Contemplation

David Kracov was one of only 20 artists chosen to create a piece of art in memory of the children who lost their lives during the Holocaust.

Incorporating animation characters into such a profound and disturbing event, David has said that this was his most difficult sculpture of his career. David chose the famous poem, The Butterfly , written by Pavel Friedmann, a young boy who lost his life at Auschwitz, as his inspiration. In the poem, Pavel writes of the last beautiful thing he ever saw, a butterfly, which has since come to symbolize freedom and hope.

The inspiration for the design of my sculpture comes from my passion for animation and the innocence that the characters portray. Incorporating animation characters into a sculpture that represents the loss of children's lives during the Holocaust was for me, one of, if not the most difficult creation of my career.

As adults, the one thing we tend to lose is our innocence and naïve portrait of the world around us. But there are a few who grow older, but never lose that magical sight. As adults, our first impression is to think of animation and cartoon characters as just that, cartoons. But we forget that these characters were created from the minds of adults who never lost the innocence of the views of the world that surrounds them. My sculpture represents that innocence that we all had as children and should never lose as adults.

The butterflies of my sculpture represent the souls of those children that lost their lives during the Holocaust. In particular, each butterfly of my sculpture represents 1,989 children under the age of 16 that lost their lives at Auschwitz.

The sculpture consists of over 500 individual butterflies. When I began researching for this project, I was overwhelmed with the details surrounding aspects of the Holocaust. The amount of people that were condensed into a single boxcar seemed almost too overwhelming to be real for me. I wanted to portray this overwhelming number through my sculpture, which is why there are so many butterflies condensed in one area of the sculpture. For me, the overwhelming amount of butterflies flying into Heaven represents the unthinkable amount of people that where packed into one boxcar. I wanted the viewer to feel a sense of overpowering claustrophobia.

For some, when they look at the characters that surround the boxcar, each character is praying. For others, the characters are contemplating in sadness. I designed each character in their individual pose to leave the viewer with their own ideals of what to believe. For some, the belief in prayer helps to aid in their making it through difficult times, thus they see each character in prayer. Or, more to the point, they see a little bit of themselves in each character.

The Butterfly

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.

Pavel Friedmann   4·6·1942