A special thank-you to members quasar and eplovejoy ( and the other EAddicts, too!) for reminding me of this book.


...I never saw another butterfly... is one of the saddest books I've ever read. It is a collection of drawings and poems done by the children of Terezin (Theresienstadt) between the years of 1942-1944. Terezin was the 'model' camp, the one which was shown to outside observers such as the Red Cross. In fact, it was called a 'ghetto' instead of a camp, and was built to convince foreigners that life for the children there was good.

Actually, life for the children in Terezin was good, or at least better than for many others. For a short time, the children of Terezin were encouraged to write, to draw, to act and sing in children's operas, to use their imaginations. There were teachers in the children's section of the camp, teachers who used their skills to make life more normal and bearable for the children in their care. These children loved to paint and to draw, just like children anywhere, at any other time. There are many drawings and paintings in this book of scenes from nature - flowers, tress, gardens, and butterflies. Apparently these were the things which most interested the girls. However, the boys reportedly drew more realistic pictures of life in Terezin - pictures of SS men, pictures of children being deported to Oswiecim (Auschwitz), pictures of people pulling carts loaded with dead bodies, pictures of executions. Most of those pictures were omitted from this book, but are described in the epilogue. The pictures in this book are mostly nature scenes, but are filled with an obvious longing to be in a much happier place.

However, it is the poetry which tears at one's heart. In their poems, the children write beautifully of horror and pain, the terrifying details of their everyday lives. The poem "The Garden" is a good example of this:

" A little garden,
Fragrant and full of roses.
The path is narrow
And a little boy walks along it.

A little boy, a sweet boy,
Like that growing blossom,
When the blossom comes to bloom,
The little boy will be no more."

'The Garden' was written by Franta Bass, who was born in 1930 and died in 1944. He was twelve years old when he wrote this poem.

However, it is the title poem which makes me cry every time I read it. It is called 'The Butterfly'. Here is an excerpt:

"...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 in here,
In the ghetto."
Pavel Friedman

For years after reading this poem for the first time, I would feel like crying every time I saw a butterfly. That expression of a child's longing for something beautiful lasted longer than the child who wrote it. Then, one day, I read an article in one of my gardening magazines about creating a butterfly garden. It occurred to me that making a butterfly garden, a refuge for butterflies which are becoming more and more rare was the only way for me to respond to the Holocaust. Instead of focusing solely on the atrocities committed, I could do one very small thing to bring something beautiful back into a world which for a time was unable to save innocent children from the gas chambers.

' I never saw another butterfly...' is a very short book. Only twenty-two poems are presented in the collection, and forty-seven works of art. It takes only a short time to read, but lasts a lifetime. It seems to me the only possible response, when confronted with something unbearably ugly and horrifying is to create something beautiful to counteract the ugliness. This is what the children of Terezin did by writing, and drawing , and creating, and it is what I have tried to do with my butterfly garden.






Recommended: Yes