this tender composition was written by a pole while he was in buchenwald concentration camp. ♪ ♪ lotoro the camps. it hasn't been freed. ♪ ♪ this wasn't an obvious calling for an italian who was raised roman catholic, but from age 15, lotoro says, he felt the pull of another religion. you converted to judaism. you say you have a jewish soul. define what that means. >> lotoro ( translated ): there was a rabbi who explained to me that when a person converts to judaism, in reality he doesn't convert. he goes back to being jewish. doing this research is possibly the most jewish thing that i know. >> wertheim: lotoro's quest began in 1988 when he learned about the music created by prisoners in the czech concentration camp theresienstadt. the nazis had set up the camp to fool the world into believing they were treating jews humanely. inmates were allowed to create and stage performances, some of which survive in this nazi propaganda film. lotoro was amazed by the level of musicianship and wondered what else was out there. he reached out to bret werb, music curator at the u.s. holocaust memori

they were quite humane, right, in terms of comparisons to our general image of, say, auschwitz or buchenwald. so they could wear their own clothing, they could have packages sent to them. but by any other measure, they were pretty notoriously miserable places where both italian jews and foreign jews were kept after 1938. >> one more question here. >> you partially answered part of my question in relation to somebody else, but i wanted to know how italy regarded itself as a colonial power both in relation to the french with arab north africa, and the british and the germans and the french and black africa. dr. mclean: so, pre-1936 -- well, throughout, they think of themselves as more humane. they think of themselves like the french, as sort of catholic colonizers and think of themselves as people more than -- and therefore they think of them more as people more than the germans or the british do, that they are there to civilize these populations and they're there just to help them realize the great riches of their lands, right? a.k.a., take them. but the reality is much more stark, and, in fa