Shalom, my name is Paige Saunders,

I was born in 2004 (8 years old) and live in South Africa. I help the children in Israel and first started to do so when I was still young, only 5 years old when I gave my pocket money to help the cancer children there.

I was sad to hear that some 1.5 million Jewish children were murdered during the Holocaust… generations were wiped out! .Nazi persecution, arrests, and deportations were directed against all members of the targeted families without concern for age. Plucked from their homes and stripped of their childhood, many children like Anne Frank had witnessed the murder of parents, siblings, and relatives. Many faced starvation, illness and brutal labour, until all of them were consigned to the gas chambers. They lived and died during the dark years of the Holocaust and were victims of the Nazi nightmare...!

My vision is that CARDS sold through ‘Paige’s helping Hands’ with poems written by children before dying in the Holocaust will bring more awareness to help children living daily with fear and are victims of terror and those suffering from cancer. 

God bless you… From Paige

The children who were brought to Terezín knew nothing of what their fates would be. They had come from places where they had already experienced and known humiliation. They had been expelled from the schools, forced to sew stars on their clothes, and were not allowed to play in places other than cemeteries. They were herded into Terezín with their parents. They were forced to sleep on concrete floors in crowded rooms or in three-tiered bunks. They soon began to understand the strange world they lived in. They saw reality of their situation, but maintained their childish outlook on life.From the age of 14 the children of Terezín were forced to work as adults. They worked 80-100 hour weeks of hard manual labour. The Terezín children saw everything the adults saw. They saw all of the horrors that took place in their new home. They witnessed the transports coming and going constantly, taking their neighbors to their ultimate death. They saw the funeral carts used to carry their food and the people who pulled these carts like animals. They were witnesses to executions and other horrors that simply became a part of their everyday lives. These children were perhaps the only children in the world who captured what they saw, felt, heard, smelled, and tasted with a pencil and paper.

Secretly, these children studied and drew not only the horrors that they were silent witnesses to but also the beauty that only they, through their childish outlook on the world, saw. The children saw the beauty that was beyond the walls of their homes.

The poems  are a reminder and a warning of how things can change in our world today. They were written by children while at "Terezin Concentration Camp" (and "Auschwitz")... the poems demonstrates a quick and brutal confrontation with the reality of the camp; a sense of having one's soul stripped from one's body; a cool vision of the reality of the camp; and finally reality, an affirmation of life even in the face of certain death. Terezin was unique among concentration camps. This was the fake city of safety, the to fool the world. For anyone who does not know the full story of it, and describe the life there. The determined preservation of music, art, education and all that creates culture amidst these appalling conditions is beyond remarkable.

Two hundred thousand persons passed through there, fifteen thousand children. Only 132 of those children were known to have survived.

These poems and children's drawings were hidden at Terezin inside mattresses and stuffed in cracks between the walls of houses. They were recovered after the war. .. "I Never saw Another Butterfly"