The Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe in London supports the ILMC Foundation archive.

Collaborations continue at full speed between the Fondazione Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria, based in Barletta, and Italian and international cultural institutions that have taken to heart the preservation and dissemination of music written in concentration camps and other places of civilian and military captivity during World War II. The Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe of London has proven particularly sensitive to the activities of the large Archive and Media Library created and curated by the ILMC Foundation under the musicological aegis of its president, Francesco Lotoro (a musician with over thirty years of comprehensive involvement in the field of concentration camp music). By statute, and in recognition of worthy projects, it funds a large number of organizations and individual scholars working in the fields of Jewish heritage, culture, and education.

The Rothschild Foundation has recognized the significant value and unique nature of Lotoro's challenge: to trace, restore, publish, and perform scores of music composed in captivity or deportation during World War II. This goal has led him to travel the world in search of forgotten compositions, with the aim of preserving the memory of the men and women who transformed music into an act of resistance. The result of this at times all-encompassing commitment has to date been the discovery of more than 8,000 scores and 12,500 documents (including diaries, music notebooks, recordings, and interviews).

The uniqueness of this artistic and human heritage lies in the fact that it includes not only thousands of scores, documents, and testimonies of Holocaust survivors or their families—that is, music written in Nazi concentration and extermination camps under extreme conditions of deprivation of fundamental human rights—but also every other music composed in captivity and deportation throughout the conflict zones of the Second World War.

The works that Francesco Lotoro rescued from oblivion—collecting, transcribing, and bringing back to life compositions often written on the most unlikely media, and sometimes attempting to philologically recreate them from severely damaged materials—range from classical music, celebratory or popular songs from across Europe left behind by Jewish deportees, to testimonial improvisations by Sinti and Roma musicians, to clandestine protest songs, works of every style and genre, from symphonies, sonatas, and operas composed by talented professional musicians, to entertainment music, tangos, cabaret, and popular songs by amateur singers, etc.

There is no shortage of photographs, both paper and digital, which also need to be organized coherently. There are also non-musical documents (manuscripts, typescripts, printed documents) relating to the musical activity in the Camps. Finally, it is necessary to organize the extensive video and phonographic material, such as VHS tapes, audio cassettes, 33 and 78 rpm records, Pyral records, DVDs, and CDs. Added to all this are the Library's books, which comprise over 3,000 publications.

Given this monumental cultural heritage, the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe 's fundamental contribution is to support the essential cataloguing activities through cataloging, transcription, restoration, digitization, and archiving, according to international standards. The additional, important objective is to make the research findings subsequently available to the public through a multilingual anthology and a free-to-access web portal.

"Achieving these results, " stated Maestro Francesco Lotoro , " is a momentous achievement because it allows us to restore to humanity entire pages of our collective history, testimonies expressed through music, which by its very nature is a universal language, as is its emotional power. Furthermore, the recovery of this lost and rediscovered music opens new avenues for musical historiography, which is now in a position to recover entire pages unjustly torn from the great book of the History of Music. I therefore feel compelled to thank all the organizations that are supporting us in this arduous undertaking, and in particular the Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe, which has provided significant support to our Foundation's Archive and Library, the beating heart of all our initiatives."