How the legacy of Holocaust survivors lives on through poetry in Toronto
The legacy of Holocaust survivors who put their pain into poems in Toronto will be revived in song on Thursday, marking Holocaust Remembrance Day and commemorating the genocidal trauma they endured.
“What a legacy for them, this new incarnation,” said Dr. Paula David, founder of a poetry project dedicated to survivors at Baycrest Centre for geriatric care in Toronto.
It began 30 years ago when an influx of Holocaust survivors flooded into Baycrest, at one point amounting to nearly 65 per cent of their residents, according to David, who worked at the home as a social worker for over 20-years.
“We had to take a different approach to care,” David said.
She pointed to showering as an example. “Someone coming in the morning and saying, ‘Time to get up and go to the shower,’ that would be a trigger for a great number of survivors,” she said. At concentration camps, gas chambers were disguised as showers.
To provide a space for residents to openly speak about their trauma, she created a survivors group. With permission, David began taping their meetings, pulling sentences from their discussion and compiling them based on common themes, like hunger or fear.
Together, these fragmented sentences, which could be a compilation of 12 unique voices, became poems.
When David read them to the group, they resonated. “That’s exactly how I feel,” David remembers residents responding. “That’s just what’s going on in my mind, in my heart.”
“There is a beautiful rawness about them,” she added.
Eventually, they compiled the poems into a book that chronicled the experiences of victims of sexual violence, Josef Mengele’s human experimentation, forced sterilization and the internal-dilemma of stealing food for hungry children.
A book titled "Collective Poems" chronicles Holocaust survivor testimonies from the Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care in Toronto. “We dedicated it to their murdered families,” David said.
In honour of Holocaust Remembrance Day, their words will be brought to life, performed through a compilation of music titled, “Silent Tears,” premiering Thursday evening. “It’s taken on a life of its own,” David said.
“I find it incredibly sad it’s still relevant,” she said. “But also incredibly proud that what happened 30 years ago from people I know and cared about and who are gone is still relevant.”
CTVNews.ca Top Stories
BREAKING Federal employees will be required to spend 3 days a week in the office
Starting in September, public servants in the core public administration will be required to work in the office a minimum of three days a week. The Treasury Board Secretariat says executives will need to be in the office four days per week.
Concerns about plexiglass prompt inspections at some Loblaws locations in Ottawa
Inspections are underway at more than one Loblaws location in Ottawa after complaints were filed about tall plexiglass barriers.
OPP officer said 'someone's going to get hurt' before wrong-way Hwy. 401 crash
As multiple Durham police cruisers were chasing a robbery suspect on the wrong side of Highway 401 Monday night, an Ontario Provincial Police officer shared his concerns, telling a dispatcher, "Someone's going to get hurt."
Canada's most wanted fugitive arrested in P.E.I. in connection with Toronto homicide
A suspect in a fatal shooting in Toronto’s east end last summer has been arrested in Charlottetown, just one week after he topped a list of Canada’s most wanted fugitives.
Poilievre returns to House unrepentant for calling Trudeau 'wacko,' Speaker not resigning
An unrepentant Pierre Poilievre returned to the House of Commons on Wednesday to pepper the prime minister about his drug decriminalization policies after being booted the day prior for refusing to take back calling Justin Trudeau 'wacko' over his approach to the issue.
Five human skeletons, missing hands and feet, found outside house of Nazi leader Hermann Göring
Archeologists have unearthed the skeletons of five people, missing their hands and feet, at a former Nazi military base in Poland.
Toddler of Phoenix first responder dies after bounce house goes airborne
A two-year-old child died after a strong gust of wind sent the bounce house he was in airborne and into a neighbouring lot in central Arizona, the Pinal County Sheriff's Office said.
Plane overshoots runway at airport in St. John's, N.L., no injuries reported
Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada are headed to St. John's, N.L., after a plane overshot a runway at the city's airport this afternoon.
A teen was found buried in a basement in New York. An engraved ring helped police learn her identity two decades later
For more than two decades, the unknown victim was nicknamed "Midtown Jane Doe" because she was found in the Hell's Kitchen neighbourhood of New York City. But this week, investigators finally revealed her identity.