Silent Tears, The Last Yiddish Tango

To mark Holocaust Remembrance Week 2023 and the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, The Payadora Tango Ensemble, Lenka Lichtenberg and Aviva Chernick present Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango.

This award-winning program is based on poems, testimonies and writings of women who were victims of sexual violence, human experimentation, forced sterilization and torture during the Holocaust. Some are from a project led by Dr. Paula David, a social worker at the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care who helped survivors process their trauma by writing collective poetry. Others are from Molly Applebaum, a Canadian author, who, during her adolescent years, was buried underground in a small wooden box in a barn in Dąbrowa Tarnowska, Poland during World War II.

The songs from Silent Tears tell the story of unimaginable violence as experienced by women and children during the Nazi occupation of Poland.