I just found out about something called The Butterfly Project. It is by the Holocaust Museum in Houston and they are looking for 1.5 million handmade butterflies to represent the innocent children who perished in the Holocaust. The butterflies will be part of a display in 2013.
The website has a set of teaching tools and list of requirement for the butterflies. This is a great family project! Granted you will have to tailor it to your children’s ages, but you can teach so many valuable lessons about life, love, and respect. A lesson of justice and what horrible injustice looks like.
I would love to make a post just of butterflies…so if you do this project, take a picture of the butterfly and send it to me at firstname.lastname@example.org.
Let’s give ourselves a deadline of June 1. (if you are like me you need a deadline to get anything done!)
The project is inspired by this poem:
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 yellow
Is 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 Jan. 7, 1921.
Deported to the Terezin Concentration Camp on April 26, 1942.
Died in Aushchwitz on Sept. 29, 1944.
“I Never Saw Another Butterfly”
Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp 1942–1944. By Hana Volavkova (Editor)
More than 12,000 children under the age of 15 passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp between the years 1942-1944. More than 90 percent perished during the Holocaust. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates of Terezin, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their courage and optimism, their hopes and fears.