Poems set to music by Jewish women who survived the Holocaust feature in the album ‘Silent Tears’. The Yiddish-language album is now receiving an award. 

When psychologist Paula David started her new job as a social worker in the Baycrest Centre, a Jewish home for assisted living for seniors in Toronto, Canada in the early 1990s, she had no idea what she was in for, according to an article of Deutsche Welle.

Although she had been trained in group trauma therapy, the field of study was not as developed as it is today. Meanwhile, the 14 elderly women who met her regularly for group therapy were all survivors of the Holocaust from Eastern Europe. The women did not initially want to speak about their childhood and youth. "In the beginning, they told me very clearly that they cannot tell these stories, that they had no words for them," said David. Instead, the psychologist spoke to the participants about their daily lives, their children and their grandchildren for a year.

Over time, some of the women were showing early symptoms of dementia, meaning their earlier, traumatic memories were clearer than more recent experiences. Finally the 'dam broke', as David said once in a TV interview. Now that the women trusted her, she heard shocking testimony of human experiments, torture, the loss of children or other close relatives, of sexual abuse, terrible hunger, sickness and forced sterilization.

Until then, these women had not even shared their stories with their closest relatives. "It was the time before "Schindler's List," David told DW, referring to the 1993 hit film that shone a light on the horrors of Nazi genocide against European Jews "One did not speak so much about the Holocaust. At the time the topic was still loaded with shame."

Every now and then there were breakthroughs with the group — but also setbacks. "Often we were overloaded," David said. "Then we needed lots of cups of tea and spoke about other themes for some time.

David began recording the reports and transcribing them at home. She realized that the participants, whose mother tongue was not English, used a syntax, melody and vocabulary that was completely different from those born in Canada. The language they used was "infinitely more powerful than I could have expressed it," David said. She wrote down the sentences and organized them thematically. And in this manner, poems came into being which she presented to the group.

The women could hardly believe they were listening to their own words. One said: "I can't even write, forget composing poems!", Paula David remembers. Realizing that these really were their own texts filled them with great pride. The poems gave the Holocaust survivors and David a structure, and they became kind of an emotional outlet for all of them. "We became poets," the psychologist remembers.