Butterflies Do Not Live Here (Motýli tady nežijí)

ALL DOCUMENTS, CHILDREN'S DRAWINGS AND POEMS FEATURED IN THIS FILM

ARE AUTHENTIC AND WERE CREATED BETWEEN 1941 AND 1945.

BUTTERFLIES DON'T LIVE HERE

TEREZĺN, 1941-1945

Story

Collaboration

Cinematography Editor / Producer

Music Conductor

Narrators

Director and screenplay

Production

Everything was devised according to a plan.

The weird script still sticks to these walls.

Block QL, Querstraße, Lange Straße, numbers on houses, on doors,

even people received numbers.

There were also children here.

They played and they scribbled, just like all children do.

These children were brought here on a train,

and they were looking forward to that same train

taking them home again.

But neither this or that one did.

It wasn't able to, or perhaps allowed to.

But with a box of crayons, with pots of watercolours,

their former homes came back to them.

From back home came girls with flowers and boys with kites.

Paths opened for them, offering to take them home.

Home is warm, there's a lamp, a chair and a table,

a window with a curtain.

But that bed into which you need to climb a ladder,

who has misplaced it in here? That's not the bed at home.

All roads and paths lead home.

Home is where the red scooter is.

But there were ramparts.

The ramparts were guarding a town, surveying its streets and houses.

And the children drew it all.

Even themselves, with stars sown onto their hearts.

Triple ramparts encircled the town, surveying its streets.

The children could watch them through the barracks windows.

That was permitted.

In the distance beyond the ramparts they saw animals and birds

and the bluish hills of the Czech mid-lands.

That's where they imagined was their home.

There were backyards here and the central barracks yard

in which they played.

What joy for children who had been expelled from schools

and suffered the horrors of the transport.

There was a horse here that they couldn't get enough of.

In the ghetto, the children could only see people harnessed into carts.

They saw hearses delivering bread,

they saw funerals consisting only in the gathering of coffins.

With their crayons they even managed to capture executions on paper.

The worst of all is the cook.

He left the children queue in line.

He cooked rotten potatoes for them.

He left grandpa to chew on a hard crust! He, the cook!

I'd like to go alone some place where people are different, nicer.

Somewhere unknown.

Where no one gets killed.

I'd like to have a little house

surrounded by a firm fence, or atop a high rock.