At 85 – and given the powerful emotions of the moment – it would not have been surprising if Aviva Bar-On’s voice had wavered. But as she sang in clear tones in front of an audience of 3,000 people in Jerusalem on Sunday night, it was easy to imagine the nine-year-old Nazi concentration camp prisoner she was once was.
Bar-On performed a song she committed to memory more than seven decades earlier in Theresienstadt camp in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Composed by the Jewish poet and musician Ilse Weber, who was later gassed at Auschwitz, the song had never been heard in public.
It was one of 11 pieces performed at the concert, the culmination of a 30-year quest by Francesco Lotoro, an Italian composer and pianist who has tenaciously tracked down thousands of songs, symphonies and operas from the Holocaust.
The music was created in the darkest, most desperate moments imaginable by musicians and performers whose lyrics and scores were written on scraps of paper or memorised. Some were forced to play as their fellow inmates were led to the gas chambers.
“Some [of the music] was written in notebooks, on coal sacks, food wrappers, tickets,” Lotoro said. One five-act opera was found on sheets of lavatory paper. And some of the music was held only in the memories of survivors, now in their 80s and 90s.
Lotoro has travelled the world, searching in bookshops, attics and archives, and interviewing Holocaust survivors. He has salvaged and recorded 8,000 pieces of music, “but there are more than 10,000 more waiting to be deciphered that I have not yet touched”.
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