While Amazon is seemingly trying to take over the world of self-publishing and leave all the independent folks out – see Yvonne Dita’s excellent article, I’m also left wondering what it’s doing in terms of being green for the environment.
I am wondering this because today I got a book from Amazon that was delivered in a box that could fit three books and I looked around my office and started calculating how many times I’ve received books from Amazon in boxes that are way too large for one book. The answer is too many.
The book that came today was I never saw another butterfly…” Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944. My daughter was assigned to do a story on the holocaust and she researched on the Web and found the book and the story of the 15,000 children under the age of 15 who passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp between the years of 1942-1944; less than 100 survived.
The book is a collection of the children’s drawings and poems while at the camp. They were encouraged and taught by an art teacher who was also interred there and saved paper and scraps for the children to create art on.
The book has an introduction by Chaim Potok and he quotes Israeli novelist and child survivor of the Holocaust, Aharon Appelfield, “Art constantly challenges the process by which the individual person is reduced to anonymity.”
In particular, this poem is striking even today:
“I’d Like to Go Alone” by Alena Synkova
“I’d like to go away alone,
Where there are other, nicer people,
Somewhere into the far unknown,
There, where no one kills another.
Maybe more of us,
A thousand strong,
Will reach this goal
Before too long.
Children capture the very essence of life that oftentimes we all forget to reflect upon.
Less boxes, less war, more abundance, less greed, more joy.
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