art by Sans Souci

I came across a link to a blog by someone who I am not affiliated with, and was moved by the request to make a yellow paper butterfly to remember Pavel Friedman.  It was said on the blog that he wrote the following poem while in the Warsaw Ghetto, but he was actually in the Ghetto of the Terezin Concentration Camp

Terezin was the “model” camp, the sham, the lie, projected to the world to cover up the disgrace of the Nazis. It was billed to the elderly as a “retirement home,” when in fact it was the town of propaganda, hardly a place of perfection and culture, it was a façade for disease and death. 

We remember Pavel Friedman at this time of Passover, when we remember those who are oppressed today and those who were oppressed from the beginning of history.  He was born in Prague January 1921, sent to Terezin in April 1942, and died in Auschwitz in September 1944.

FACTS & FIGURES ON TEREZIN

* Over 200,000 Passed through Terezin

*Named for Teresa, Mother of JosephII in 1780

*Propagandized as a Retirement Center/Spa

*97,297 Died, 15,000 Children

* Deaths in the Camp: Malnutrition & Disease

* Called Waiting Room for Auschwitz

*Musicians Pavel, Krasa, Ullmann and other deported there.

*Pavel Friedman writes, I never Saw Another Butterfly

*Opera for Children Brundibar performed over 50 Times, decrying Tyranny  (see Narice’s post  http://philsgal7759.multiply.com/journal/item/211)

* Site of  Staged Visit for Red Cross in 1944.

The Butterfly

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 4.6.1942

Elizabeth Taylor reads “The Butterfly”

~Sans Souci
©4/20/08srk

My sister was born in December;

I was 6 years old.  And by the summer

when our 1950’s apartment was stifling and my

father was weary from work and heat

my mother sent him on vacation

to the Catskill Mountains.  It didn’t matter that she

needed a rest from an infant

and a soon to be second grader.

She sent my dad.

He took me with him.

We went to a place far from the city

where the blaze of summer bounced

off the lake and hit the tree tops;

The Pine Tree Country Club,

a small, run down hotel with an old “casino,”

composed of a gaggle of little bungalows

with saggy wooden cracked painted porches,

each with its very own wasps’ nest glued and nestled under the eaves;

every pair of bungalow couples shared a bathroom.

There was an old black and white television in the casino

and movies were projected on a screen at night.

My father got me a tee shirt; it was white and had

the emblem of a pine tree, raised in faux, dark green velvet

and the words, “Pine Tree Country Club.”  It was itchy as all hell.

I had bad allergies.  My father opened fragile clear capsules of

teeny little pink and white pills that spilled into a spoon and then

onto my tongue in hopes of helping me to breathe.

We sat by the lake in Adirondack chairs that had probably been there

as long as the hotel—from the ‘20’s? 30’s. Perhaps this had been

a classy retreat for wealthy city dwellers then, but now the working

class was here.  Sitting here by the lake, for a week or two, and then it

was back to the reality of work.

My father was a laborer; he packed and lifted huge boxes of

rain coats and shipped them for the Neptune Raincoat Company

on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, grunting in the heat in

his undershirt in a warehouse.

But here, by the lake he was king in his untucked tropical shirt

with the large green leaf pattern.

The lady next door tried in vain to braid my hair to my specifications

and I protested to my father who shushed me as

we slammed the door of the bungalow.  We woke the wasps

who were angered and swarmed over my father–

one managed to get a good bite of his bald head.

My father didn’t want to show me he was in pain and scared, but

I sensed it.  Someone told him to “put mud on it.”

We went to the lake where the previous day he hid a

garter snake in his tropical shirt pocket and it peed

a yellow puddle of fear.  This time it was my father’s turn to be

fearful, but I helped him by putting a mud pie on his head.

During the week of our sojourn

I learned how to play chop sticks on the tinny old casino piano.

I climbed up on a huge bar stool with cracked red leather

and asked the bartender for a ginger ale.

I sat on the toilet and watched my pet fly, “Cookie”

crawl on my arm.

It was the country, this was my version of nature.

One morning I put on my yellow sun dress and after breakfast

we went to the lake. The sun was bright over head

the sky was intensely clear and blue,

minnows bubbled to the top of the murky green water.

I sat in the large lake chair, my legs straight out, and watched

one, two, three, seven, eleven yellow butterflies

flutter onto my dress and latch on; fifteen, twenty two, my

dress was calling to them, like guiding them to a runway

at an airport, thirty four, thirty five…

I was covered in butterflies; small, silky, stubborn, baby-skinned

little creatures that refused to let go as I tried to brush them off

with shrieks and jumps and shakes.  I was terrified.

I never knew the intensity of such intimacy before.

I was so lucky.

Adirondack chair

Return to the poetry tour here

Comments from the parallel universe at Yahoo:

Beautiful images of precious memories, flying like butterflies in and out of the blooming flower of our consciousness. Thank you again for sharing these poignant and very personal poems.

You wield a fine pen! Your images are so vividly alive. And a great memory you have!

I still sit and watch butterflies, though not in a yellow dress. Is that why I don’t see the yellow ones!

Butterflies are Free! Who was it that said that? I can’t recall at the moment, anyway that’s what I think of when i watch butterflies, they are free….

Speechless.

Tags: poetry, poetry wednesday, 1950’s