Selections from "I never saw another butterfly" by Hana Volavkova

After WW 2, Hana Volavkova collected poems and songs written by the children incarcerated in the Terezin concentration camp, many of whom died later in Auschwitz. She was director of the Prague Jewish Museum.

"The Butterfly" by Pavel Friedman

Pavel Friedman was a teenage Jew in the Terezin Ghetto near Prague in 1942. Along with the adult Jews, many of these Terezin children were then sent to other death camps where they were killed. Very few children survived from the Terezin ghetto. Pavel Friedman died in Auschwitz a couple years later. The symbolism of this poem is very strong. In its metamorphosis from a common ugly caterpillar to a beautiful and colourful winged butterfly, the butterfly often takes on the symbol of hope, beauty, freedom, but also of rebirth and resurrection. But the poem is one of lost hope: "Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live here, in the ghetto." All the beauty of the world, represented by the butterfly is gone. What is left is the horror of the ghetto, and death.

"Terezin" by Mif

This poem speaks more directly about the pain and suffering endured in the camps. The vocabulary used is one that evokes pain, grief and death. Amidst all the pain however, rises a sliver of hope as it "A fourth year of waiting, like standing above a swamp from which any moment might gush forth a spring." These children are still waiting for something good to happen, someone to come take them away from this hell. A hell where people are neither dead or alive, they are just waiting: "Meanwhile, the rivers flow another way, another way, not letting you die, not letting you live." The poem opens and ends with the same verse: "The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads to bury itself deep somewhere inside our minds." This repetition stresses the never ending waiting for the unknown that these children endured. They had no idea what they were doing there and what was awaiting them.The wheels are reminiscent of the trains in which these people were brought to the camp. It is most probably those same wheels that will transport them later on to Auschwitz where death awaits.
Many of these children had been seperated from their families and put in a special part of the camp with supervisors to look over them. Some were as young as five years old. Mif recalls this when he writes: "We've suffered here more than enough, here in this clot of grief and shame, wanting a badge of blindness to be a proof for their own children."