Thanks to the support of our partners, over the course of three years the ILMC Foundation has undertaken dozens of trips in search of scores, manuscripts, and surviving works; this is to cement a Memory built on testimony, Art, and Music understood as a Testament of the Heart.

Memory is not an optional extra of the intellect but is the true muscle of the spirit: there are those who, driven by a paleontological spirit, search for dinosaur bones and exhibit them in museums, but those who search for this music search for the footprints (scores) of dinosaurs (composers who created in captivity).
A footprint is life and was left by a living being. It indicates what it ate and whether it lived in a pack or alone. Bones are organic indicators of dead and decomposed beings.
As with core sampling in polar ice and in development land, musical research core sampling in the Camps is invaluable, indispensable for bringing to light the traces of the giant musicians of the human race annihilated by the mad meteorite of War.
Ghettos and concentration camps became factories of dreams and art capable of restarting the intellect's clock; this music transformed History into the present; making music didn't alienate the deportee from the world but rather compressed him like a spongy ball so that he could fully enter the Camp.
Writing music in captivity and deportation calmed the mind's omnivorous instincts, provided lightness compared to the heaviness of the place, and was a collective survival strategy.
Whoever saves one life saves the entire world, as written in the Talmud Bavli; we could not save the lives of most of these musicians, but we saved their music, and this is equivalent to having saved their lives in its universal, metahistorical, and metaphysical meaning.

To the hundreds of thousands of musicians who wrote, created, and performed music in the Camps, despite persecution, discrimination, imprisonment, deportation, genocide, and humanitarian catastrophes, we at the ILMC Foundation dedicate this book, assuring them that: yes, we made it.

Francesco Lotoro
President of the ILMC Foundation