Exhibition about survivors of the WWII-era Lety u Písku concentration camp in Bohemia opens at the Hodonín u Kunštátu Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Moravia

The museum said fewer than 600 Romani people from the Czech lands survived the Second World War. As much as 90 % of the interwar population of Roma were murdered and part of Czech society remains completely unaware of this, the director of the museum told the Czech News Agency (ČTK).

“It is important to commemorate this day, because while many educated people know about it, part of the public does not. Frequently those are people who have a negative relationship toward this minority, and they don’t want to know or haven’t accepted the truth of what happened during the war to the Roma and Sinti from our country and elsewhere in the world. They were targeted for genocide and 90 % of the Roma and Sinti who were historically native to the Czech lands were murdered. Today most of the Romani people living in Czechia are from families who came here from Slovakia after the war,” the director said.

The tragic fates of these Roma and Sinti were not discussed after the war. “The Roma themselves did not share their stories. It was painful for them, they were hurt by what society had done to them. When they returned from the camps, their conclusion was that it was necessary to conceal their Romani origins, they believed that much more than ever before. Many raised their descendants in ignorance of their origins to protect them from such things. The public were not interested in the Romas’ stories either, they did not take kindly to the Roma,” noted the director.

The communist regime played a role in this as well. “The regime started down the road of state-managed assimilation, and recalling a common [Romani] identity, culture and history had no place there,” the director said.

The situation was transformed after the 1989 Velvet Revolution, but it was not an easy process. “In 1991 we established the museum and we wanted to collect such stories. However, it was quite difficult to persuade the eyewitnesses and those who were directly persecuted that it was important to tell their stories. I’d say at least half refused us. They were also afraid that revealing their origin could pose a threat to their descendants’ careers,” the director recalled.

Several stories collected over the years by the museum are part of the exhibition entitled “Stories of survivors. Lety u Písku as a place of memory of the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti“.

“The authorial team decided to avoid the merciless rhetoric of numbers, an overview of how racist regulations developed, and any photographs of impoverished people taken by their tormentors. Instead, we focused attention on the human dimension of this history. We want to present the faces and stories of the people who were interned in what was called the ‘Gypsy Camp’ because of their origin and who were meant to be murdered, as most of their friends and relatives were, but who survived against all odds,” curator Jiří Smlsal said.

The exhibition presents the specific stories of six prisoners from the concentration camp in Lety u Písku. “Thanks to Božena Růžičková, Zilli Schmidt, Božena Pflegerová, Antonín Studený, Josef Lagryn and Josef Serinek, visitors have an opportunity to see the diversity of the Romani experience and the difference in the destinies of the people who were labelled ‘gypsies’ and thereby became the victims of this Nazi racial persecution,” said a spokesperson for the museum.

Each person portrayed is brought closer to viewers with the aid of authentic family photographs and audio recordings of readings from their memories of this history. The readings draw on excerpted texts from the survivors’ own memoirs, postwar testimony in court, or interviews with historians.

The exhibition is presenting examples of rare, preserved personal items associated with these survivors to the public for the first time ever, such as Josef Serinek’s original diary. The exhibition will be available to view at the Hodonín u Kunštátu Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Moravia until the end of October.

Most Romani people in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia were concentrated in the camps at Lety u Písku and Hodonín u Kunštátu in 1942. From those locations they were then deported to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, through which roughly 22,000 European Roma eventually passed.

In the summer of 1944, after the able-bodied prisoners there were relocated, the “Gypsy Family Camp” was liquidated. In a single night from 2 to 3 August several thousand people were gassed to death.

This spring the Museum of Romani Culture opened the new Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia after many long years of effort. According to the director, there is great interest in the memorial, including among people from abroad.

The museum is up against the fact that it does not have enough personnel to run the new memorial and not enough funds to administer it. The museum plans to negotiate with its establisher, the Czech Culture Ministry, about possible changes to this situation.