1. …I never saw another butterfly…
Children’s Drawings and Poems
From the Terezin Concentration Camp

2. What is Terezin?
“a Czech town, formed in 1780, nestled where two rivers meet”
“surrounded by thick, octagon-shaped walls”
“narrow streets joined at right angles”
“homes dark and bleak”
“huge gray barracks”
“set in a serene world of meadows and low rolling hills and summer butterflies”

3. How did Terezin become a concentration camp in 1941?
It was an attempt to make the Germans look humanitarian in the eyes of the Free World!
“created by Germans to solve an awkward problem they encountered…what to do with certain special categories of Jews”
“Terezin became a model ghetto to be inhabited and governed by the Jews”

4. Who was transported to Terezin?
“Privileged Jews”
Intellectuals and writers
Actors, artists, composers and conductors
Jews married to Aryans
Half-Jews
Veterans of the First World War
Jews of all ages

5. What actually went on inside the walls of Terezin?
Men were separated from women and children
It was forbidden to write home.
Smoking was punished.
Nobody was allowed to walk on pavement.
Every uniformed person had to be saluted.
There were no vehicles for transport.
There was not enough fuel,
food or water.
The elderly died alone of dysentery.

6. Did the children know that death lay waiting for them? …yes
“We stood in a long queue with a plate in our hand, into which they ladled a little warmed-up water with a salty or a coffee flavor.”

7. “We got used
to sleeping
without
a bed.”

8. “We got used to undeserved slaps, blows, and executions.”

9. “We got accustomed to seeing people die in their own excrement,
to seeing piled-up coffins full of corpses.”
-Peter Fischl, age 15

10. Terezin Statistics,
From , over 141,000 Jews entered into Terezin
33,456 died in the here in the ghetto
88,202 were transported to death camps in the East
16,832 remained by 1945
Of the 15,000 children deported from here to Auschwitz……100 survived.
-none under the age of 14

11. What did Terezin do to the children?
“…that ghetto, the sunlight of the day and the terrors of the night, their dreamy remembrances of the past and their desolate encounters with the present…”
Much of what it did to them we can see in the art they left behind.

12. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis
A highly sophisticated artist in Terezin
Put her life at risk as she used art to help the children handle life in the ghetto
Would tell stories and have children draw objects she mentioned
Encouraged children to draw their concealed inner worlds and their tortured inner emotions
Was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and died
"I remember thinking in school how I would grow up and would protect my students from unpleasant impressions, from uncertainty, from scrappy learning. Today only one thing seems important — to rouse the desire towards creative work, to make it a habit, and to teach how to overcome difficulties that are insignificant in comparison with the goal to which you are striving." ~Friedl, 1940

13. Pavel Friedmann -born on January 7, 1921 -deported to Terezin in 1942
-died in Auschwitz on September 29, 1944

14. “The Butterfly” -Pavel Friedmann, 1942
The last, the very last, So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing against a white stone.... Such, such a yellow Is carried lightly ’way up high. It went away I’m sure because it wished to kiss the world good-bye.
For seven weeks I’ve lived in here, Penned up inside this ghetto. But I have found what I love here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut branches in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don’t live in here, in the ghetto.

15. Final Thoughts…
The last remaining Jews left Terezin on August 17, 1945.
Terezin has since returned to its tranquil surroundings. Virtually no trace remains of those nightmarish ghetto years.
One sees the rolling hills, the gentle juncture of the two rivers, the Bohemian mountains.
And butterflies.