Poetry Wednesday 03/05/08: I Never Saw Another Butterfly

During World War II, when Pavel Friedmann was about 11 years old, his family was forced to leave their home in Poland. The Friedmanns and other Jewish families were moved into a walled-off, isolated area called a ghetto. While he was living in the ghetto, Pavel wrote a poem called “The Butterfly.” Part of the poem reads, “Such, such a yellow/ Is carried lightly way up high/ It went away I’m sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye.”

It was the last butterfly Pavel would ever see. He was one of 6 million Jewish people who were killed during World War II. The murder of Jews by members of Germany’s Nazi Party from 1938 to 1945 is known as the Holocaust. It is considered to be one of the most evil acts in history.

Of the 6 million Jewish people who died in the Holocaust, 1.2 million were children. Eleanor Schiller, a teacher in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was looking for a way to help her students understand the huge number of young lives lost in the Holocaust. After she read Pavel’s poem, an idea took flight. She decided to invite students everywhere to create 1,200,000 paper butterflies to display for Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 23. Says Schiller: “I wanted kids to realize that this is a world where we can all work together.”

The students at Schiller’s religious school, Chabad Academy, have been cutting out butterflies for weeks. They’ve made about 125,000 butterflies.

Student Becky Hemmo, 13, says the project is special to her. “Butterflies are just like children–colorful and free. Butterflies don’t live long, and these kids didn’t live long. We should remember what happened, to stop it from ever happening again.”

The Butterfly Project

The following poem was written by Pavel Friedman, a child in the Terezin Ghetto, where the arts flourished as a defiance of the soul, even in children.

Nothing free, like the butterflies or the Jews, lasted long in the Captivity of brutal men. Pavel could watch butterflies soar over barbed wire, fences and guns, until there were no longer butterflies. It is a poignant reminder not only of the depth of expression in young Jewish souls, but of the captivity of art in having to hide defiance and honor in metaphor.

I Never Saw Another Butterfly
by Pavel Friedman

The last, the very last,
so richly, brightly, dazzling yellow.
Perhaps if the sun’s tears sing
against a white stone

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly `way up high.
It went away I’m sure because it
wished to kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto,
but I have found my people here.
The dandelions call to me,
And the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live here in the ghetto.

— by Pavel Friedman, age 11, June 1942

Born in Prague on January 7, 1921.
Deported to the Terezin Concentration Camp on April 26, 1942.
Died in Aushchwitz on September 29, 1944

During WWII, the Gestapo used Terezín, better known by the German name Theresienstadt, as a concentration camp.. The majority of the Jews sent were scholars, professionals, artists and musicians. Inmates were encouraged to lead creative lives, and concerts were even held. Within the camp, parks, grassy areas and flower beds, concert venues and statues were installed to hide the truth; that most of the inmates were going to be killed. This was all part of a Nazi plot to deceive International Red Cross inspectors into believing that Jews were being treated humanely. This façade masked the fact that of the 144,000 Jews were sent there, about 33,000 died, mostly because of the appalling conditions (hunger, stress, disease, and an epidemic of typhus at the very end of the war). About 88,000 were deported to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. At the end of the war there were 17,247 survivors.

The Poetic Words of Elie Weisel

holocaust.jpg picture by lstlight

Elie Weisel can be seen from the third row from the top, peeping out slightly above the last man on the right.

“The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference;
the opposite of beauty is not ugliness, but indifference;
the opposite of learning is not ignorance, but indifference;
Hatred cannot be anything but evil.
Hatred contaminates me.
We cannot give in to hatred;
To preserve humanity we must fight indifference.”

— Elie Weisel, Holocaust survivor

For his literary and human rights activities, Elie Weisel has received numerous awards including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the U.S. Congressional Gold Medal and the Medal of Liberty Award, and the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor. In 1986, he won the Nobel Prize for Peace. A few months later, he established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.

For Poetry Wednesday this week, I am dedicating this post to my son, Matthew, who will be Bar Mitzvahed this weekend. It is in the tradition of the synagogue that we belong to that we remember a child that died in the Holocaust when a child is Bar Mitzvahed.

Click here to return to Sans Souci, the yidishe mame, who is hosting Poetry Wednesday.

Viewing History

Laurita .

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