Future Memories: Lotoro's journey in search of music written in concentration camps has landed in Israel

Francesco Lotoro consulta gli archivi dello Yad Vashem, Gerusalemme

This September saw Francesco Lotoro – who for nearly 40 years has been engaged in researching music written in concentration camps and other places of captivity around the world between 1933 and 1953 – arrive in Israel , one of the stops on the project "Future Memories. Lotoro's Journey to Save the Lost Music" . The project, promoted by the Fondazione Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria ETS and dedicated to the recovery of precious new musical pages written in captivity and deportation, is supported by the Claims Conference (New York), the Puglia Region, the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe (London), and the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Paris) . The destinations of this journey, which also included Grazia Tiritiello , vice president of the ILMC Foundation, were the cities of Kiryat Ono and Jerusalem .

In Kiryat Ono, the two researchers met singer Aviva Bar-On, who was deported to Theresienstadt at the age of 13 and entrusted to the care of writer and composer Ilse Weber at Pavillon C41. Bar-On memorized numerous of Weber's songs, several of which had never been recorded. Although they had met her in previous years, they decided to meet her again so she could re-sing two songs, some verses of which had been omitted through forgetfulness.

Francesco Lotoro and Grazia Tiritiello with Aviva Bar-On (center in the left photo)

Most of the journey, however, took place in Jerusalem , at the Yad Vashem Library and Research Centre; here, hundreds of documents, diaries, and musical manuscripts were identified, including "Abschiedslied," written by Ilse Weber on a sheet of notebook paper in 1939 on the platform of Prague's main station while her son Hanuš was leaving on a Kindertransport train. The research continued at the National Library of the Hebrew University, where Lotoro and Tiritiello completed previously begun research. At the National Library's Sound Archive, they acquired phonographic material from the Theresienstadt musicians .

The trip was also an important opportunity to meet Noemi Cohn Cassuto - daughter of the French Jewish flautist and composer Leo Cohn , arrested after the German occupation of France during the anti-Semitic roundups and transferred to Birkenau where he died - and to acquire an anastatic reproduction of her father's music.

I musicisti Ilse Weber e Leo Cohn