Product Description
Pavel Friedmann wrote the poem The Butterfly in 1942 in the Terezin Ghetto when he was 21. He was murdered in the Auschwitz extermination camp in 1944. Pavel was born in 1921 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) to a Jewish father and a Christian mother. The Butterfly is a living symbol of the beauty of freedom. Such a free spirit could never have survived the confines of the Warsaw ghetto. But while the butterfly did fly away, the spirit and love of freedom it represented never left the souls of the Jews of the ghetto. They always prayed that one day the barbed wire would come down and the butterfly would reappear. The butterfly flutters there today, but many of the Jews who prayed for its return did not live to welcome it back. The first performance of "The Butterfly" was given on May 8, 1988 at JASA in New York City. The performers were: Andrew Bolotowsky, flute Glenn Rhian, vibraphone Mimi Stern-Wolfe, reciter
There are at least two versions of the poem "The Butterfly" due to different translations.This work uses VERSION 2 as translated here:
"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 carried lightly way up high. It went away I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye. For seven weeks I've lived in here, penned up inside this ghetto, but I have found my people here. The dandelions call to me and the white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live in here, In the ghetto."
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