Gale - A Study Guide for Celeste Raspantis I Never Saw Another Butterfly

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Celeste Raspanti

1971

After coming across a book of poems and drawings created by children of the Holocaust concentration camps, Celeste Raspanti wrote the play I Never Saw Another Butterfly in 1967. Officially published in 1971 and presented as a one-act cutting in 1980, the drama is based on the true story of survivor Raja Englanderova.

Raja was one of 15,000 children under the age of fifteen to enter the gates of Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp located in Czechoslovakia (now divided into the two nations the Czech Republic and Slovakia). Raspanti brings to life the experiences of all those children by holding a magnifying glass to the experience of just one.

Terezin was created as a "model camp," one designed to fool outsidersparticularly the International Red Crossinto thinking the Jews were being treated humanely throughout the Holocaust. Most adults who entered the camp were intellectuals, artists, and scholars. The children of Terezin were encouraged to create. They wrote poetry, played music, drew, and painted pictures. When Terezin was liberated, six thousand poems and drawings previously hidden were discovered. Some of those works were compiled into a book called I Never Saw Another Butterfly by Hana Volavkova. The book inspired Raspanti to translate the children's art into drama.

The one-act play investigates the topics of death and victimization while exploring themes of the true meaning of survival and what is required to hope in the face of despair.

Raspanti was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1928. The youngest of three children born to Italian immigrant parents, Raspanti grew up in a close extended family. After winning a writing contest in 1943 at her Catholic girls' high school, she knew she wanted to be a writer. Her plans changed when, in 1946, she entered a convent and became a nun. Though she maintained a love of writing, her focus changed to teaching.

Raspanti graduated from Milwaukee, Wisconsin's Alverno College with a bachelor's degree in English in 1950 and earned her master's degree, also in English, from Marquette University seven years later. While working on her master's degree, she taught high school in Illinois and Wisconsin until accepting a job as an English professor at Alverno, where she remained until 1969. At that time, Raspanti moved to Minnesota and earned a Ph.D. in theater arts from the University of Minnesota-Minneapolis.

In 1963, Raspanti came across a book of drawings made by children of the Terezin concentration camp from 1942 to 1944. By the end of the book, she was speechless. The last section of the book listed the names, birth dates, and transport dates of each child, as well as the date each died at Auschwitz. After reading the phrase "perished at Auschwitz" on page after page of listed names, Raspanti was startled to read "Raja Englanderova, after the liberation, returned to Prague."

In her essay "Where Does a Play Begin?" Raspanti remembers, "At that moment I knew I was committed to these children. My first reaction to the story of the Terezin children was silence. My second reaction was the inability to keep silent." Four years later, Raspanti traveled to Prague to meet Terezin survivor Raja Englanderova. On that same trip, she visited two of the most notorious death camps, Auschwitz and Dachau.

Raspanti's travel and research resulted in the play I Never Saw Another Butterfly. Though not officially published until 1971, the show opened in 1967 under the title A Place of Springs and was produced and performed by Alverno's theater department. Milwaukee's Jewish community paid to fly Raja to Milwaukee for the premier of the play. The one-act version of that same play was published in 1980. A sequel, The Terezin Promise, was published in 2004.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Raspanti held various teaching and consulting positions at Minnesota universities and colleges. No Fading Star, also about the Holocaust, was published in 1979. In 1993, she helped the Saint Paul Seminary plan and produce events to commemorate the institution's one hundredth anniversary. Raspanti retired in 1995.

Writing constituted a major part of Raspanti's life, both before and after retirement. She has published many other dramatic scripts as well, including a stage adaptation of Vera and Bill Cleaver's classic novel Where the Lilies Bloom. In addition to her plays, Raspanti has written and published numerous articles for academic and professional journals.

Since retirement, Raspanti has been a driving force in the Italian community of the Minneapolis-St. Paul region. In addition to serving on several civic boards, she publishes Notizie: An E-mail Newsletter for Italian Americans, Italians and Italophiles and belongs to numerous Italian cultural and historical organizations.