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At Jewish History Museum, Butterfly Project honors Terezin’s child victims of Holocaust

Alfred Weisskopf, age 16, died in Auschwitz in 1944. So did Eva Bulova, age 15. And Zuzana Winterova, who was just 11. But Dotan Yarden, Haley Weiss, and Dana Handleman are very much alive. Along with 23 other young actors in the play I Never Saw Another Butterfly, which will be performed Thursday at the National Museum of American Jewish History, they are capturing the voices of children who lived in the Terezin concentration camp during the Holocaust.

The cast rehearses “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” a drama that premieres Thursday at the National Museum of American Jewish History.  ED HILLE?/?Staff Photographer
The cast rehearses “I Never Saw Another Butterfly,” a drama that premieres Thursday at the National Museum of American Jewish History. ED HILLE?/?Staff PhotographerRead more

Alfred Weisskopf, age 16, died in Auschwitz in 1944. So did Eva Bulova, age 15. And Zuzana Winterova, who was just 11.

But Dotan Yarden, Haley Weiss, and Dana Handleman are very much alive. Along with 23 other young actors in the play I Never Saw Another Butterfly, which will be performed Thursday at the National Museum of American Jewish History, they are capturing the voices of children who lived in the Terezin concentration camp during the Holocaust.

Between 1941 and 1945, 15,000 children were transported to Terezin, created by the Nazis as a "model ghetto." In truth, there were beatings and executions, rations of stale bread and salty water, frequent trains rumbling toward the death camp of Auschwitz.

Fewer than 100 children survived Terezin. But they left their drawings and writing: sketches of barracks, collages of flowers, poems about fear, homesickness and a "purple, sun-shot evening."

The Terezin children's poetry and art became a book, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, published in 1959. Five years later, a Catholic nun who taught literature picked up a copy while browsing in a Chicago bookstore. She felt seized by the children's words and, after several years of research, turned the book into a play.

Butterfly doesn't gloss over the Holocaust's brutality and terror. But it also holds humor, tenacity, and hope. For the author, Celeste Raspanti, and for the young actors in Thursday's production by the Wolf Performing Arts Center of Wynnewood in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is a story that continues to resonate.

While researching the play, Raspanti learned that one of Terezin's few child survivors, Raja Engländerová, had returned to Prague after the war and become a doctor. Raspanti made Raja the play's central character.

In the Wolf center's production, four girls play Raja — two in each cast, one portraying the terrified child who learns to trust and even finds love in Terezin, the other voicing the older Raja.

At a recent rehearsal in a Wynnewood church, Haley Weiss, 15, stood downstage before a minimal set of wooden benches that could become a train, a barracks, a secret schoolroom. In the basement, the costume crew was sewing Jewish stars onto the children's clothing.

"My name is Raja," Haley said. "I was born in Prague. Father, Mother … Irena, Honza — they are all gone, and I am alone. But that is not important. Only one thing is important — that I am a Jew, and that I survived Terezin."

When Haley first read the script, in the Baldwin School library during a study hall, she wept. "I've always had a hard time with the big picture of the Holocaust, the six million. But that's six million individual people with their own personalities."

When she utters the list of Raja's relatives, she silently substitutes names of her own family members. Her brother, Drew, is also in the cast, and when his character crosses the stage, headed for the train that will carry him to Auschwitz, Haley imagines the wrenching pain of saying goodbye.

Bobbi Wolf, executive director of the Wolf center and codirector of the play, devoted prerehearsal meetings to preparing the actors, ages 10 to 17, for the somber material. She asked them to write about "what it means to be safe" and "what it means to be a survivor." They talked about discrimination and bullying. They wrote letters to their characters and to the playwright.

Dana Handleman, 13, who plays the older Raja, had always been frightened to learn about the "nitty-gritty" of the Holocaust. "This role pushed me. This character is real. I wondered: Am I going to do her justice?" At first, Dana spoke her lines tremulously. "But this is not a sob story. It's a story of having strength when you think you don't."

At Terezin, German soldiers forbade classes and learning. Secretly, the adults taught whatever they knew — economics, Hebrew, painting, poetry — to the children. In Butterfly, a teacher named Irena Synkova makes it her mission to comfort and inspire Raja and the others.

When Katie Gould was a sixth-grader at Bala Cynwyd Middle School, she played the young Raja in a production of Butterfly also directed by Wolf. Now Gould, 27, is playing Synkova. The play, she said, has shaped her career. "I thought about the play all the way through high school. It started a fire in me to be working on socially and politically important theater."

Fifteen years later, she said, Butterfly still feels relevant. "It's the 'forever' topic. Children being the victims of adult anger and hatred is a story that constantly needs to be revisited."

Ivy Barsky, director of the National Museum of American Jewish History, agrees. "Holocaust survivors who are still alive are getting quite aged and fragile. The next generation is making sure that their stories survive."

Butterfly is a story of unlikely connections. Raspanti and Engländerová (whose last name is now Zadnikova), the Catholic nun turned playwright and the Jewish survivor turned physician, corresponded and became friends. The women, both 83, have met numerous times in the United States and Europe.

When she first read the play, Zadnikova said in an e-mail, she was surprised by "how good it was. I was impressed how Celeste was able to feel so deeply the situation and events."

Dotan Yarden, 13, plays Honza, a boy who befriends and flirts with Raja, meeting her secretly at night and risking punishment by stealing a sausage for her. He met the real Raja when he and his father traveled to Prague this month for spring break.

"Meeting with [Zadnikova] and going to Terezin personalized the whole thing," he said. Dotan and his father saw the cemetery, its nameless headstones inscribed only with Jewish stars, and the barracks where Raja and other girls lived.

In a courtyard of the former concentration camp, Dotan let himself become Honza, his dimpled smile ceding to a sober gaze. He practiced his lines while his father videotaped: "Raja … don't — don't turn or move … [I'm] here, on the other side of the wall?… just listen."

The courtyard echoed, Dotan recalled. "I felt like I was saying the lines in honor of the kids [who died]. They can't say it, so I'm saying it for them. Or maybe they're saying it through me."

Today, the drawings and poetry of the children of Terezin hang in the Jewish Museum in Prague and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. The play has been produced hundreds of times. Wolf hopes to extend its reach by raising money to take Butterfly to schools, community centers, and places of worship in the Philadelphia area.

"The message still needs to be told," she says. "I think of children in the city, their day-to-day survival. And always, the echo of 'never forget.'?"

"No matter how confident and comfortable and cultured we think we are, there is in each of us this seed of domination and cruelty," says Raspanti, the playwright. "When it goes unchecked, as it did in Germany, this is what happens."

Near the rehearsal's end, the cast huddles while a man's voice, offstage, reads the names of those who died: Petr Fischl, age 15, perished at Auschwitz. So did Nina Ledererova, age 14. And Frantisek Bass, also 14. The kids, clutching one another's hands, eyes wide with fear, exit the stage.

Only the two Rajas are left. "I hear and I remember," they say, speaking as one. "My name is Raja — I am a Jew; I survived Terezin — not alone, and not afraid."