Czech presidential candidate says pig farm on site of former concentration camp for Roma must be demolished

Michal Horáček has published a video on his official Facebook profile in which he makes an absolutely clear statement about the pig farm that now stands on the site of the former concentration camp at Lety u Písku. “That pig farm must be demolished! It must! What should be here is an empty space that we will fill with remembrance and empathy,” the candidate in next year’s presidential elections said.

The reference to an “empty space” is Horáček’s response to recent remarks by Czech President Zeman asserting that moving the farm would harm the Czech national economy. “Do you want to build empty spaces?” he asked the General Director of the Barrandov cable television channel, Jaromír Soukup, in a recent interview.

“I am standing at a place where 245 of our children perished. According to a directive dated 10 July 1942 more than 400 people were transported from here to the gas chambers as part of the Nazi’S ‘Final Solution’,” his Facebook post reads.

The video has been filmed inside a replica of the prisoners’ sleeping quarters that was recently installed at the current memorial. “What you can’t perceive from this video, unlike me, is the indescribable stench from the pig farm that was established here at one point by the communist regime. Let’s finally allow the good and the empathetic in us to come out. Let’s compensate the owners to move the pig farm elsewhere, and let’s organize an ’empty space’ here that we fill with reverent remembrance,” the candidate said.

“To fair-minded people, it is unimaginable that flies and an enormous stench should be here at the site of such suffering. Imagine if it was like this at Auschwitz, or at the Kobyliská střelnice [a shooting range near Prague where executions were carried out by the Nazis], or at Lidice or Ležáky,” Horáček says in the video.