Commemorative ceremony in Prague-Ruzyně marks 82nd anniversary of deportations of Roma and Sinti to Auschwitz II-Birkenau
On Monday, 10 March 2025, dozens of people commemorated the 82nd anniversary of the mass deportation of Roma and Sinti from Prague to the Auschwitz-II Birkenau Concentration and Extermination camp with a ceremony in Prague's Ruzyně quarter. Those attending, most of whom wore black, laid floral wreaths at the wooden sculpture of the memorial site.
The third annual ceremony at this location was first initiated by the Centre for the Roma and Sinti in Prague and was organized this year by the Municipal Department of Prague 6, the Museum of Romani Culture, and the Prague Forum for Romani Histories at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts. “I have the sense that the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti is still a rather forgotten chapter of Czech history. Despite processes which have been complicated and protracted, the fact of the existence of the ‘Gypsy Camps’ in Lety u Písku and Hodonín u Kunštátu have managed to make it into Czech memory now. However, other institutions also played a role in that history. One of them is the building of the prison in Ruzyně, which served at the time as a forced labor camp,” Petr Palacký (Mayors and Independents – STAN and Greens – Zelení), a councillor for Prague 6, told the Czech News Agency (ČTK).
The commemorative ceremony has been held since 2023 near the former grounds of the forced labor camp in the Ruzyně quarter, where Roma and Sinti from Bohemia were imprisoned in March 1943 before being deported to Auschwitz. The first transport to leave that location on 11 March 1943 comprised at least 648 Romani children, men and women.
Most of those deported were murdered by the Nazis. This is the third year in a row that the Municipal Department of Prague 6 has convened the ceremony.
At this location, together with the Centre for the Roma and Sinti in Prague, a Museum of Romani Culture project that ended last year, the local authority installed an information sign about this history in 2023. “I believe we have introduced a tradition and that these commemorative ceremonies will be held annually,” Palacký said.
Last year a wooden sculpture was unveiled at the remembrance site with the title “Hlava Nemtudomky” [Head of Nemtudomka] featuring a likeness of a character from Romani fairytales. It is the work of Jakub Brázda, a student at the Academy of Fine Arts.
The sculpture was created as part of an art student project on commemorating the Holocaust of the Roma. “This was not originally produced for this remembrance site and has been exhibited in more than one place, such as in Hodonín u Kunštátu,” Palacký said.
The sculpture has not been permanently installed at the remembrance site. “I firmly hope that in a few years we will manage to build a permanent memorial here to bring this event from our history into the present,” the local councillor said.
According to Palacký, it is important to commemorate the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti because it is part of Czech history.
Karolína Kozáková’s memoirs
This year another partner to this event was the Prague Forum for Romani Histories at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts, which distributed during the ceremony a brochure with information about a unique testimony to the imprisonment of Roma on the grounds of the forced labor camp in Ruzyně and about the March 1943 transport from the viewpoint of the Romani survivors. Karolína Kozáková authored a memoir entitled Cesta životem v cikánském voze [My Journey through Life in a Gypsy Wagon], published in the year 2000, in which she described her imprisonment in the Ruzyně forced labor camp from the perspective of the Romani victims.
“What I have to tell you is something terrible, unimaginable,” she recalled of the night when a van of SS drove up to their home in the village of Zdaboř. Her family were ordered to quickly pack and to bring just the most necessary things with them.
Her father desperately tried to persuade the soldiers that her pregnant mother should be permitted to remain in their home, but the soldiers insisted that they say good-bye to her and that they would bring her back to her family once she had given birth. “My God, if you could have seen us saying goodbye to Mama! We knew we would never, ever see her again,” Kozáková described the painful moment.
Her family was transferred to Ruzyně. Her brother Jenda and her father were separated from the rest of the family and she remained with her sisters.
All of them experienced enormous fear and uncertainty. “We were very sad, we didn’t know what awaited us, and we were without our Mama,” Kozáková’s testimony says.
The Holocaust of the Roma during the Second World War involved the systematic persecution, segregation and annihilation of Romani people throughout Europe by the Nazi regime and their supporters. According to estimates, between 220,000 to 500,000 Romani people were murdered, representing roughly one-quarter to one-half of the population of Roma at the time.
Historical research has established that of the 7,000 Roma originally indigenous to this part of Europe, just 583 returned from the concentration camps to the territory of Bohemia and Moravia after the war.
