Chamber Recital I
October 6, 2024
3:00 p.m.
Bloch Learning and Performance Hall
Canady Creative Arts Center
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For more information visit: emergency.wvu.edu
October 6, 2024
3:00 p.m.
Bloch Learning and Performance Hall
Canady Creative Arts Center
Jump to:
This concert is part of the Violins of Hope at WVU exhibition and event series.
* WVU School of Music Student
I Never Saw Another Butterfly: a cycle of 5 songs on poems by children incarcerated in Theresienstadt Concentration Camp 1942-44.
That bit of filth in dirty walls
And all around barbed wire,
And 30,000 souls who sleep
Who once will wake
And once will see
Their own blood spilled.
I was once a little child,
Three years ago,
That child who longed for other worlds.
But now I am no more a child
For I have learned to hate.
I am a grown-up person now,
I have known fear.
Bloody words and dead day then,
That’s something different than bogymen!
But anyway, I still believe I only sleep today,
That I’ll wake up, a child again, and start to laugh and play.
I’ll go back to childhood sweet like a briar rose,
Like a bell that wakes us from a dream,
Like a mother with an ailing child
Loves him with aching woman’s love.
How tragic, then, is youth that lives
With enemies, with gallows ropes,
How tragic, then, for children on your lap
To say: this for the good, that for the bad.
Somewhere, far away out there, childhood sweetly sleeps,
Along that path among the trees,
There o’er that house
That was once my pride and joy.
There my mother gave me birth into this world
So I could weep . . .
In the flame of candles by my bed, I sleep
And once perhaps I’ll understand
That I was such a little thing,
As little as this song.
These 30,000 souls who sleep
Among the trees will wake,
Open an eye
And because they see
A lot
They’ll fall asleep again . . .
The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.
Perhaps, if the sun’s tears would sing
against a white stone. . . .
Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly ‘way up high.
It went away I’m sure because it wished to
kiss the world good-bye.
For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto.
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live in here,
in the ghetto.
I.
In Terezin in the so-called park
A queer old granddad sits
Somewhere there in the so-called park
He wears a bead down to his lap
And on his head, a little cap.
II.
Hard crusts he crumbles in his guns,
He’s only got one single tooth.
My poor old man with working gums,
Instead of soft rolls, lentil soup.
My poor old graybeard!
Today the ghetto knows a different fear,
Close in its grip, Death wields an icy scythe.
An evil sickness spreads a terror in its wake,
The victims of its shadow weep and writhe.
Today a father’s heartbeat tells his fright
And mothers bend their heads into their hands.
Now children choke and die with typhus here,
A bitter tax is taken from their bands.
May hear still beats inside my breast
While friends depart for other worlds.
Perhaps it’s better—who can say?—
Than watching this, to die today?
No, no, my God, we want to live!
Not watch our numbers melt away.
We want to have a better world,
We want to work—we must not die!
A little garden,
Fragrant and full of roses.
The path is narrow
And a little boy walks along it.
A little boy, a sweet boy,
Like that growing blossom.
When the blossom comes to bloom,
The little boy will be no more.
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