National Prepartion

As I was preparing for Nationals,I was going over all the ways I could make my duo more "real". Thinking about how I could get people to see me not as an average teenage American girl, but a Czechoslovakian Jew that had to face sorrow, pain, hatred, death. Holocaust was horrible, something that none of us want to hear, read,or even acknowledge that humans could be so heartless. Living in North Idaho I haven't experience, seen, or understood the holocaust like the people near the Holocaust museum in Washington, or people who lived in Germany. So when I was preparing I had to realize that these two teenagers were real. To think that a girl of 12 lost everyone she loved. Her mother, father, brothers, and sisters all of them gone. The Prodject Judaica Foundation said "Of the vast majority of Czech Jews who were taken to Terezin, 97,297 died among whom were 15,000 children. Olny 132 of those children were known to have survived." Raja was one of those 132. She feel in love at the camp. When she did, she found hope and reason to live. Honza was her everything. He ends up dying in the end. I can imagine how much pain she suffered. She lost her family, forced to work in painful conditions, lost everything she knew, and ultimately lost the only man she loved. For the speech to become "real" I have to capture that desperation. I definitely have my work cut out for me, but I can't do it justice. This story has to be shared. So we will never forget what the world would look like if we had no God. I wanted to share a poem that Raja wrote. (the girl that I am playing.) This is the full poem, if you saw our duo I only read half of it due to time. Also, I wanted to share her ending lines, she says them as an older woman sharing her past story.

So here is her poem:
"I never saw another butterfly
The last, the very last
so richly, brightly, dazzling yellow.
perhaps if the sun's tears 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 goodbye.
For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto,
But I have found my people here.
The dandelions call to me,
And the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live here in the ghetto."

Raja ended up living in the camp till she was 19.
Here is what she said looking back at that time in her life:

"Goodbye. It was the motto of Terezin. It should have been written over the entrance instead of the lie that greeted newcomers: "Work makes us free" It was goodbye, not work, that made us free. It was the only thing we knew would never change. Goodbye... goodbye... goodbye. It freed us all. What was there to fear when you had said goodbye to everone you ever loved?
... My name is Raja. I am a Jew. I survived Terezin, not alone, and not afraid"

That paragraph is so powerful, send chills up my spin everytime. After Nationals I will post a video of Sam and I doing the duo, so you can all see. But I would strongly encourage you to read the play. It is so sad and powerful. It is "I never saw another butterfly" by Celeste Raspanti.

P.S. The writer is really cheesy.