The Music That Survived the Holocaust
Italian musicologist Francesco Lotoro has devoted his life to collecting compositions by the Nazis’ prisoners.
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‘One day, when talking about Auschwitz, we will talk about music, and only then will we have truly liberated Auschwitz.”
The man who says this is Francesco Lotoro, a passionate Italian pianist, composer and musicologist. He’s 61, and we’re in his modest four-room house in this coastal city of around 95,000 northwest of Bari, near Italy’s heel. Since 1988, when he finished his piano studies at an academy in Budapest, Mr. Lotoro has dedicated his life to “restoring, recovering, reclaiming” music composed by prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps of World War II, as well as in Soviet gulags. In the process, he has exhausted his savings and gone deep into debt. His wife, Grazia Tiritiello, works at the post office. “We need her salary, benefits and pension,” he says.
Only recently, he spent €20,000 of his own to acquire the oeuvre of a Czech composer, who died at a death camp, from his “wonderful but cash-strapped descendants.” He shows me a violin that belonged to a Polish musician who was sent to Auschwitz at 17, survived and emigrated to the U.S. after the war, settling in Bay City, Mich. After a segment about Mr. Lotoro aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” in early 2020, the man’s widow wrote Mr. Lotoro offering to give him her husband’s violin, which Mr. Lotoro calls “the Violin of Auschwitz.” He flew to Michigan to pick it up. It was in a ruined condition, and Mr. Lotoro spent €2,500 to restore it. In the process, he earned the ire of museum curators, “who asked why I did that.” They would have preferred to preserve it as a damaged artifact. “But I am not a museum,” Mr. Lotoro says. “I am a musician. Just as the music composed in the camps must live again, so must a musical instrument devastated by the same imprisonment.”
Mr. Lotoro has collected “10,000-plus musical scores to date,” he says, the majority of which are compositions from concentration and death camps. When I exclaim aloud at this huge number, he tamps down my amazement: “No, no. There’s so much left—90% of this music is still unrecovered, unknown.” His collection—which has devoured two rooms in his house, as well as many shelves of library space lent to him by a well-wisher in town—includes amateur compositions made by “cultured people for whom music was a part of everyday life.” But a startling number of pieces—symphonies, sonatas, madrigals, sonnets, even ambitious operas—were composed to the highest standards of professional musicianship. “If I were to play you some of these works, and I didn’t tell you that they were written in Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, you wouldn’t know. It’s beautiful music, that’s all.”
A Nazi law from 1933 barred Jews from participating in professional and public life, and that included the performance of music. Jewish musicians were, at a stroke, shut out of orchestras, conservatories, theaters and universities. “Almost all Jewish composers, conductors, music teachers and orchestral players who couldn’t escape from Europe ended up in the camps,” Mr. Lotoro says. He has detailed biographies of 140,000 such musicians, a number he calls “the tip of the iceberg.” He is working on a 12-volume encyclopedia titled Thesaurus Musicae Concentrationariae—Treasury of Concentrationary Music—which he expects to complete by 2027: “It will contain history, historiography, theory, aesthetics, bibliography, a dictionary of musicians, and 500 musical works written in the concentration-camp universe.” Mr. Lotoro’s dream is to establish a center for such music in a former distillery in Barletta by 2028; but as he scours for funds, he knows it could take longer.
He is a painfully modest man. I have to prize out of him the fact that his is the world’s most comprehensive private collection of “concentrationary music,” a phrase of his invention that he prefers to use instead of “concentration-camp music.” He defines “concentrationary” to include all circumstances in which there’s a punitive concentration of people, including in ghettoes. His vast archive contains music composed in the ghettos of Warsaw, Lodz, Krakow and elsewhere.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem have “huge, large collections,” he says. They have been the beneficiaries of donations from family members “because of the great international importance of these institutions.” Mr. Lotoro’s archive, for the most part, has been put together by personal toil and tireless persistence—travels across Europe, to the U.S. and to Israel, accompanied by painstaking detective work and requests to the descendants of camp musicians to bequeath to him their family papers. He and his wife have schlepped materials home by train, “five big valises recently from Prague.” He is, he says, “like the Monument Men, but in a musical key”—a reference to a 2014 Hollywood movie, loosely based on fact, about a unit of salvagers that set out to save priceless art in World War II.
Once, he entered an attic in Italy where a camp inmate composer’s son had stashed all his father’s papers: “I was immediately aware of being bitten all over my body by parasites. The papers were infested. I had to return in a space suit and gloves to disinfect everything. Only then could we pack and transport the papers.” Old manuscripts are usually infested with woodworms, silverfish or “other microscopic creatures with a love of paper.”
Why did prisoners, many awaiting certain death, compose so much music? In his book “The Lost Music of the Holocaust” (2024), Mr. Lotoro quotes Jerzy Rajgrodzki, a Jewish violinist and Treblinka survivor, who attested that “in the camp, songs had a revolutionary purpose for us. They encouraged us to keep up our fight for survival and to find a way to salvation.” Emile Goué, a French composer and prisoner in a German POW camp—where he contracted an illness that killed him shortly after the war ended—said that “music wasn’t entertainment or a game, but the very expression of our inner lives.”
Mr. Lotoro is in awe of these composers in adversity: “Those who produced music in captivity were laying down a testament. These musicians were repairing a broken world.” Ghettos, concentration camps and gulags were “reverse black holes that turned the clock of history back to the time of the Huns.” But they also “triggered an explosion of creativity. Music served as an individual and collective strategy of resistance, producing mental and spiritual nourishment no less indispensable than food.”
He cites a heartbreaking example of such resistance, shown by a group of young Tunisian Jews who arrived at Bergen-Belsen in 1943. They repeatedly sang a Hebrew song of their own composition, which another inmate memorized and was able to recall after the war. Committed to kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, they resolutely refused any of the meager food offered at the camp, and “allowed themselves to die of starvation.” Mr. Lotoro calls this “an act of defiance embedded in music.”
I first met Mr. Lotoro at Auschwitz on Jan. 27, 2025, the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation. He was playing a piano in the house once occupied by Rudolf Höss, the camp’s commandant, which has been purchased by the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project and turned into the Auschwitz Research Center on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization. This Jan. 27, Mr. Lotoro will headline a fundraising concert for the project at the Kennedy Center in Washington, at which he and an orchestra will perform 15 compositions from the death camps.
In Auschwitz last year, he was playing a lullaby on the piano, composed by Adam Kopycinski, a brilliant Polish musician who was the conductor of the Auschwitz Orchestra and had performed for Höss. (After the war, Kopycinski founded the Wroclaw Symphony Orchestra.) The emotional effect of a tender lullaby performed in a house where a mass murderer of Jewish children had once lived was overwhelming. The dozen people in the room were in tears.
Why would someone compose a lullaby, of all things, at a death-camp? “The lullaby is a highly prized musical form,” he says. Schumann, Brahms and Liszt all “tried their hand at this genre.” He guesses that Kopycinski, who lost two sisters at Auschwitz, “probably dedicated the lullaby to a son from a previous marriage before his deportation.” He adds that the musical repertoire at Ravensbrück, a camp for women and girls, included several lullabies. “Writing a lullaby helped to preserve the maternal aura that had to be maintained in ghettoes and camps with large populations of women and children.” Mr. Lotoro also cites a lullaby, sung in Yiddish, that was composed by a Polish Jewish watchmaker, Aron Liebeskind, at Treblinka, after his wife and 3-year-old son were gassed. He called it “Lullaby for My Little Son in the Crematorium.”
We know of this lullaby because Liebeskind, who was later killed at Sachsenhausen, transmitted the song there to Alexander Kulisiewicz, a Polish musician and political prisoner who had an eidetic memory. As his reputation spread through the camp, musicians of every kind went to him and “decanted their music into his mind,” Mr. Lotoro says. “ ‘Alex,’ they said, ‘we’ve heard you’re able to learn a song by heart.’ ”
After his liberation, Kulisiewicz, stricken with tuberculosis, dictated “716 songs in many languages to a nurse who realized how valuable this material was.” Before his death in 1982, he had amassed a collection of death-camp music, a large proportion of which now rests at the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Kulisiewicz’s son, Christof, gave a trove of Kulisiewicz’s papers to Mr. Lotoro.
Relatives of camp musicians welcome Mr. Lotoro with open arms: “They know about me from the internet, perhaps. But when I began this research in 1988, there was no email, social media or smartphones. I would go directly to the home of the survivor”—many were still alive—“or their relatives, and was welcomed like a friend. The relatives of survivors have proven to be my best allies.” Only in one case has a relative said that his father’s musical manuscript “was a precious memory and that he would never show it to anyone.”
Practically every concentration camp had an orchestra, made up of prisoners, who played for the German officers as they ate their meals, and also played fast-paced marches as the inmates filed out for labor duties. “The German authorities at Auschwitz I”—the main camp of the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex—“had a good knowledge of classical music and incurred considerable costs to acquire musical instruments, scores and sheet music.” The orchestra grew to some 80 musicians. Alongside the orchestra was a brass band, 120 strong. The musicians weren’t exempt from forced labor but did enjoy marginally better living conditions.
When Polish Jewish conductor and composer Artur Gold arrived at Treblinka in 1942, Kurt Franz—a brutal SS commander known for unleashing his large dog on prisoners—made sure that “the famous musician be given what he needed to assemble an orchestra befitting his reputation,” Mr. Lotoro says. Gold “managed to have his musicians exempted from ordinary work in order to hold regular rehearsals.” They also received extra food rations. “It was probably the best-known and most accomplished orchestra” among the extermination camps on Polish soil.
Mr. Lotoro was born into a Roman Catholic family, but when he was 15, he started to “become fascinated with Judaism.” He met his wife, Grazia, in 2000, when he was 36, and together they resolved to convert to Judaism. There are no synagogues in Barletta, so they drive for hours to Rome for religious instruction. They converted formally in 2004, on the morning of their wedding day. His Jewish name is Israel; Grazia’s is Sarah. The rabbi who conducted the wedding ceremony told Mr. Lotoro: “You have a mission to give life to dry bones.”
“Being a Jew helps me with my research,” Mr. Lotoro says. “It’s a mission, a mitzvah.” While the music he encounters is often exhilarating, the back stories are tragic and demoralizing. How do you cope when you learn that a composer who salvaged his musical compositions after two years in Buchenwald had to burn the papers to keep warm on the death march the Nazis forced him to undertake as American soldiers approached the camp? Or that a distinguished Jewish composer was dispatched to the gas chamber merely because he coughed as Josef Mengele walked past the assembled inmates?
“Being a Jew allows me to withstand the many, many periods when I am down,” Mr. Lotoro says. “But ultimately, what I do is remembrance. And memory is our official Jewish sport.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at NYU Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.
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Appeared in the January 10, 2026, print edition as 'The Music That Survived the Holocaust'.
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