The Art of Survival

It wouldn't be all that surprising if, more than a half-century later, today's high school students would imagine the Holocaust to be as ancient as the Peloponnesian War.

But it's odd how, if you give them a way to connect with it, students will come to find the Nazis' systematic murder of 6 million Jews during World War II to be as relevant as first period.

Take "I Never Saw Another Butterfly," which premiered Thursday at the Las Vegas Academy Theatre's Black Box Theater.

The play, by Celeste Raspanti, is inspired by a collection of poetry and art created by children who lived in the Terezin (or Theresienstadt) concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic during World War II.

About 15,000 Jewish children passed through the camp from 1942 to 1944. At war's end, all but about 100 of them -- including most of the young artists and poets whose work appears in the collection -- were dead.

In the play, the events of Terezin unfold through the eyes of one of those real-life survivors, Raja Englanderova. In flashbacks, Raja tells of her life at Terezin and how Irena, a teacher at the camp, inspires the children to create art in the service of survival.

Despite -- or, perhaps, because of -- the intense subject matter, students have embraced the play from day one, says director Melissa Lilly.

"We're always looking for theater that really expresses the voice of young people," she says. "These characters, except for the part of the teacher and the voice of the Nazi, they're all under 16 years old."

Nor was Lilly surprised that students found in the play relevant parallels to today, mostly because "I know how sensitive and aware of diversity our students are."

Students have brought to the piece "their own experience of prejudice in one way or another," Lilly explains. "And they are taking it very seriously, and understand, that they are portraying a true story and, with that, comes a responsibility."

The students also bring to the production the memories of Ben Lesser, a Las Vegan who met with the students to talk about his own experiences as a survivor of three Nazi camps.

Lesser was 11 and living in Krakow, Poland, when his own family's ordeal began. Of his seven family members, only Lesser and his sister survived the Holocaust.

Lesser said his mission now is to ensure that the Holocaust never will be forgotten. At the academy, he says, "I talked to the cast so they would have some idea what the Holocaust was all about.

"It's very therapeutic for me to know that (to) these kids, it means so much to them," he says.

Lilly says that, in staging the play, the goal was to "keep it very simple." However, the production does include clips from a propaganda film the Nazis made to portray Terezin as a model Jewish community and images of the Terezin children's original drawings.

The drawings and poems were hidden and then, after the war, recovered. It is, Lilly says, "important to see the pictures that survived."

"I Never Saw Another Butterfly" is a tribute to the victims of the Holocaust and a means of helping to explain it. But, Lilly says, it's also a "statement that art can help us survive."

Lilly says that, as someone who has taught theater for more than 30 years, she knows firsthand how transforming and redemptive art can be.

"I think we truly survive because of our art," she says. "So that resonated with me, that art teachers were able to help these children."

Contact reporter John Przybys at jprzybys@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0280.