By Samuel Asher
Starting this April, visitors to the Virginia Holocaust Museum will be welcomed by a striking mural of colorful ceramic butterflies.
This installation is part of The Butterfly Project, a global initiative that honors the 1.5 million children lost in the Holocaust through art, education, and remembrance.
Co-founded in 2006 by Cheryl Rattner Price and Jan Landau, The Butterfly Project uses painted butterflies as symbols of resilience and hope, making Holocaust education more engaging and accessible. The project takes inspiration from The Butterfly, a poignant poem written by a young prisoner at the Terezin concentration camp.
On April 3, 25 art students from Great Bridge High School in Chesapeake, Virginia, will install 300 ceramic butterflies on the new Henri Maizels Memorial Butterfly Garden Mural, dedicated to Holocaust Survivor Henri Isadore Maizels (pictured top of article).
The museum has invited schools to participate by ordering kits that include ceramic butterflies, paints, and biography cards of real children who perished in the Holocaust. Schools can return the painted butterflies to be fired and installed at the museum. Thanks to generous donors, over 9,000 butterflies have already been ordered.
The Butterfly
He was the last. Truly the last.
Such yellowness was bitter and blinding
Like the sun’s tear shattered on stone.
That was his true color.
And how easily he climbed, and how high,
Certainly, climbing, he wanted
To kiss the last of my world.
I have been here seven weeks,
‘Ghettoized’.
Who loved me have found me,
Daisies call to me,
And the branches also of the white chestnut in the yard.
But I haven’t seen a butterfly here.
That last one was the last one.
There are no butterflies, here, in the ghetto.
This poem was written by Pavel Friedmann, at Theresienstadt concentration camp on 4 June 1942. On 29 September 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz where he was murdered.
