Sketches in towel paper, in a diary papers, or in paper sheets
were found left by people who lived and died in the prison or in concentrations
camps of the Second World War.
The article shows us we can try to remove something good
of something terribly bad; these people (dead people) wished a full of
life of music for themselves and they would have had it if its destiny
had been different.
Francesco Lotoro
músico italiano
In these days of April, when the anniversary of the liberation
of the people is commemorated the 62 who still were left in the concentration
camps of the Nazi German alive, a group of Italian investigators made
a revealing announcement. Thousands of works practically forgotten
will bring back to life, by means of the integration of a file of compound
or interpreted music in the crematory between 1933 and 1945.
“We tried to remove something good of something terribly
bad: These people wished a full life of music for themselves and they
would have had it if its destiny had been different”, said to the Italian
musician Francesco Lotoro.
Lotoro has compiled original, copies and recordings of all
the musical sorts, from operas composed in the corners of the mortal machinery
of the Nazis, to pieces of jazz with letters in Japanese, created in the
camps of military prisoners in the Asian jungles.
The music library that will be inaugurated in September in
the Third University of Rome will offer the scholars a repertoire of 4.000
documents and 13.000 micro cards that include scores, letters, graphs and
photography.
For more than 15 years, Lotoro practically worked alone.
It crossed the world, paying frequently its expenses, in search of
musical works in museums, archives and stores of antiques. It also
spoke with survivors of the Holocaust or relatives of the disappeared
people.
Lotoro, a pianist, has made the adjustment and the recording
of many pieces, to produce a collection of 32 discs; five of them already
have been published. Several musicians and singers who reside in their
native town of Barletta or in other populations of the south of Italy,
shared the passion of Lotoro, and usually they dedicate Sundays to work
with him in the recording studio.
The experts who know Lotoro’s work consider that it
is the first time that a resemblance effort was made to compile and
to live in a place a dispersed musical treasure everywhere. “I do not
know any institution that compiles those musical documents”, Bret Werb
said, musicólogo
of the Memorial Museum of the Holocaust in Washington. “It is an important
project that will become a resource unequaled for the musicians
of the entire planet”.
In an interview, Lotoro said that it discovers new work
constantly, “which
does not represent a good signal, because it means that history has
not done its work”. Lotoro, 42 year old, related that their Jewish
ancestors were forced to become part of the Christianity centuries
ago. Attracted the Judaism in its adolescence, Lotoro became the 2002.
In the beginning, the investigator looked for scores done during the
Holocaust, in a trip that took him to the Prague in 1991. In a short
time he accumulated huge work which he had hoped for before his trip.
“I started off for two weeks, with a small suitcase,
and hoped to bring a dozen works, but in the end I had to buy one
larger suitcase, to bring back the hundreds of manuscripts and
copies”,
remembered the musician. But finding work is only the beginning, since
it can be fragmented. Many were written in clandestine form or as quickly
as possible, indicated Lotoro. Among the main work in which he has
worked during the last decade appear those of Rudolf Karel, a Czech
composer, whom the Nazis stopped as he participated during the resistance
in Prague.
As a prisoner in military prison suffering of dysentery,
Karel used hygienic paper mainly to compose an ample repertoire, including
an opera in five acts and a sonnet (composition for nine executants).
The last one of its scores found by Lotoro is the “March of the Prisoners”,
dated four days before his death in 1945.
Distinta sangre
mismo valor
Many findings of Lotoro are works written in Terezín,
a Czech city used by the Nazi from 1941 like a ghetto and provisional
field of concentration, to which leaders and prominent Jewish artists
from all Europe were transferred. Terezín (Theresienstadt in German)
was also used like a propagandistic tool to hide its plans of extermination
to the international organizations. The prisoners could present/display
operas, recitals and spectacles of night club with several orchestras,
including one called the “Ghetto
Swingers”. Of the 140,000 Jews sent to Terezín, 33,000 died and almost
90,000 were deported to the fields of the death.
The file in Rome will include works of gypsies caught by
the Nazi, choral compositions of Dutch women caught by the Japanese in
Indonesia, and the music of Edmund Lilly, a American colonel who wrote
songs and poems during his past by several Japanese fields of halting,
since he surrendered in the Philippines in 1942, until his liberation in
Manchuria, more than three years later. In addition, the library will include
works of Berto Boccosi, an Italian captain who began to write an opera
when he was prisoner of the allies in a camping in Algeria. Lotoro comments
that it also looks for music written by officials Germans stopped by the
Soviets.
“Music is a universal language, so that the music written
by the German official and the Jewish prisoner as he himself has historical
value”, pointed out Lotoro. It trusted that the collection will allow
the scholars understand better “the explosion of creativity” that gave
birth to a tango in Buchenwald or waltz in the Italian field of Alberobello. “One
can at any moment feel the tragedy, but in his creative effort, a musician
is able to escape reality”, he said.
Music can also take the seed of the challenge, like in
the “March
of Terezín”, that was interpreted after the nocturnal spectacles in
the ghetto and begins with first notes of “Hatikva”, subject that would
become the Israeli national anthem in the end. At least, music was
for many prisoners a way to conserve their sanity. “For an author,
composing it is question of mental survival”, said David Meghnagi,
professor of psychology in the Third University, that heads the creation
of the file. “This way, it
maintains his human condition intact and allows its mind imagines of
a different world."
Por Ariel David / The Associated
Press 