This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of the conclusion
of World War II. From 1942 to 1945 over 15,000 Jewish children passed
through Terezin. It soon Became a station, a stopping off place, for
hundreds of thousands on their way to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
When Terezin was liberated at the end of the war only about one hundred
children were alive and able to return to what was left of their lives,
their homes and families. The story of those years at Terezin remains
in drawings and poems collected and published in the book I Never Saw
Another Butterfly. The Appendix to I Never Saw Another Butterfly briefly
notes the names of the children, the dates of their birth and
transportation to Terezin. For most of the Children whose work appears
in the book, the brief biography ends, "perished at Auschwitz..."
But one child, Raja Englanderova "after the liberation, returned to Prague".
This Play is her story. It is history as much as any play can be history.
Come with me, with my fellow students and actors back into Terezin and
relive through their eyes the best and the worst of which
the human heart is capable.