Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps made music; now it's being discovered and performed. More than 6 million people, most of them Jews, died in the Holocaust. The music they wrote as a temporary escape, however, did not die with them, thanks in part to the efforts of Francesco Lotoro. An Italian composer and pianist, Lotoro has spent 30 years recovering, performing, and in some cases, finishing pieces of work composed in captivity. Nearly 75 years after the camps were liberated, Francesco Lotoro is on a remarkable rescue mission, reviving music such as the one created by a young Jewish woman in a Nazi concentration camp in 1944.
Truly vibrant red was elusive for many years: until a mysterious dye was discovered in Mexico and how a crushed bug became a sign of wealth and status. Although scarlet is the colour of sin in the Old Testament, the ancient world’s elite was thirsty for red, a symbol of wealth and status. They spent fantastic sums searching for ever more vibrant hues, until Hernán Cortés and the conquistadors discovered an intoxicatingly saturated pigment in the great markets of Tenochtitlan, modern-day Mexico City. Made from the crushed-up cochineal insect, the mysterious dye launched Spain toward its eventual role as an economic superpower and became one of the New World’s primary exports, as a red craze descended on Europe. .
María Félix, the accomplished Mexican film actress who was known for defying stereotypes and famously turning down Hollywood roles, would have turned 104 years-old on Sunday, April 8, 2018. To celebrate her birthday, Google is honoring her with her own Google Doodle. The Mexican star, who died in April 8,2002 at age 87, acted in more than 47 films in her lifetime and was a muse to famous artists and writers like Diego Rivera and Jean Cocteau. Her incredible career spanned more than three decades. The entire time she “reigned as the supreme goddess of Spanish-language cinema,” according to her New York Times obituary.
Volunteers are helping forgotten Dutch diarists of WWII to speak at last. Their voices, filled with anxiety, isolation and uncertainty, resonate powerfully today. Anne Frank listened in an Amsterdam attic on March 28, 1944, as the voice of the Dutch minister of education came crackling over the radio from London. “Preserve your diaries and letters,” he said. Frank was not the only one listening. Thousands of Dutch people had been recording their experiences under German occupation since the Nazi invasion four years earlier. So the words of the minister, part of a government trying to operate from exile in England, resonated.
