Students in Wallace Middle School's Origami Club who folded butterflies last week agreed to send their creations to the Holocaust Museum Houston (Texas) to be part of an exhibit called The Butterfly Project. The project will honor the 1.6 million children who died in the Holocaust.
"The butterflies will eventually comprise a breath-taking exhibition, currently scheduled for Spring 2013, for all to remember. The Museum has already collected an estimated 600,000 butterflies," according to its Web site.
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.
(Pavel Friedman, June 4, 1942. Born in Prague on Jan. 7, 1921. Deported to the Terezin Concentration Camp on April 26, 1942. Died in Aushchwitz on Sept. 29, 1944.)