Pavel Friedman (January 7, 1921 – September 29, 1944) was a Jewish Czechoslovak poet who received posthumous fame for his poem "The Butterfly".
Little is known of Friedman's life prior to his incarceration at the Theresienstadt concentration camp, where his arrival was recorded on April 26, 1942. On September 29, 1944 he was later deported to Auschwitz, where he died.[1]
The text of The Butterfly was discovered at Thereisenstadt after the ghetto was liberated. It has been included in collections of children’s literature from the Holocaust era, most notably the anthology I Never Saw Another Butterfly, first published by Hana Volavková and Jiří Weil in 1959, although Friedman was 21 years old when the poem was composed. The poem also inspired the Butterfly Project of the Holocaust Museum Houston, an exhibition where 1.5 million paper butterflies were created to symbolize the same number of children that perished in the Holocaust.[1]
The Butterfly