SDHS Butterfly Project

Created in 2013 by students in the Did You Know? Club, The Butterfly Project is a series of vividly-painted ceramic butterflies located on the west-side second level mezzanine of the 900 building. Part of the national Butterfly Project, each represents one of the 1.5 million children killed during the Holocaust. A set of murals accompany the butterflies, portraying - with great detail and care - icons such as the gates of the Auschwitz concentration camp and a young Anne Frank. Inscribed below the stream of butterflies is the following, from Pavel Friedmann's poem The Butterfly, written while Friedmann was interned at the Theresienstadt concentration camp:

He was the last. Truly the last. Such yellowness was bitter and blinding like the sun’s tear shattered on stone. That was his true colour. And how easily he climbed, and how high. Certainly, climbing, he wanted to kiss the last of my world. I have been here seven weeks, ‘Ghettoized’. Who loved me have found me, daisies call to me, and the branches also of the white chestnut in the yard. But I haven’t seen a butterfly here. That last one was the last one. There are no butterflies, here, in the ghetto.