Exclusive drone footage of the new memorial to the Holocaust and its Romani and Sinti victims being built in Lety u Písku, Czech Republic
At the site of the former WWII-era concentration camp for Romani people in Lety u Písku, Czech Republic, where an industrial pig farm was built during the 1970s, work is continuing on building the Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia. The building of the visitors' center can already be seen, and in the back part of the memorial it is possible to now see the circular path where the names of the persons imprisoned in what was called the "Gypsy Camp" between 1942 and 1943 will be displayed on radiating spokes around the circle.
You can see the current state of the grounds through the exclusive drone footage of ROMEA TV below. “The building of the Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti is proceeding per the plan. Currently work is underway on the construction of the concrete dividing walls, the visitors’ center, and adaptation of the terrain on the grounds,” Karolina Spielmannová, press spokesperson for the Museum of Romani Culture, told Romea.cz.
“For the time being there are no indications that the work could become delayed. For that reason, we are still assuming the Memorial will have its grand opening during the first half of next year,” she added.
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More than 1,300 Roma and Sinti were forcibly interned in the former “Gypsy Camp”, which de facto functioned as a concentration camp. At least 326 persons died there, most of them children.
After the mass transports of all of the camp’s prisoners to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration Camp, the buildings were all razed to the ground and set on fire in 1943. Approximately 300 meters from the former camp at Lety an emergency burial ground for some of the camp prisoners was found, and in 1995 a stone monument was installed there and the entire site of the burial ground became a Cultural Heritage Memorial (KP) in 1998.
In 2012, the Lidice Memorial (which was then administering the KP grounds) undertook landscaping work there and built an amphitheater, a replica of the prisoners’ quarters, a parking lot and a signed trail. As of 2018 the administrator of KP Lety became the Museum of Romani Culture.
In 2018, after the state bought out the industrial pig farm that had been in operation there since the 1970s, the museum was entrusted by its establisher, the Czech Culture Ministry, with demolishing the farm and building a new memorial at the site called the Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia. Its aim is to honor the memory of the camp victims in a dignified way and also to conserve and commemorate the tragic story of the Lety camp.
