Ryan Gloyer Middle School eighth-graders Claire Hubler, left, and Adia Chardella teamed up to paint a ceramic butterfly to symbolize the victims of the Holocaust.

JACKSON TWP — Babies and toddlers are joyful, said Kyra Fazio as she brushed yellow underglaze onto her white ceramic butterfly.

“We're painting it yellow to symbolize joy and happiness,” said Kyra, 14, a Ryan Gloyer Middle School eighth-grader. “The person I got was a 3-year-old ... I was really sad that they were so young and they had to die, there's no reason it should have happened to a toddler who didn't have a chance to live out his life,”

Shmi Adinun was born in 1938 and died at the age of 3 in the Holocaust in 1941.

Kyra was one of the Ryan Gloyer Middle School students who painted 72 ceramic butterflies Tuesday to memorialize children who perished in the Holocaust.

The work was done for The Butterfly Project, a nonprofit organization that uses lessons of the Holocaust to educate about the dangers of hatred and bigotry through the painting of ceramic butterflies.

This is an excerpt from a story that appears in Wednesday's Butler Eagle.