Drone footage shows the industrial pig farm that overlapped the concentration camp site in Lety u Písku, Czech Republic is completely demolished
The industrial pig farm that was once built over part of the grounds of the WWII-era concentration camp imprisoning Roma and Sinti people at Lety u Písku has now been demolished. Two parts of a feed hall from the farm are all that is left and will be part of the permanent exhibition there.
The new memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia should be ready in one year. It will be built by the PROTOM Strakonice s.r.o. firm, which won the public tender.
The industrial pig farm was in operation there from the 1970s until the spring of 2018, when it was built on the grounds of what had been called the “Gypsy Camp” there. More than 1,300 Roma and Sinti were forcibly imprisoned there and it was a de facto concentration camp.
At least 326 people died there, most of them children. After all of the remaining prisoners were transported en masse to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp, the buildings of the Lety concentration camp were razed to the ground and set on fire in 1943.
Approximately 300 meters away from the former concentration camp, the supposed location of the “temporary” burial ground for some of the Lety prisoners was identified and a stone memorial was installed there in 1995, with the entire location becoming a Cultural Heritage Monument in 1998. The then-administrator of the grounds, the Lidice Memorial, built an amphitheater there in 2012, installed a replica of the prisoners’ quarters, a parking lot, and a hiking trail with signage telling the history of the former concentration camp.
Since 2018 the administrator of the Lety Cultural Heritage Monument has been the Museum of Romani Culture. After the industrial pig farm was bought out by the state in 2018, the museum was entrusted by its establisher, the Czech Culture Ministry, with demolishing the farm and building the new Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia there; the aim of the new memorial is to honor the memories of the victims of the Lety concentration camp in a dignified way and to conserve and commemorate its tragic story.
