Event

To mark Holocaust Remembrance Week 2023 and the 78th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the National Arts Centre presents Silent Tears: The Last Yiddish Tango, by the Payadora Tango Ensemble and Lenka Lichtenberg. 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 a Toronto Jewish care home 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, Poland during the war.

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