For the past fifteen years, Italian musician Francesco Lotoro has been collecting thousands of forgotten works composed in the prisons and concentration camps of World War II, which will be displayed in a library scheduled to open in September at Rome's Third University.

The Associated Press reports that the library will offer scholars 4,000 papers and 13,000 microfiches, including music sheets, letters, drawings and photos. The music, scribbled on diaries, paper and even toilet paper between 1933 and 1945, ranges from operas composed in Nazi camps machine to jazz pieces written in Japanese POW camps.

“We are trying to right a great wrong: These musicians were hoping for a musical life for themselves, and they would have had it if their destiny had been different,” Lotoro told the AP. He has traveled widely (largely working alone and usually at his own expense) to track down musical works from museums, archives and antique shops, as well as from survivors or their families.

Lotoro, 42, a pianist who converted to Judaism in 2002, is also arranging and recording some of the works for a collection of 32 CDs, five of which have already been published. Musicians and singers who live near his southern Italian town of Barletta often spend their Sundays recording the music with him, reports the AP.

The project took off after a trip Lotoro made to Prague in 1991, when he first began researching music written during the Holocaust. "I left for two weeks with a small bag hoping to bring back a dozen works, but in the end I had to buy a bigger suitcase to carry home hundreds of manuscripts and photocopies,” he told the AP.

Among key works discovered are those of Rudolf Karel, a Czech composer (who died in 1945) who was arrested by the Nazis for taking part in the resistance in Prague. While in a military prison and suffering from dysentery, Karel composed numerous works on toilet paper, including a five-act opera and a nonet.

Many of Lotoro's finds are works written in Theresienstadt, a Czech town used by the Nazis as a ghetto and transit camp.

The Rome library will include works by Gypsies imprisoned by the Nazis, chorus songs by Dutch women interned by the Japanese in Indonesia, and the music of Edmund Lilly, a U.S. colonel from North Carolina who wrote songs and poems in Japanese camps.

Also in the library are the works of Berto Boccosi, an Italian captain who began writing an opera while held by the Allies in an Algerian camp. According to the AP, Lotoro is also researching music written by German officers imprisoned in Soviet camps.

“Music is a universal language, so the music written by the German officer and by the Jewish prisoner have the same historical value,” he said.