Opening Reception: “Taking Flight: The Butterfly Project”

For 20 years, Holocaust Museum Houston fostered a powerful project, “The Butterfly Project,” collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies to commemorate the children who perished in the Holocaust. The project was imagined and based on an inspiring poem written by Pavel Friedmann in 1942, when he was a prisoner in the Terezin Concentration Camp in former Czechoslovakia. More than 12,000 children under the age of 15 passed through the Terezin camp between the years 1942-1944. More than 90 percent of the children who were there perished during the Holocaust. Between 1995 and 2015, more than 1.5 million handcrafted butterflies were brought to the Museum by students and children. These exquisite, colorful butterflies were created by people around the world using an incredible array of materials and innovation. The memory of the children who died in the Holocaust and the loss of their talents and possibilities is felt in the grace and beauty seen in each of the more than 100 handmade butterflies now on display, HMH members are invited to a free preview reception from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 11, 2016. Advance registration is requested. To RSVP online, visit www.hmh.org/RegisterEvent.aspx.