VARNELL, Ga. — Rose Calvillo has a goal.

She wants to see 1.5 million butterflies adorning the walls of Varnell Elementary School.

“I want to remember the 1.5 million children who died during the Holocaust,” said Calvillo, who is a fifth-grader at Varnell. “It’s important that we remember the Holocaust, so that it doesn’t happen again. We need to remember everyone who died, but I think it’s really important to remember the children who died.”

Calvillo and her classmates are learning about World War II and the Holocaust, and for their class they had to do a presentation. Calvillo chose as her topic the children who died during the Holocaust, the systematic murder of some 6 million Jews and millions of others by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

“I didn’t want to believe it,” Calvillo said of the Holocaust. “I felt like crying every time I read about it. I still don’t want to believe it. But if we forget about it, if we ignore it, it’s like they died twice.”

“Rose learned about the Butterfly Project, a worldwide effort (by the Holocaust Museum Houston) to collect 1.5 million butterflies to honor the children killed during the Holocaust,” said teacher Beth Taylor. “So we decided to have our own Varnell butterfly project.”

The idea came from a poem called “The Butterfly” by Pavel Friedman, a Jewish poet from Czechoslovakia who died at Auschwitz. He wrote the poem while imprisoned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, also known as the Theresienstadt ghetto, when he was just 21.

There are several English translations of the poem. The one used by the Holocaust Museum Houston ends with the lines “Butterflies don’t live here/in the ghetto.”

Taylor said the idea for the presentations came from another fifth-grade student, Valeria Camarillo.

“On her own, she went out and learned about Anne Frank and came back and did a presentation,” Taylor said. “That just inspired everybody. All the children wanted to do their own presentations, and I just ran with it.”

Frank is one of the most well-known victims of the Holocaust due to the posthumous publication of her diary, which describes her life in hiding from the Nazis in the Netherlands from 1942 to 1944. She was just 15 when she died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

“I knew a little bit about Anne Frank, and since we were discussing World War II in class I decided I wanted to learn more about her,” said Camarillo. “Reading her story made me very sad, but I also wanted to share it.”

The students at Varnell are making their own butterflies

“The younger ones really don’t know about the Holocaust,” said media specialist Dawn Campbell. “For them, we are just talking about how the butterfly represents uniqueness and how each person is unique.”

They have also ordered 36 ceramic butterflies from the Butterfly Project to decorate, each come with a biography of a child killed during the Holocaust. Taylor says those butterflies will become part of a permanent exhibit in the school’s media center.

Rose also composed a letter that was sent to other schools in the Whitfield County Schools system and other area schools asking students there to create butterflies and send them to Varnell.

“We’d like to see other schools, church groups, individuals send us butterflies,” said Taylor.

Those who would like to create a butterfly for the Varnell project can send them to Butterfly Project, Varnell Elementary School, 4421 Highway 2, Dalton, GA 30721.