Uncovering a precious heritage: the unknown music of the Holocaust

This doctoral research project is based on the prestigious resources of the Alexander Kulisiewicz
Collection, a unique archive, nowadays stored at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington DC, that preserves musical compositions written by prisoners in the Nazi concentration camps
during World War II. Despite its extraordinary importance, most of the archive remains little known to the
scholarly community even today, as acknowledged by many leading academics in the field. Therefore, the
project aims to explore and shed light on neglected and completely forgotten composers and to bring
their artistic heritage back to the attention of the public, scholars, performers, as well as the international
musicological community. The work will not only contribute to deepening and broadening our currently
limited knowledge of this repertoire but also help to restore, through their art, the memory of all those
who were persecuted during the war. The research will take into account both instrumental and vocal
compositions written by internees imprisoned in the German camps and in those established in the
occupied Poland, with a particular focus on composers Leon Kaczmarek and Teodora Grace from KL
Dachau, Ludmila Peskarova from KL Ravensbruck, Waleria Felchnerowska from KL Stutthof, and Sofia
Karpinska from KL Majdanek. The research will be carried out through a historical and artistic archiving of
this enormous musical testimony, together with a musical analysis of the scores, inquiry of texts and
historical contextualisation in order to display this musical legacy not only within an academic framework
but also to musicians and performers who wish to perform and study such an important historical period
from an artistic perspective. For this reason, the research outcomes will be made available through the
publication of a monograph followed by edited scores and recordings of the music thereto related.