The narrative begins: “This was a little village northwest of the great and ancient city of Prague in the middle of Europe, far away from here.”
The story is told in English and Spanish. It unfolds with the upward flight of a dazzling yellow butterfly. There are “white chestnut candles” and dandelions that “call out” to children.
A fairy tale? No. This is the firsthand account of children interred in the Terezin Ghetto from 1942 to 1944. They painted, sketched and put into verse aching, lovely fantasies, memories of home, fears for the future and daily scenes of a stark present.
The children have long since perished, but the works have been preserved in a permanent exhibit called “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.”
The San Francisco Unified School District will be showing 45 drawings and 10 poems from the collection — for the first time, with Spanish and English translations — at San Francisco City Hall from March 1 through April 12. An opening reception will take place Tuesday, Feb. 29.
The feelings expressed in the poems and artwork resonate today, even with children whose lives would seem to be very different, according to Hene Kelly, director of the SFUSD Holocaust education program. “These children never saw their mothers again,” she said.
However, many of the school district’s Latino emigre children have suffered long separations from one or both parents while their families resettled in the United States. They can understand the fear, the longing — and the anger, Kelly said.
“They can well imagine. And they understand scapegoating.” The translations help provide a strong link, she said.
The exhibit’s title, familiar to many who have seen the play by that name or read the collection of children’s work from Terezin, is taken from a line in “The Butterfly,” a poem by Pavel Friedman, who died in 1944 at the age of 17.
“The last, the very last/So richly, brightly, dazzling yellow… Such, such a yellow/Is carried lightly ‘way up high/I’m sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye.”
The poems were written in Czechoslovakian. Kelly is trying to get them translated into Chinese and Russian for a booklet to send to all the district’s schools, reaching other immigrant populations.
The lessons are poignant but also uplifting.
The children who visit the exhibit will see art and poetry used as tools of a powerful and lasting expression. While such expression could bring penalties as severe as death to the ghetto children, it also was empowering. “It talks about resistance, which is really the most important thing,” said Kelly.
“While living at Terezin, these children attended secret schools,” the narrative reads. “If they or their teachers were caught writing poems, drawing their artwork or reading books, they would be punished badly by their guards.
“Isn’t it amazing that somebody could hate children so very much to punish them for trying to learn, or to draw pictures, or to write poems?”
Kelly learned of the bilingual traveling exhibit from Rabbi Doug Kahn, executive director of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council, and sought funding to bring it to the Bay Area. She secured a grant from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation.
“I thought immediately it would be a wonderful thing for San Francisco,” said Kahn. “The whole point of the JCF is to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to a broader audience. It’s just ideal for San Francisco.”
More than 140,00 people were detained at Terezin on their way to extermination camps, and more than 35,000 died of famine and disease while still there.
Of 15,000 children who passed through the camp, only 100 survived.
The ghetto was a sort of stage set, a mockup for the benefit of foreigners and inquisitive visitors, in which detainees appeared to receive good treatment. What visitors did not know was that the people they saw before them were part of a continuous transient flow, alighting only briefly at Terezin before being packed into cattle cars bound for death camps.
German actor Kurt Gerron, the subject of a propaganda film called “The Town Hitler Built for Jews,” was packed off to Auschwitz the day after the film wrapped. He died in the gas chambers.
The drawings were made on thin scraps of paper, and are too fragile to be shipped abroad. Those who visit the exhibit, which made its first U.S. stop at the Capital Children’s Museum in Washington, will see prints.
The original works are part of a permanent collection of more than 4,000 pieces in the State Jewish Museum in Prague.
The free exhibit is open to the public as well as for class visits. It is suggested for students in grades four and five, as well as middle and high school classes in art, English and social studies.