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Long Live Life! Concert

On the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day, 27th January 2021, the 76th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Herzog Centre, Trinity College Dublin, in collaboration with the Italian Institute of Culture and Holocaust Awareness Ireland announce the launch of the Long Live Life! Concert. Produced by the Fondazione Istituto di Letteratura Musicale Concentrazionaria and INTERGEA, the concert is available for a week from 27th January at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DssxqTxhZeA

The concert brings back to life several pieces of music created by people who managed to defy the reality of concentration camps: the musicians who produced music in the camps were not only gifted with great musical talent but also with an unshakeable faith in humanity; this concert is therefore an opportunity to reciprocate their trust by letting their music resound as an expression of human creativity and an instrument of resistance.

The Long Live Life! Concert is a tribute to the memory of those men and women who were killed and deprived of the most basic human rights during their imprisonment in concentration camps

During the last 33 years, Francesco Lotoro, the Italian pianist has recovered more than eight thousand musical scores composed by captives in the concentration and slave labour camps: a legacy that deserves to be studied, performed and exposed, as it preserves the precious signs of life of those souls who continued to make music to remind themselves of a better past and to hope for a better future.

Long live life! is the title of a play written in Theresienstadt (original title in Czech: Ať žije život!) by the comedian, conductor, poet, writer and actor Karel Svenk. Svenk died immediately after the evacuation of the Meuselvitz Camp (April 1945) while he was on his way back to Prague.