Francesco Lotoro - Shoah - The martyred musicians of the Holocaust

Today Germany is reflecting upon the genocide and atrocities of Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime with ceremonies around the country and beyond. Nazi Germany’s Holocaust claimed the lives of more than six million mainly Jewish victims, killed systematically through gas chambers, mass shootings and other brutal methods.

 

Germany has gone through different phases of self-examination in coming to terms with Adolf Hitler’s regime, and it wasn’t until 40 years after the end of the Second World War that Germany named an official day to remember victims of the Nazis’ genocide.

  The 1968 student movement in West Germany during the Cold War played a large part in bringing discussions of the Nazi history to the forefront of debates.

In 1996, German President Roman Herzog - who died earlier this month - first declared January 27th as the official day of remembrance, marking the 1945 liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

It was a time of deep reflection for the country, with the official remembrance day declaration preceded the year before - on the 50th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation - by numerous speeches, television documentary specials and reflective newspaper think pieces.

"The darkest and most awful chapter in German history was written at Auschwitz," then Chancellor Helmut Kohl said in 1995. "Above all, Auschwitz symbolizes the racial madness that lay at the heart of National Socialism and the genocide of European Jews, the cold planning and criminal execution of which is without parallel in history."

On that first memorial day, politicians and former concentration camp prisoners laid wreaths at sites across the country, but some members of the Central Council of Jews in Germany criticized the ceremonies as insufficient.

About a decade later in 2005, the United Nations also declared the day as the International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

 

 

Since 1991, the Italian pianist Francesco Lotor has traveled the globe to seek out and bring to light symphonies, songs, sonatas, operas, lullabies and even jazz riffs that were composed and often performed in Nazi-era concentration camps.

“This music is part of the cultural heritage of humanity,” Lotoro, 48, said after a concert in Trani, a port town in southern Italy, that featured surprisingly lively cabaret songs composed in the camps at Westerbork in the Netherlands and Terezin (Theresienstadt) near Prague.

 

Lotoro has collected original scores, copies and even old recordings of some 4,000 pieces of what he calls “concentrationary music” — music written in the concentration camps, death camps, labor camps, POW camps and other internment centers set up between 1933, when Dachau was established, and the end of World War II.

This album features music of the Czech composers Rudolf Karel, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann. They were excellent composers , whose lives and works were cut short by Nazism.

Tracklist:
01. Rudolf Karel - Theme et Variatoions, op. 13
02. - 06. Pavel Haas, Suite, op. 13
07. - 09. Gideon Klein - Sonate pour piano
10. - 12. Viktor Ullmann - Sonate pour piano no. 6 op. 44

Francesco Lotoro - Shoah - The martyred musicians of the Holocaust
(320 kbps, front & back cover included)