"There are really hundreds, if not thousands of topical songs, original songs, in the style of light music, cabaret music, and so this is what these young people had in their heads."īy no means was all of the music composed in captivity the result of free expression. "For them, time had pretty much stopped at the time of their incarceration, and music became a great escape hatch for them," he says. Holocaust Museum, says it's not surprising prisoners could write upbeat tunes. Its carefree tone belies lyrics describing the miserable treatment of Jews in the camp.īerniker died of exhaustion at the Stutthof camp in Poland in April 1945.īret Werb, curator of music at the U.S. The compositions rescued by Lotoro cover the entire musical range: classical, folk, swing and some disconcertingly lively tunes.įor instance, a 19-year-old Lithuanian Jew in a camp in Riga, Ljowa Berniker, wrote a syncopated cabaret song, "Reischsbahlied" (Railway Song). "In a few hours in Auschwitz, an entire generation of musicians, composers, famous piano virtuosos, the fifth column of the Jewish musical elite of Central and Eastern Europe disappeared," Lotoro says. The same day the Nazis killed Ullmann, they gassed a dozen other prominent musicians. Terezin became a crossroads of contemporary music, Lotoro says, before its inmates were transferred to the gas chambers.
She survived World War II and died in 1992. It was an all-in-one ghetto, concentration and transit camp that the Nazis used as a cultural showcase to deceive the Red Cross and for propaganda purposes.įrida Misul, a singer from Livorno, Italy, was deported to Fossoli and eventually was at Auschwitz. The Third Reich banned the performance of all Jewish music, from Mendelssohn to cabaret.īut at the camps - with the notable exception of the extermination camps - musicians were allowed a degree of artistic freedom. Lotoro quotes from an essay Ullmann wrote before he was moved to Auschwitz, where he died in the gas chambers in 1944: "By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon and our endeavor with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live." Confinement in the Terezin camp made him prolific: In captivity, he composed more than 20 operas. Ullman, who studied with fellow Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, has long been recognized as a prominent composer.
The compositions Lotoro has resurrected were written in conditions of intense suffering.Īs he plays an excerpt of a piece by Viktor Ullmann, Lotoro notes the composer's anguish at not having enough time to complete his work, as well as the sense of urgency in the music. A selection was released last year in a box set of 24 CDs called Encyclopedia of Music Composed in Concentration Camps. Lotoro has arranged and recorded 400 of the works he discovered.
Lotoro's mission to find the lost music of the Holocaust was one reason he converted to Judaism in 2004 he later learned his great-grandfather was Jewish. In an essay, he wrote: "By no means did we sit weeping on the banks of the waters of Babylon and our endeavor with respect to arts was commensurate with our will to live." He died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz in 1944. Since then, he has traveled from his native Italy to more than a dozen countries, searching through old bookshops and archives, and interviewing Holocaust survivors.Īustrian musician Viktor Ullman composed more than 20 operas while imprisoned by the Nazis. Lotoro's solitary quest began in 1991, with his first visit to a concentration camp. Here, he plays music in his home in Barletta, southern Italy.įor the past two decades, in a small town in southern Italy, a pianist and music teacher has been hunting for and resurrecting the music of the dead.įrancesco Lotoro has found thousands of songs, symphonies and operas written in concentration, labor and POW camps in Germany and elsewhere before and during World War II.īy rescuing compositions written in imprisonment, Lotoro wants to fill the hole left in Europe's musical history and show how even the horrors of the Holocaust could not suppress artistic inspiration. Italian musicologist Francesco Lotoro is on a decades-long mission to find and resurrect music composed by prisoners at camps before and during World War II.
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