...I never saw another butterfly

On A Sunny Evening

On a purple sun-shot evening

Under wide-flowering chestnut trees

Upon the threshold full of dust

Yesterday, today, the days are all like these.

Trees flower forth in beauty,

Lovely, too, their very wood all knarled and old.

That I am half afraid to peer

Into their crowns of green and gold.

The sun has made a veil of gold

So lovely that my body aches.

Above the heavens shriek with blue

Convinced I've smiled by some mistake.

The world's abloom and seems to smile.

I want to fly but where, how high?

If in barbed wire, things can bloom

Why couldn't I? I will not die!"

1944 Anonymous

Written by the children in Barracks L318

L417, ages 10 - 16 years.

Terezin, a concentration camp which largely imprisoned children and the elderly and artists and creatives under the demise of a paradise, the Nazi public relations lie sought to hide the foul treatment of the captive guests of the camp. The gas-lighting technique because of the real natural beauty of the rolling hills and lovely creeks and the town around the concentration camp gave the false illusion that detainees were being fed well and treated well. But the Nazi run prison oppressed and mentally tormented prisoners at several different also physical levels. First, by providing the false illusion that acceptance of the hypnotique that all was well especially for all of the children there, and second while smiling in the faces of prisoners while enjoying the blunt starvation of them and while actually enjoyed random shootings of these precious human beings while at the same time soothing them to believe that the leftover crumbs they provided were a luxury or a gratuity. The surroundings of a beautiful paradise of hills, vales and rich bubbled brooks even fooled Red Cross Workers who came to examine the situation for themselves once. This brief visit which resulted in nothing only returned the children to a place of fear, trepidation and barely a rotten potato each day. Had the workers peered deeper they would have seen the truth about the starving children, the ground they slept on instead of beds, the same clothing worn throughout the stay and obvious other of a thousand miles long outlined and specify listed Geneva violations so unspeakable as to demand that this should have been looked into and confronted and most definitely spoken about and stopped years before the prisoners were ever confined there at all. The children of Terezin were being intentionally groomed by Nazi violators for mass murders by the gas-chambers and it seemed as if no one knew or even cared.

After the State Jewish Museum of Prague loaned the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum twenty-four original drawings made by just a small portion of the children of Terezin, it must be noted that the book here represents a mere faction of the over one million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. "Among the museums important artifacts are a rail car of the type used to transport Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka , a barracks from Birkenau, and a Danish fishing boat that was used to ferry Jews to safety in Sweden. Some of the most cherished artifacts to be found in the museum are twenty-four original artworks from Theresienstadt along with fifty handmade facsimiles of the originals. " At Terezin while streams of fresh running water ran nearby, it is highly doubtful the children enjoyed any of that at all. Some elderly Jewish people had been conned through Nazi propaganda newspaper advertisements to sell all they owned and donate all of their life savings to the Nazis unknowing. They were promised a lifetime of luxury and retirement. But arrival at the camp became the opposite of that story. And while slow starvation begat disease and death, it almost seemed that the demonic Nazi regime were doing the devil's best to violate the Leviticus of the Jew's own beloved Torah way of life for proper hygiene, eating, living and moral conscience and other habits. Of course there was so much more evil than this done to Jewish people throughout the war that much of it becomes unspeakable. 'I Never Saw Another Butterfly' is one poem penned by young Jewish children who were able to work on art for a certain time period of each day at the Terezin Concentration Camp. And under the instruction of the Jewish teachers also held as prisoners at the camp one begins to wonder why the demon programmed Nazis holding a dark cloud over the prison camp of innocent Jewish children had ever even been allowed such. by Nazi regime and soldiers. Only about one-hundred Jewish children survived this surreal nightmare of a made over death camp, something society should forever mourn and be aware of.