27th January is the International Commemoration Day for the atrocities carried out by the Nazis on Jews, Gypsies, political opponents and homosexuals. This was the greatest crime against humanity ever committed. The world then swore: Never Again but reality has demonstrated that cruelty of men against men since never ceased.

The Spiro Ark has undertaken to present the devastation of war to all human beings by presenting 11 poems written by children in Terezin - a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. One of these poems is entitled "I Never Saw Another Butterfly" and the entire song cycle is thus called after it. 15.000 children under the age of 15 passed through the Terezin camp. None of the children who wrote these poems survived and they have been set to most moving music by composer Julian Dawes. The children from the Finchley Children Opera will be singing the poems that were written by those children who were incarcerated in the ghetto of Terezin before their deaths in Auschwitz.
The second half of the programme is entitled "Be the Change You Want to See" - it is also a song cycle by composer Julian Dawes. It is a setting of a range of texts from the Bible, to contemporary Hebrew, Jewish and Israeli poets as well as non-Jewish poets like HH The Dalai Lama and Mahatma Gandhi and many others.
Top actors and musicians will take part in this moving performance.

The piece was written and composed by Julian Dawes as a tribute to Nitza and Robin Spiro - creators of the Spiro Institute and the Spiro Ark for their imaginative work in building bridges, between people of peace.