The Real Story Behind the Story
Terror in Terezin.
Theresienstadt was a hybrid concentration camp and ghetto established by the SS during World War II in the fortress town Terezín, located in German-occupied Czech lands. Theresienstadt served two main purposes: it was simultaneously a waystation to the extermination camps, and a "retirement settlement" for elderly and prominent Jews to mislead their communities about the Final Solution. Its conditions were deliberately engineered to hasten the death of its prisoners, and the camp also served a propaganda role. Unlike most other concentration camps, the exploitation of forced labor was not economically significant.
The camp was established by a transport of Czech Jews in November 1941. The first German and Austrian Jews arrived in June 1942; Dutch and Danish Jews came beginning in 1943 and prisoners of a wide variety of nationalities were sent to Theresienstadt in the last months of the war. About 33,000 people died at Theresienstadt, mostly from malnutrition and disease.
More than 88,000 people were held there for months or years before being deported to extermination camps and other killing sites; the Jewish self-administration's role in choosing those to be deported has attracted significant controversy. Including 4,000 of the deportees who survived, the total number of survivors was around 23,000.
Pavel Friedman
(January 7, 1921 – September 29, 1944)
Pavel Friedmann was a Jewish Czechoslovak poet and received posthumous fame for his poem "The Butterfly". Originally born in Prague, little is known about his early life. When he was 21 the occupying German authorities had him transported from Prague to Theresienstadt concentration camp, in the fortress and garrison city of Terezín, in what is now the Czech Republic. His arrival was recorded on April 28, 1942. On June 4, 1942 he wrote the poem “The Butterfly” on a piece of thin copy paper that was discovered after the liberation of Czechoslovakia and subsequently donated to the Jewish Museum in Prague. On September 29, 1944 he was deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he perished.
The Poem
The text of The Butterfly was discovered at Theresienstadt after the concentration camp was liberated. It has been included in collections of children’s literature from the Holocaust era, most notably the anthology I Never Saw Another Butterfly, first published by Hana Volavková and Jiří Weil in 1959. The poem also inspired the Butterfly Project of the Holocaust Museum Houston, an exhibition where 1.5 million paper butterflies were created to symbolize the same number of children that perished in the Holocaust
