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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