The house at 88 Legionów Street, in Oświęcim, is leaning against the wall of the Auschwitz extermination camp. It was for years the house where Rudolf Höss, commander of the camp from 1940 to 1944, built a seemingly normal family life – gardens, swimming pool, greenhouses – while a few meters away he organized the greatest extermination in history. Since January 2025, after decades in private hands, the villa was acquired by the Counter Extremism Project and transformed into the Archer project, an international research center against anti-Semitism and extremism, under the patronage of UNESCO and in collaboration with the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. It is here that on June 11th there will be a concert by the composer, conductor and musicologist Francesco Lotoro, with the baritone Angelo De Leonardis. The program will be dedicated to music composed in concentration camps and almost erased by the Shoah: scores annotated on paper fragments or transcribed by heart, saved by Lotoro in over thirty years of commitment to collect, catalog and return this music to the public. The concert, promoted by the Counter Extremism Project, includes first world and Polish performances of works from the Italian composer’s archive.

It is not the first time that Lotoro plays within those walls: in 2025 he had already been invited to perform in the “Francesco Lotoro Sound Hall”, the hall dedicated to concentration music named after him by the Counter Extremism Project. On that occasion the master had expressed the hope that “the works recovered in the camps, and performed in the same rooms that housed the supreme evil, could accompany the work of contrast to that hatred that created the unspeakable conditions in which they were written”.

The following day, Friday, June 12 at 6:00 p.m., Lotoro will be in concert at the Ceremonial Hall of the Jewish Cemetery in Bielsko-Biała (920 Cieszyńska street), in an appointment organized by the BCK.