Holocaust Butterfly

You might have noticed a new button featuring a butterfly on the right hand side of this blog, that I recently added. I discovered it on the blog of a fellow artist and friend Trudi who in turn had also found it online. The Butterfly Effect is spreading rapidly in cyberspace and what a good thing this is as the Holocaust Museum Houston in Texas is putting on an exhibition in Spring 2013 to commemorate the 1.5 million children who perished in the Holocaust.

They will need 1.5 million hand-crafted butterflies to do so and you too can participate in this event, either by sending your butterfly to Trudi (all information can be found on her blogpost here) or by mailing your butterfly straight to the Holocaust Museum Houston (information here).

My father's parents (living in the south of The Netherlands during the war) took in a very young Jewish boy and passed him off as their own. Had this been discovered everyone in the family would have been shot. I never realised till after my grandparents had both gone, just how courageous an act this must have been, specially as they had sons of their own including my father, who should have gone to labour camps in Germany but instead had all gone underground and found shelter in various farms in The Netherlands. Both this boy and his sister (taken in by another Dutch family) survived the war but they were the only ones from a very large Jewish family. He is my uncle and became a very successful lawyer after the War.

So this butterfly is in honour of my grandparents, Rudolf and Frederika Mulder!

It was designed using Electric Quilt 6 and was foundation pieced and embellished with couched yarn and buttons.