The cruelest month: Richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow

So far, my poems for National Poetry Month have been by the great and the good. Or at least the well-known. My entry for today comes from a collection of poems and drawings from the children of Terezín, the “model” ghetto the Nazis built as part of their Final Solution of the Jewish Question.

Terezín was the Nazis’ Potemkin lager—a transit camp-cum-ghetto for Jews removed first from Prague, then from other areas of the Reich. Built on the old Hapsburg town of Theresienstadt (pre-war population around 5000), it housed tens of thousands in ghetto conditions, although it was considered posh enough to show to visiting Red Cross officials as an example of benign treatment of Jews. Of those who didn’t die of starvation, disease or brutality at Terezín, most were murdered at Auschwitz.

I first saw I Never Saw Another Butterfly while working at the Children’s Room of the Pasadena Public Library. There’s a newer edition on Amazon, with about 50 more pages than mine, so I’m thinking more context setting.

Anyhow, the poem that gives the collection its title is “The Butterfly”, by Pavel Friedmann:

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 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.

The poem was dated 4^th June 1942, when Friedmann was 21. He was transported to Auschwitz and murdered 29^th September 1944.

You should see the picture that faces “The Butterfly” in my edition. It’s by Eva Bu (Bulová), undated.

Bulova was born 12^th July 1930, deported to Terezín 12^th September 1942, and killed in Auschwitz 4 October 1944.

Years after my introduction to Terezín, I was reading some poems written by German soldiers who’d been caught by Russia’s greatest military leader, General Winter. I can’t remember the source, or even where they were—Stalingrad? Leningrad? Moscow? Dunno. But from their frozen hell they expressed the same kinds of longing the children of the model ghetto spoke of.

Just a butterfly. Just a flower. Just a smile from a young woman. Just a hint that life holds out something good, when in fact as far as you can see it's ugly and painful and fearsome.

That's one of the functions of poetry, to focus on that hope.