In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, one non-profit organization is reaching out to survivors, their families and communities, and organizations in the US to rescue, preserve, and perform music composed by musicians imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.
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Holocaust Music Lost & Found hopes to use music either encoded on items such as notebooks, toilet paper, or telegrams or handed down by heart to produce educational programs and concerts.
"As the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles with each passing year," HML&F President Janie Press said, "our goal is to share these stories by finding them, performing them, and educating the world on the beauty that can come within chaos and destruction and how the preservation of the human spirit can uplift us."
The organization was formed to support the work of the Italian Fondazione ILMC organization.
Founded by Maestro Francesco Lotoro, a pianist, composer, and conductor, has for the last three decades recovered, studied, archived, performed, recorded, and promoted thousands of works produced in concentration, extermination, and civil and military imprisonment camps.
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Lotoro said, "It's wonderful that we have found a partner in the US that can help us in our urgent quest to find the vast music literature that was written in captivity during WWII. Music that proliferated in the camps is one of the most important legacies of human history. The 8,000 scores that I have found so far are only a small part of what we must continue to search for.
"We need to give back to humanity this heritage so that it can regain its rightful place in the history of music," he said.
JNS.org contributed to this report.
