Butterflies for Children

1,500,000 children innocent children died in the Holocaust. The Holocaust Museum in Houston is planning a wonderful exhibition honoring the youngest victims of the world's most horrific mas murder.

"Children were neither just the mute and traumatized witnesses to this war, nor merely its innocent victims; the war invaded their imaginations and the war raged inside them." — Nicholas Stargardt in "Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis"

In an effort to remember them, Holocaust Museum Houston is collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies. The butterflies will eventually comprise a breath-taking exhibition, currently scheduled for Spring 2012, for all to remember. f Summer 2008, we have already collected an estimated 400,000 butterflies."
I am planning on sending some butterflies and I thought perhaps some of you would like to also. Check their site for more details. http://www.hmh.org/minisite/butterfly/index.html


THE BUTTERFLY

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing against a white stone....
Such, such a yellowIs carried lightly ’way up high.
It went away I’m sure because it wished to kiss the world good-bye.
For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me and the white chestnut branches 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, June 4, 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