The Butterfly Project

I am a member of Swap-bot...it's a group where you mail each other things... it sounds lame but is really fun. It might be tea bags, or bookmarks you've made, or books, or things you paint, or...well, it can be anything. In a recent listing of swaps something caught my eye. It was a butterfly swap. It required each participant to make one 2D butterfly of artistic choice and mail it to the Butterfly Project in Houston (instead of to each other). I was intrigued, so I went to the Houston site. It is the Holocaust Museum in Houston. The Butterfly Project is named for a poem written by Pavel Friedmann, one of the young people at Terezin Concentration Camp.

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The last, the very last
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
against a white stone...
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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.
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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.
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That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live in here, in the ghetto.
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It is one in a collection of poems and drawings done by the young people in the Terezin concentration camp 1942-1944 on display in Houston.

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1,500,000 children died in the Holocaust. The museum in Houston is trying to collect a million and a half handmade butterflies before June 30, 2011 as a way to remember and honor them, with an exhibition scheduled to open in Sping 1012. Butterflies must be less than 8"x10", of any 2D medium, with no glitter or food products (such as dried macaroni or rice).

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I think it is a beautiful tribute. I hope they collect so many butterflies that they can barely fathom how to display them all. If you click on the title of this post, The Butterfly Project, it will take you directly to the Holocaust Museum's Butterfly page.

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