“The Butterfly Project” lesson plan was imagined by three Houston-area teachers and based on an inspiring poem written by Pavel Friedmann in 1942, when he was a prisoner in the Terezin Concentration Camp in former Czechoslovakia. The butterfly – with its story of rebirth and transformation into new life – has now become a symbol of freedom from oppression, intolerance and hatred ever since Friedmann wrote his poem about life in the Terezin camp and the fact that he never saw another butterfly there. He died in Auschwitz in 1944.
Friedmann’s poem is published in the book “I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942– 1944.”
