In the worst of all circumstances how is it possible to retain our humanity?

September 28, 2010, Mythic Imagination will inaugurate a year-long program, Creativity in Captivity.  The opening evening of September 28th will be a concert at the Schwartz Center at Emory University in Atlanta.

The concert will be produced in partnership with the Emory University Center for Ethics, and will be free and open to the public.

All of the music in the concert was written by people inside the concentration camps of Nazi Germany.  Dr. Francesco Lotoro has spent the last 22 years racing against the dissolving history of the Holocaust to find, document, copy and record thousands of pieces of music that were written in the Nazi camps, as well as music written by prisoners of war during World War II.  Mythic Imagination is partnering with Dr. Lotoro, a concert pianist and professor of music in Italy, to insure the permanence of the archive and help to continue his research and recording, as well as bringing the work to America and creating performances.

Dr. Lotoro explained: “ If we think of it, no one can control the creative energy of mankind.  In fact, the creativity of mankind multiplies the more difficult, the more restrictive, the more limited the situation.  It was generally a sentiment of many of those who knew they would not survive to leave a testament, they had nothing.  They couldn’t leave their house, their belongings.  They had nothing...  So people who were maybe even resigned to an atrocious death, had all the more reason to create artistically...  The process of creating music was something close to the heart, a testament of the heart.”

By giving the concert, we are trying to raise money to fund Professor Lotoro’s work.

A unique photography exhibition, The Last Album:  Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau, will also be on public display beginning September 15th through Thanksgiving, at several location on the Emory campus.

By accident during a group tour of Auschwitz, Anne Weiss discovered a lost cache of personal photographs that the Nazi’s had confiscated from one group transported there.

The photos most people associate with the Holocaust depict dehumanized skeletal bodies, but theses pictures provide rare glimpses into the vibrant life’s stories of prisoners before their imprisonment- who they loved and what mattered most to them.

Ms. Weiss has spent much of the last 20 years researching the stories of the families in the photographs.  She will present them at the concert on the 28th.