a new perspective for her.

“Suddenly I’m in these places, meeting these people, I’m representing my community… I felt very Jewish, especially in places where the Jews were wiped out, like in Poland… some of these towns there were none left, and to be a person bringing in this music, sometimes I felt like [I was] pointing a finger, and it was kind of uncomfortable to me.”

But the response has been inspiring, she says.

“I was astonished… people being willing to hear these stories. Everywhere we’ve gone the reception’s been really unbelievable. It’s not an easy show in any way and it’s challenging the audience so much… It gives me some hope that all these people have shown up and told us how they were touched and how the music helped them to hear these difficult stories.”

In Plonsk, Poland, the hometown of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, the town’s mayor took the stage to speak at the end of the show, says Wolkstein.

“He wanted the audience to understand what had happened in their own town. And he said, ‘It used to be over 50 percent Jewish, and we have no Jews left. And we have to remember, we have to remember what happened here.’”

Wolkstein felt goosebumps when the mayor spoke.

“It was so important to him that it never happened again and that everybody recognized what had happened to the community there, and then he took us on a tour the next morning and showed us all the sites where they’re commemorating the community,” she said.

“That’s what Silent Tears has done, is reached out across… so that there isn’t a divide… and found lots of support from non-Jews across the globe who are touched by the project. In a time when it feels like antisemitism is really on the rise, it’s kind of not been my experience because Silent Tears has been so well received.”

The company presented in four cities in Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks in Israel that brought extra security concerns for Jewish events worldwide. But there, too, the receptions were warm, including an unanticipated “superstar” treatment after a concert hosted by the Jewish community in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.

“When we came out of the backstage, there was a long line of people waiting to take photos with us and greet us as if we were mega superstars. It’s not normal for a project like this to be received in that way… people were so excited that we were coming, and the Jewish community was… just elated to have the representation to be able to come together and be a part of this project.”

Lenka Lichtenberg, whose vocals appear on two recordings on the Silent Tears album, says she surprised herself when she recorded the emotionally charged “Victim of Mengele,” which called for a range of expression.

“It couldn’t be too soft… too defeated, but some parts of it have to be like that… other parts have to be angry, and I found an angry voice in myself that I have never used… suddenly, there it was and I did [surprise myself] because I didn’t know exactly how to get into it,” said Lichtenberg, who notes the “harrowing” song doesn’t always appear in performances.

“It’s just too much for some places, but if we do play it, then we usually get the best response exactly for this because it’s just so dramatic,” she said.

Lichtenberg’s now presenting a solo version of Thieves of Dreams, called The Secret Poetess of Terezín, which premiered at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the one-woman production she says has “become more like a theater piece now” will be in New York in April.

Lichtenberg also presents the show, including projected images along with the music, in educational settings, from a Grade 3 and 4 class in Thunder Bay, Ont. up to postsecondary students at York University and the University of Chicago.

In some cases, like the Thunder Bay grade school, students might have never heard of Jewish people or the Holocaust if it’s not part of their school curriculum, she says.

“The music helps me, because when I’ve been talking for 23 minutes, I play a song, and it’s a song that is based on a poem by my grandmother. They’re looking at [a portrait of] her face [on a screen]… they totally accept it, and they actually really get into it…then they want to know more.

“And then I can tell them: What it’s like to be a minority and to be discriminated against? Has anybody here ever experienced anything like this? How would you feel if suddenly you had to leave everything in your home and go somewhere else? And when I ask this of these kids, there are hands that come up exactly with this question… they can relate to it.

“I walk out of that school and my heart is flying… I’ve just managed to give to these young minds something,” she said, including keeping the stories alive that she discovered in her grandmother’s notebooks.

Power of poetry

Paula David, who taught gerontology at the University of Toronto’s social work department for years, recalls how publishing the poetry of survivors 30 years ago changed their lives. In some cases, their families had never heard their traumatic stories before.

“They [the survivors] got this new status within the social strata of the community, which they had never had before, and confidence,” she said.  “The families looked at them differently and for families, it really was a bit of a watershed because they could start talking to their parents more.”

Silent Tears found David going back to the survivor group’s poems and even pulling out unpublished material, some of it challenging work she thought that “probably would have shaken families and other residents up… they’re all long gone now.”

The journey has brought David to several “full-circle” moments.

The first live performance was held at the tail end of the pandemic at Baycrest which she says was “some kind of divine justice.”

“That it’s done what it’s done and it’s traveled where it has… is mind-boggling beyond anything we could have known.”

Rosenberg still keeps in touch with David from touring locations.

“All of these survivors that I ever worked with, their main theme for dealing with any of it was ‘nobody should forget… they should know my story. When I’m gone, people need to remember.’

“I think one of the reasons it’s resonating is because there are even more and more shattered populations around the globe, and this does take it beyond just plain words [which] hardly get to hit the depth of the emotion and the pain. And music is doing it, and I think it bodes well for the future for Holocaust education and post-genocide trauma education and communication.”

Thinking about the source of the work “makes it really hard for Holocaust deniers,” David said. “But nobody could have anticipated what’s happened. And it has really strong Canadian roots.”

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