During the last year of his Masters studies at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, pianist Dimitri Malignan researched lives and music of Jewish composers killed in the Holocaust. His work resulted in

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Eleonore Pameijer talks about how she discovered the scores of Hans Lachman: “One of the most projecting finds of recent years was stashed away in a garden shed. Hans Lachman’s son Michel kept his father’s scores

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In February 2020 some new photos were found of Leo Smit that had never before been published. The photos were part of a family album belonging to a friend of Leo’s sister Nora. The pictures were taken in the summer of 1923, when Leo Smit was still a student at the Amsterdam Conservatoire.

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With his music, Hans Krieg shed some light in the darkness of camp Westerbork. With his guitar he taught the children songs and with his recorder he would sometimes pop up in unexpected places. A letter to him, written by a prisoner in January 1944 contains a fitting description: ‘the whistling faun’.

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When he came across this painting on an aucioneer’s website, musicologist Thiemo Wind immediately recognized the person portrayed. Why was this painting by an important Dutch composer for sale? Could this be true?

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According to a note on the manuscript, Leo Smit’s orchestral work Silhouetten was inspired by drawings by Paul Süss. Who was he?

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Géza Frid and Paul Hermann both studied at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, where Zoltán Kodály and Bela Bartók were their teachers. In the 1920s they fled the antisemitism in Hungary. They both married a Dutch girl. Géza Frid survived the war as a stateless Jew in Amsterdam, Paul Hermann was arrested during a raid in Toulouse and never returned. Together with the Leo Smit Stichting, their children Arthur Frid and Corrie Hermann keep their fathers’ music alive.

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Ignace Lilien wrote an eyewitness account in one of his manuscripts. With help of the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund, the Leo Smit Stichting scanned over 30,000 pages of manuscript to make unpublished music more easily accessible.

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Years ago, Eleonore Pameijer, founder of the Leo Smit Foundation, received a package in the post. It was her birthday that day and curiously she opened the envelope. It contained a music manuscript with a note from Ima Spanjaard-van Esso. "I heard about the Leo Smit Foundation on the radio and I thought you should have this."

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