It started just like many other days had recently. It was midmorning and I stood in front of a group of my girls, who ranged from five to twelve. I checked that I had enough paper, colored pencils and watercolors. Most of them had arrived in the last few weeks. They’d gone from sleeping in their own beds, with their blankets and dolls, their books and their toys, their parents beside them, to being forced to live in a children’s home with me. I couldn’t be everything in their lives, I knew, but I could try to gift them with a little stability and as much creativity as I could.  

I tried to recall the feeling of being brought to my knees by the natural world, something so beautiful and perfectly formed that I was stunned. I thought about a butterfly I saw on a holiday once as a child. It was a Danube Clouded Yellow, and it was two years after my mother died. It was so luminous I was afraid I’d imagined it. I wanted it to land in the palm of my hand so I could feel its weight, I wanted to see if its wings were fragile like tissue paper or soft like melting butter, if it smelled powdery like pollen or fresh like pine scented air, like freedom or fear.

One of our neighbors had told me a story about butterflies being the departed paying a visit to the living, and I’d forgotten it until that moment. I chased the butterfly, I stood on my tip toes, and reached as high as I could, I tried to get as close as I could, and then I watched as the wind carried it away. It found its way into my drawings and paintings for months.

I told them the story, then asked them to recall a moment where they saw something that moved them deeply, that captured them so completely they could recreate it now.

Eva pointed out that there were no butterflies here. “That’s why it’s important to remember,” I explained. “To imagine, to remind ourselves that there is so much to look forward to when all of this is over, because it will end.”

I saw a few of them smiling, then struggling to excavate memories like archeologists searching frantically for a civilization that may never have existed.

I gave them prompts. I talked about holidays, oceans and rivers, grandmother’s kitchens and farms, and best friends’ houses and gardens.

Their art, as always, was extraordinary. Ruth painted sea creatures, some she’d seen in books, some she’d imagined, everything from starfish to eels to jellyfish. Hana painted the driveway to her childhood home, surrounded by lush green trees, and the outline of her house. Ina drew an oasis by a swimming pool, in two parts. Eva and Marika drew butterflies. Marika’s was green, Eva’s were pink and yellow, surrounded by fields and lavender and yellow flowers.

When we were finished, when I’d collected the drawings and put them safely into storage in one of old suitcases and put the painted pieces in safe places to dry, I went to meet my husband. He was standing in line, waiting for our soup. He actually likes lentils, and potatoes, though this thin, watery mess bares no resemblance to what we ate at home.

When we find each other, Pavel and I hold hands like leaves unfurling around each other’s. When he’s really missed me, he calls me Frederike. It’s my real name, but everyone calls me Friedl.

Some people describe love as the feeling of sun on your face after a long, dry winter. That’s how it felt with Franz, my first love. We studied art and created side by side. When I had his attention, I felt the infinite force of his brilliance, and when I didn’t, I felt frozen and withdrawn. I stayed with him for longer than I should have, even after he married someone else.

With Pavel, it felt like discovering the depth of a tree’s roots and feeling anchored by its history. I wrapped my spindly roots around his solid ones and we merged into a beautiful, immovable being. The beginning of a forest, thick with rich greens, we thought. I’d feel my body begin to blossom, feel the beginning sprouts of life, and then nothing but the crushing feeling of being unable to accomplish the most basic things, what my body was supposed to be able to do. We tried for a long time. We saw doctors and healers.

Then we knew for sure that it was just him and I, a heaviness etching itself into our bark. We’d try to ignore it, focus on work, each other, our relatives or friends. But you can only ignore it for so long. There is a sadness in knowing that in the end, you and your partner is all there is. Especially now that we find ourselves here, living in separate homes. I care deeply about the girls I live with. They enter my dreams and I wake up worrying about them, wanting to protect them.

Pavel and I love each other more than we know how to express. These days if I have spare time to paint or draw, I find myself painting his portrait, his essence, his hopes, his dreams, his gentle way of speaking to me. At night, sometimes I give them to him. Sometimes I store them along with the children’s paintings.

Later, I teach a different group, a group that includes boys. As a perspective drawing exercise, I encourage them to imagine shrinking themselves to the size of a bug. How would everything look if you were tiny, I asked them. When they were finished, I asked, how everything would look if they were giant. Hanus drew himself as a enormous cockroach, the walls of Terezin crumbling under the weight of his giant feet. Gideon draws himself as a giant furry rat, his heavy tail slapping the Arbeit Macht Frei sign at the entrance, making it shake, a tiny Nazi in his mouth, quivering at the sight of his large, sharp teeth. His blood makes only a tiny dot at the rat’s feet. This was not what I had in mind, I had hoped to transport them to a different world, but it gives me hope, seeing their imagination, their will to resist and fight back. Alena, who is five, draws herself as a tiny fly, surrounded by other flies who she says are the other children. People are scared that we spread disease, she tells me, her expression serious. But we just want to eat and play. We just want to fly really high. I hug her and try not to cry.

I do a collage and mixed medium lesson with some older boys and girls that night, who’d spent the day working. We use strips of different coloured paper, and a variety of scrap papers that have been found and scrupulously saved. A few of them are in resistance groups, and Franta asks if it’s true that I used to be a Communist. I raise an eyebrow. Why do you say used to be?

He grins and I tell them all about how I was arrested in the thirties for making Communist art. I made a photo collage series called This is What it Looks Like, My Child. The most controversial had a newborn baby superimposed in the centre of violence and turbulence, where it was clear that it was lost already.  The words next to it read “This is what it looks like, my child, this world, that is what you have been born into, there are those born to shear and those born to be shorn… and if you, my child, do not like it, then you will just have to change it.”

They stare at me wide eyed. I tell them all about being thrown in jail, having to leave Austria, ending up in Prague, and then Bohemia, and then here.

“What are you doing to resist now,” he asks me, a mix of exhaustion and frustration creeping into his voice. It’s a question I think about all the time. I consider my answers. I’m tempted to say the act of creation, the act of teaching even though it’s been explicitly forbidden. I want to say, working with hundreds of kids, trying to harness their imaginations, to liberate them from their fears. I want to say, taking care of my girls, trying to help them process their emotions, trying to highlight their strength and resilience.

I put a hand on his slim shoulder, feel the bone between his shoulder blades scraping against the back of my thumb. He is a poet and his writing is beautiful. I want the world to read his words. I want him to live long enough to publish in books and magazines, to reflect on our time here with perspective and insight.

I think about something a musician I met recently said, about being able to retreat into her own mind for freedom or comfort, regardless of what she had to endure.

“Staying alive,” I told him, looking into his charcoal eyes. “Survival is the biggest act of resistance of all.”

We make a silent promise, darkening sky matching the dirt at our feet. I see the faintest embers of hope before I turn around, ready to paint, and then hug and soothe my girls before I fall asleep.

Danila Botha is a Canadian author, a short story writer and novelist. She has published three short story collections, most recently, 2024's Things that Cause Inappropriate Happiness, and two novels, with the second, A Place for People Like Us, to be published in 2025.