Exhibition in Prague reveals the stories of the Roma and Sinti women and men who survived the WWII-era concentration camp in Lety u Písku
The faces and stories of Romani and Sinti survivors of the Holocaust are being presented by an exhibition at the Clam-Gallas Palace in Prague. The exhibition avoids the depersonalized language of numbers and also does not present any images of impoverished people in photographs taken by the Nazis.
Instead, the exhibition presents the specific human stories of six prisoners from the concentration camp in Lety u Písku through their authentic family photographs and audio recordings of excerpts from memoirs and other testimony. For the first time ever, the original diary of Josef Serinek, who fled the camp and became a partisan, is on display, as are other personal items linked to the survivors.
The exhibition is being held by the Centre for the Roma and Sinti in Prague, a specialized workplace of the Museum of Romani Culture, and will be open until 30 June. “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 is called “Stories of survivors. Lety u Písku as a place of memory of the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti” and tells the stories of Božena Růžičková, Zilli Schmidt, Božena Pflegerová, Antonín Studený, Josef Lagryn and Josef Serinek. Each person portrayed is brought closer to viewers through authentic family photographs and audio recordings of readings from their memoirs.
The audio content includes readings of excerpts from the survivors’ memoirs, postwar court testimony, and interviews with historians. The readings are available in Czech, English and Romanes.
“This exhibition reveals the dimensions of the human suffering that many leading politicians in our state have been belittling by making the claim that Lety was ‘just’ a labor camp. That is not so, it was effectively a concentration camp and the stories of our six heroes prove that,” said the director of the Museum of Romani Culture, Jana Horváthová.
The stories of the selected figures are also unique in that they testify to their persistent suffering. These people preserved photographs of their lost loved ones, were interviewed by historians, or processed their memories in literary works.
During a time that was not much inclined toward public commemoration of the Holocaust, these people preserved this historical memory. Rare examples of personal items linked to these survivors, such as Josef Serinek’s original diary, are on display to the public for the first time ever.
“He writes about all the atrocities which were committed there by Czech gendarmes, not by Nazis. He describes witnessing more than one person being beaten for minor infractions, how they were abused and given absurdly insufficient amounts of food,” Zdeněk Serinek, the grandson of Josef Serinek, said on Monday, 15 April at the opening of the exhibition.
The exhibition begins with a message from Jana Kokyová, a representative of the third generation of survivors, that brings the intrinsically personal dimension of the story of the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti closer to visitors and argues for the urgency of why this story still needs to be told. According to historians, between August 1942 and May 1943, 1,294 Romani children, men and women passed through the camp at Lety u Písku.
At least 335 of those people died in the camp itself due to the shockingly poor conditions for maintaining personal hygiene, illness, and ill-treatment, while more than 500 were forcibly transported to Auschwitz. After the war, fewer than 600 Romani men and women came back to Bohemia and Moravia from the concentration camps.
During the 1970s, an industrial pig farm grew up at the location of the former camp. In 2018, the state bought the farm from the AGPI company, which had been raising as many as 13,000 pigs at a time there, for CZK 450 million [EUR 17.8 million].
The demolition of the farm was completed in 2022. What is being installed there instead is The Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia, which the Museum of Romani Culture will open to the public on 12 May, the day when the commemorative ceremony at the Burial Ground will take place, as has become a tradition.
