It wasn't long after the premiere of I Never Saw Another Butterfly that I began thinking about another play. Though it didn't have a title at the time, it had a story that I knew had to be told.

I had spent two years answering my own questions about the Terezin children. From the moment I discovered the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly in Brentano's bookstore in Chicago, I was captivated. I turned page after page of the slim volume, read the poetry, studied the drawings and resolved to learn more.

The appendix offered a few facts about each child whose work appeared in the book—date of birth, date of transportation to Terezin, the date the child perished at Auschwitz. As I glanced at the pages, I noticed a recurring phrase: “perished at Auschwitz, perished at Auschwitz, perished at Auschwitz ...” But another phrase startled me: “Raja Englanderova, after the liberation, returned to Prague.”

At that moment I knew I was committed to these children, to the more than 15,000 transported to Terezin, to the mere 100 who survived, and in a special way, to that one child, now a woman, who would become the subject of my research, the nominal principal character of my play, and a dear personal friend.

I began my research in libraries. Later I interviewed Holocaust survivors and made contact with the editor of the book. Through the editor I located Dr. Karel Lagus, the curator of the Jewish Museum in Prague. It was he who located Raja Englanderova and told her about my work. He suggested that I write to her, and I did with some trepidation. “I've used the writer's privilege,” I wrote, “assuming that what happened to one person in Terezin could have happened to any other person. I will not use your name, if you do not wish me to do so.”

Raja answered with an offer to help with research and a gracious invitation: “It would be pleasant and helpful if you could visit me in Prague.” It would be helpful, but not possible, I thought. Later that month it became possible when a generous Jewish man who “wanted to do a mitzvah” sent a gift and initiated the fund that sent me to Prague. He had financed an exhibit of the children's work in New York and learned of my work through Dr. Lagus.

Alone, with my play in hand, I went to Prague and met Raja Englanderova, now married and a doctor working in the Clinic for Mothers and Children, a research center in Prague. I had worried about our first meeting: How would I recognize her? How would she feel about a stranger telling her story?

But I needn't have worried. We recognized each other immediately and embraced. The letters, the sharing, the confidences—they had created a firm and unmistakable identity for both of us even across the miles.

I wanted to visit Terezin to verify my research and to absorb the sense of place there. To my suprise, Raja decided to go with me and Dr. Lagus, who was to be my official guide. “It's about time,” she said, “About time that I return. I have not been back to Terezin since I left over twenty years ago. It's time.”

And so we went, driving silently through the hills outside Prague to Terezin. As we walked together through the streets of Terezin, Raja recalled incidents in vivid detail, calling them from her memory one by one. Her most moving memories were of their teachers, women who had worked together to create a school for the children in the camp. I was driven to know the whole story of the drawings and poems of the children of Terezin—how they came to be and how they survived. I learned how they came to be and found a way to tell that story in the play I Never Saw Another Butterfly.

But I knew from the very beginning that there was another play in the story of the children's work in Terezin. It was the answer to the question that always came from audiences who saw the play: how did the drawings and poems survive?

The facts are few. Determined to save the children's drawings and poems from the Nazis who were bent on destroying all camp records, the teachers wrapped them in old papers and rags and buried them. They packed the largest collection into two suitcases and hid them in the attic of the barracks where the women and children slept. And they impressed upon those who would survive that the survival of the Terezin children lay in the safe delivery of the children's work to the Jewish community in Prague.

Raja, with several of the children, located and dug up the buried bundles. And Raja herself searched for and found the two suitcases in the barracks. She took them to Prague after the liberation and gave them to a teacher survivor who was charged with helping child survivors after the war. He turned them over to the Prague Jewish community, where they remained for some years until they were rediscovered, exhibited and later published.

The Terezin Promise is an answer to the question of how the children's work survived. It is a creative telling of that story using Raja's simple statement as its historical core: “I searched for and found the suitcases and took them to Prague.”

The irony of this story is striking. We do not know or care to know the names of those who tyrannized the children of Terezin. But we do care about the children, the nearly 15,000 incarcerated at Terezin who, in the end, perished at Auschwitz. We care because, in a strange and wonderful way, they have not perished; they live in the drawings and poems—and plays—that bear witness to their young lives.