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Teaching the Holocaust and other Genocides
 
Created in collaboration with the Holocaust & Human Rights Center, the NYS Education Department, and the NYS Archives Partnership Trust.

"The Butterfly"

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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 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.

-written by Pavel Friedmann at Theresienstadt concentration camp on 4 June 1942. On 29 September 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz where he was murdered.

Discussion Questions

  1. The speaker seems awed by the brilliant yellow of the butterfly.  Why do you suppose he compares the butterfly’s vivid color to the “sun’s tears/against a white stone?” What is the significance of this metaphorical contrast?
  2. Why does the speaker imagine that such a yellow is carried up to the sky?
  3. Although the speaker is confined to the ghetto, what important connections has he made with people and nature?
  4. What is the possible symbolism of the butterfly as “the last one?” What does loss of the butterfly suggest about the speaker’s feelings of loss and isolation in the starkness of his reality?