Historical moment: The Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia opens to the public, traditional commemorative ceremony will also be held this Sunday

ROMEA TV will broadcast the ceremony live online. It marks the 81st anniversary of a large transport of more than 400 children, men and women to the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp from Lety, where they had been imprisoned in what was called the “Gypsy Camp” at the time and was a de facto concentration camp.

That transport was ordered on the basis of a decree from Heinrich Himmler and was organized by the police of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The transport arrived in Auschwitz II-Birkenau on 7 May 1943.

Among the eminent participants in the commemorative ceremony will be the President of the Czech Senate, Miloš Vystrčil; President of the Czech Chamber of Deputies, Markéta Pekarová Adamová; director of the Museum of Romani Culture, Jana Horváthová; Czech Government Commissioner for Roma Minority Affairs, Lucie Fuková; Ambassador of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Matthew Field; a descendant of a survivor of the Lety camp, Zdeněk Serinek; and the chair of the Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust in the Czech Republic, Jana Kokyová. The commemorative ceremony as a whole will be musically accompanied by the Ivan Herák family band.

“Starting at 10:00 AM on 12 May 2024, visitors will be able to enter the Visitors’ Centre, which houses the permanent exhibition ‘Place of Memory, Memory of a Place’, as well as the Memorial’s outdoor grounds, where they will be able to walk the Memory Trail. That exhibition at the Memorial will be outdoors on a permanent basis, and it tells the story of this place from the interwar era, through the Holocaust and its horrors, to the postwar era and the present day,” the museum said in a press release sent to Romea.cz.

A Circle of Reverence is also a component of the outdoor grounds, where the names of the 1,294 recorded prisoners are presented. One spoke in the circle has been left blank to represent other prisoners who were not listed in the records for various reasons.

A guided tour of the grounds will be offered starting at 15:00 on 12 May, for which it is necessary to register in advance (rezervace@rommuz.cz). The Memorial will then be open to the public Thursdays through Sundays, 10:00 AM to 17:00 PM, until 31 October.

Entry to the Visitors’ Centre at the Memorial will be free of charge on 12 May. A charter bus will travel there from Prague for those interested.

The bus will be parked beneath the overpass on Na Florenci Street near the Florenc bus statoin. It will be marked with a sign reading LETY.

The departure from Prague will be at 9:30 AM on Sunday, 12 May. Those interested can reserve their places by emailing Jana Kokyová – janaantik@seznam.cz, or by mobile phone: +420 605 288 938.