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Teachers, Help Out the Holocaust Museum.

By Rachel Turner | Thursday, Feb 21, 2008

The Holocaust Museum of Houston is preparing a special exhibit called the Butterfly Project. The exhibit will be an art installation of 1.5 million handmade, hand-decorated butterflies to commemorate the 1.5 million children that perished during the Holocaust. How can you help? I’m glad you asked.

1.5 million butterflies is an awful lot of butterflies, and the museum workers can’t make them on their own. The museum is enlisting the help of students worldwide to create the butterflies, and send them in. This is where us teachers come in. The school year is drawing to a close here in Japan, and I for one find am about to find myself with some post-finals free time in class. This project is the perfect way to fill in a few class periods and help out a truly great cause. I’m sure my students won’t mind having their art displayed in an actual museum, either.

On their website (http://www.hmh.org/minisite/butterfly/index.html), the museum has provided all the information you need to get started. They have even created lesson plans for the Butterfly Project. The lessons center around a poem, “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” written by internee Pavil Friedman before being shipped off to the Terezin Concentration Camp. If the Holocaust as a whole is a little heavy for your classes, focusing on the poem is a gentler way to approach the topic. Also, if you’re an English teacher, it opens the door for figurative language lessons. Analytical questions about the poem are provided, as well as activities urging students to create poetry of their own.

One way to make this project more identifiable for students might be to compare the Butterfly Project to Sadako’s paper cranes in Hiroshima. People from all over the world send handmade paper cranes to the Sadako memorial in Hiroshima as a call for peace and awareness. The Butterfly Project aims to do for the Holocaust what the paper cranes do for halting nuclear proliferation.

The butterflies need to be at the Houston museum by June 30, 2008. Encourage students to be creative with their designs. Some examples of submitted butterflies are available on the museum’s website. Also on the website are guidelines on submissions, information you should include, and where to send them. The museum’s main page contains a lot of excellent information about the Holocaust itself. And there is an interactive page called “Terezin’s Butterflies” that shows how many children died at the Terezin Camp alone. Make art, make a difference.

The Holocaust Museum of Houston: http://www.hmh.org/
The Butterfly Project: http://www.hmh.org/minisite/butterfly/index.html
Terezin’s Butterflies: http://www.hmh.org/minisite/butterfly/terezin.html