A great Holocaust teaching resource for both parents and educators

books:

	• I Never Saw Another Butterfly Hana Volavkova Schocken, 1994 - 128 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

I Never Saw...

This is an amazing collection of poetry and art work. Through this book one can get a glimpse of what the children of the Holocaust felt... It touched my heart and I will never forget the children.

A great Holocaust teaching resource for both parents and educators

I came across this title whilst visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The title captured my interest "I never saw another butterfly: Children's Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944". Immediately, my interest was piqued - who were these children, and what happened to them during those dark days of the Holocaust? I was also keen to discover the artwork of these innocent children who had been victims of Nazi oppression and brutality.

Between the years 1942-1944, about 15,000 children were incarcerated at various times in the Terezin [or Theresienstadt] Concentration Camp, just outside of Prague. This camp was promoted as the 'ideal' camp by the Nazis, who used it as a cover-up for their brutalities in other camps, such as the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dachau, Majdanek, Sobibor, etc. The Nazis were so successful in their propaganda efforts that even the Red Cross was hoodwinked into believing that conditions in the camp were exemplary, and that inmates flourished here. The reality was far from the truth as conditions were terrible - starvation and diseases flourished, and the inhabitants were merely biding their time before being shipped off to the camps in the east for extermination.

Of those 15,000 children under the age of 15, only 100 survived...but before these innocent lives were taken, many of these children wrote poems describing their thoughts and feelings and produced works of art that voiced their innermost fears and desires. Thanks to the great number of art teachers in this camp, children continued to gain access to art supplies and were given an outlet to vent their creativity and frustration. Many of these pictures are now displayed in the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. As I perused these pictures on the wall, my soul silently cried out for all the lost potential due to the premature annihilation of these innocent lives [though a few of these children did survive the Holocaust]. One poignant image is of a simple drawing of a little child running into a house with a sun in the background - which was so simple yet effective in conveying the desperate need of a child for the comfort of home from which he/she had been torn away from, so very violently.

This is a great resource for parents and educators seeking to make the Holocaust more accessible to children. I think it's suitable for children ages 7 and older, if only because some of the poems are a bit 'deep' in content.This is also a wonderful resource to get children to express themselves through art. Highly recommended!

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Butterfly wings

Only three of the poets and authors whose work is represented in this volume survived the Nazi Holocaust.

These works, however, are no more dead than the wings of butterflies mounted in a natural history museum.

They fly: They give the children voices for all time---not just the authors and poets' voices, but the voices of all 14,900 children who perished in Terezin from the arrival of the first transport in November 1941 to the ghetto's liberation in April 1945. Indeed, voices for all 141,000 Jewish people transported here from Germany, Holland, Poland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, including the relative handful---16,832---who survived.

The works here are a testament to the human spirit.

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Great Read and Teaching Resource

I bought this book of poems to help me with a lesson plan I was creating on the Holocaust. After reading a couple of poems, I knew I had picked a great book. I enjoyed the poems and would buy this again.

Grab the hankies!

A poignantly moving book ... bought it to do with my class ... and take part in the Butterfly project that they Houston Holocaust museum is putting on ... couldn't put it down, and couldn't stop crying ... it's important to remember the past, and this book is a great keepsake of that!

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Fifteen thousand children under the age of fifteen passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp. Fewer than 100 survived. In these poems and pictures drawn by the young inmates, we see the daily misery of these uprooted children, as well as their hopes and fears, their courage and optimism. 60 color illustrations.

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