Hi, Future Ticia 2026 here, and I’m updating this Holocaust Butterflies lesson. The museum I’m linking to is no longer collecting butterflies, but this is still a great history lesson and was a great part of our World War 2 Unit as it really helped the kids think about what happened in an age-appropriate manner.
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Spine book for this lesson: I Never Saw Another Butterfly
Future Ticia 2026 here, for this first part.
For those of you unaware of this book, in the Terezin Concentration Camp the children who passed through this camp were given access or found access to writing and art material and this book is the result.
There are poems and artwork, all of them written by the children as they process what is going on.
Before teaching this lesson I went through and picked out some passages I wanted to use with my kids.
At the time, our history co-op had kids from 6-12 or 13 years old. That means some of them were more capable of handling the material and so for this lesson in terms of what was read out loud and what pictures were shown, I tended to go simpler.
So, pre-read this book, as I read it ahead of time I was crying as I thought about these children. Know that you will cry.
I chose a couple of passages and marked them with bookmarks and several pictures.
Now back to past Ticia
As I was preparing this, I had a vague memory of several museums collecting butterflies for a Holocaust memorial project. I did a quick google search and discovered the Houston Holocaust Museum is collecting butterflies until June 30 THIS YEAR for their display.
They had a few rules: no glitter and no food, and preferably flat. I can follow those rules, they were ones I’d do on my own anyways.
Passages picked for our Holocaust memorial lesson
Then I started reading excerpts from the book, poems, and memories of the kids living there. And I started crying, it’s hard to read these knowing what happened to so many of these kids.
We looked at the pictures the children drew. It amazes me that in some small way these pictures are a pre-cursor to some of our modern counseling techniques for children. Now we have kids draw and write out what they’re feeling.
After reading the book for a while and looking at the pictures, we discussed how we thought the kids felt from the pictures they drew, and what they were thinking. How did we feel looking at these pictures? I look at the one above, and it’s so sad and depressing. But many of them had hope, look at the top picture. There are flowers, and its two sisters lying down in a bed together, or maybe it was a blanket. They’re happy. Look at the difference between these two pictures. Sometimes we’d talk about the ages of the kids involved, not often because that was very hard to discuss.
Finally, I introduced the Butterflies to Remember project. The kids were all very excited about it. I talked about how sometimes the kids in the ghetto (it was labeled a concentration camp later, but at the start it was where Hitler sent the world to see his “humane” treatment of the Jewish problem) used whatever they had to make these pictures, so some of the materials supplied were recycling paper.
Then I set them loose with markers, pencils, crayons, colored paper, glue, and scissors.
And they created.
And created.
And created for almost an hour. They all put a lot of time and effort into this knowing it was to remember kids who didn’t have a happy life, and to remember how the world turned a blind eye. We created our butterflies to remember how a few people stood up and said it was wrong.
We created our butterflies to remember the pain the kids went through. We created our butterflies to remind us of the hope of rebirth.
But most of all, we created our butterflies to remember because sometimes in response to great tragedy, you need to create something beautiful and something good to remember there is good and beauty in the world.
I’ve got the butterflies sitting next to me, all ready to be mailed. It was a hard lesson, with a lot of questions, but it was a good lesson. Sometimes we need this small reminder.
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