I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from the Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944

[...]Recently reading about the Houston Holocaust Museum's planned 2013 exhibition titled The Butterfly Project, I read for the first time Pavel Friedmann's poem The Butterfly" in which he remarks that he has seen no butterfly in the ghetto though some of the beauty of the natural world insists on itself even there. The ghetto is the Terezin Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia. Terezin was a bizarre experiment of the Third Reich, which set it up as a place to hold Jewish artists, intellectuals, and German army veterans of World War I. To these Jews and to the world it presented this depraved and dirty ghetto as a gift to these Jews who had greatly to German culture. In face, the Germans even succeeded in fooling the Red Cross into believing the place was OK.Meanwhile, 15,000 childre passed through Terezin, but fewer than 100 survived. While they were in that hellish bastion of cruelty, these children were nevertheless blessed by the Vienna-born, Bauhaus-trained artist Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Under her gentle direction and with the few art supplies shemanaged to hoard, many ofhtese childdren found a release for all that they were feeling as they encountered Nazi cruelty and awaited death every day.I Never Saw Another Butterflyexhibits these children's artwork, poems, and prose in the space of 106 pages. The book includes a catalog of the works that identifies the young artists' birth, deportation, and death dates.When the book arrived the other day, I decided I would not read the book until I coul read it in one sitting. The book deserves complete, uninterrupted attention. The innocence and honesty, truth and reality captured by these children create beauty where otherwise beauty could not take hold. Works of art on scraps of paper are the legacy of murdered children to the present. May we learn from them.<center>Hey, try to open up your heartTo beauty; go to the woods somedayAnd weave a wreath of memory there.Then if tears obscure your wayYou'll know how wonderful it isTo be alive.--Anonymous, 1941,</center>[...]

Not only are the contents of this book touching and important, but the book is very high quality. The cover is a nice texture and sturdy even for a soft cover, and the pages are like thick, smooth magazine paper. The scans of the artwork are detailed and sensitively presented next to the poetry. The editors also included informative histories regarding the ghetto and the war as well as giving credit to a hero, Ms. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, who provided the children with art supplies, encouragement, and comfort.A lot can be learned from these children. It's important to respect and fight for the rights of the oppressed.

I read the comments and knew it would be somewhat tough to read but I was crying after reading only the first entry. It's heartbreaking and beautiful. And I like that they tell you about the pictures and artists at the end of the book.

As an educator who includes the Holocaust in her curriculum, this books of poems is truly a MUST HAVE! Not only do the poems tell of the authenticity of children in a death camp but the magnificence of finding beauty amid the ashes of their lives or the ashes that consumed their lives, At the end, you read what happened to each author. That's when it starts to GET REAL for today's children and their hearts are broken for these unknown children. Many cry. I surely do. 5 STARS!

Powerful

Lovely edition. Beautifully done. Thanks to the Museum for this tragic but vital testament to those voices.

I chose this rating because I thought it was a very moving collection of poems written by children at Terezin during the most horrible experience in their short lives. We should all read it to make sure history never repeats itself. My Little Sister in Big Brothers/Big Sisters was who I purchased it for, for her 14th birthday, and we both read it. I think from her perspective, it was a rude awakening of history from the eyes of children her age or younger. She had missed seeing the play performed by Flat Rock Playhouse Youth Theatre, and was very disappointed about that. The book certainly helped her to understand the children's fate, and how they managed to express their feelings during the worse time of their young lives.

Everyone knows of the atrocities that the Nazi's perpetrated during the Holocaust, but how many people stop and think about the children that were in the concentration camps? Or what they had to bear? Shocking as it is the children at Terezin were allowed to have some time together, with a former art teacher, to sketch and create, and to basically have a form of art therapy for all of the horrors they were seeing (not that the Nazi's realized that therapy was occurring.) This book captures some of the poetry and artwork that these children created. Their fears, their hopes, and their dreams are laid out in the open for all to read. It is a powerful book and I would highly recommend it to all, especially to those taking or teaching a class on this time period.

I think we owe it to these children to read this book and see their drawings read their poems ..its just heartbreaking and unfair in the extreme how these innocent little ones lives were taken from them..15,000 children passed through Terezin Concentration Camp less than 100 survived .

How does one review something like this? I only wish I could give it 6 stars, or 10 or a million.The Holocaust - one of the most incomprehensible and evil acts of the 20th century - like all terrible events is something that we don't like to talk about, in the same way that we turn the TV over when reports showing famime and death in third-world countries come on. This book does not show the horrors explicitly - it shows them through the poems and artwork of the children at Terezin Concentration Camp. Terezin was a stopping point where jews were sent before being sent to Auschwitz. The book tells us that of the 15,000 children sent to Terezin, only 100 survived.A person would have to have a heart of stone to read this book without the tears flowing. Especially when you see things like the drawing of Jana Hellerova, who was sent to Terezin at the age of 5, and died in Auschwitz at the age of 6.The title of the book comes from one of the poems in the book, which is deeply, deeply moving. Another remarkable piece of work is 'Terezin' by Hanus Hachenburg who was 13 and died in Auschwitz at 14.The World must never let this happen again.

A really lovely presentation of a horrendous time in man's history. Drawings by the children who were in Terezin concentration Camp accompanied by poems.

I bought this a few days after returning from Terazin itself. I was moved to tears when I was there and this little book made me cry again. The fact that these words and images came from the minds of small innocent children makes it all just too difficult to understand how human beings could to do what they did to others during those awful days in the middle of the last century, (i.e. still within living memory).

Very touching poems when you consider these children's horrific situation and for them to be given an opportunity to share their experience was very moving opportunity to expess their feelings