Butterfly Project @ DES

Using history’s darkest time to teach students about hope, resilience, and kindness, helping them develop the courage to stand up to injustice in today’s world.

The Butterfly Project’s programming is a gentle approach to teaching a difficult topic. It focuses on the power one person has to make a difference in today’s challenging world. Sharing personal stories from Holocaust Survivors and families, painting ceramic butterflies to honour the 1.5 million children killed in the Holocaust, and creating art installations as reminders of courage, justice, remembrance, and hope. Why the butterfly? The Butterfly Project pays tribute to the poem “The Butterfly,” written by a young prisoner at the Terezin concentration camp. Butterflies are beautiful, fragile and resilient and represent transformation and freedom.

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 yellow

Is carried lightly ‘way up high.

It went away I’m sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye.

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 Friedmann  4.6.1942