Book Review: I Never Saw Another Butterfly

I Never Saw Another Butterfly by Hana Volavkova

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 Jewish 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 Butterfly exhibits 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.



Hey, try to open up your heart
To beauty; go to the woods someday
And weave a wreath of memory there.
Then if tears obscure your way
You'll know how wonderful it is
To be alive.

--Anonymous, 1941
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