When Pavel Friedmann was about 11 years old, his family was forced to leave their home in Poland. The Friedmanns and other Jewish families were moved into a walled-off, isolated area called a ghetto. While he was living in the ghetto, Pavel wrote a poem called "The Butterfly." Part of the poem reads, "Such, such a yellow/ Is carried lightly way up high/ It went away I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye."
It was the last butterfly Pavel would ever see. He was one of 6 million Jewish people who were killed during World War II. The murder of Jews by members of Germany's Nazi Party from 1938 to 1945 is known as the Holocaust. It is considered to be one of the most evil acts in history.
Of the 6 million Jewish people who died in the Holocaust, 1.2 million were children. Eleanor Schiller, a teacher in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, was looking for a way to help her students understand the huge number of young lives lost in the Holocaust. After she read Pavel's poem, an idea took flight. She decided to invite students everywhere to create 1,200,000 paper butterflies to display for Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 23. Says Schiller: "I wanted kids to realize that this is a world where we can all work together."
The students at Schiller's religious school, Chabad Academy, have been cutting out butterflies for weeks. They've made about 125,000 butterflies.
Student Becky Hemmo, 13, says the project is special to her. "Butterflies are just like children--colorful and free. Butterflies don't live long, and these kids didn't live long. We should remember what happened, to stop it from ever happening again."