Liberec, Czech Republic refuses to rename street after Romani partisan, vice-mayor says it shows disregard for Roma
Last week the local assembly of the City of Liberec, Czech Republic narrowly rejected a motion to rename part of Kunratická Street as Serinkova Street after the WWII-era Romani resistance fighter Josef Serinek. The motion submitted by the Vice-Mayor for Culture, Schools, and Tourism, Ivan Langr (Starostové pro Liberecký kraj - Mayors for the Liberec Region), was meant to be a symbolic act of reverence toward the Romani victims of Nazi persecution.
News server Liberecká drbna (“Gossip from Liberec”) reported on the vote. The area around Kunratická Street, specifically near the former quarry, served as a municipal internment camp and then as a concentration camp for Romani people from 1941-1943.
According to historical information, at least 130 Romani residents passed through that camp, and from the archives at Auschwitz it has been documented that two transports of prisoners from there were sent to the gas chambers. As many as 50 Romani children from Liberec were on one of those transports.
Josef Serinek survived his escape from the concentration camp in Lety u Písku and later joined the anti-Nazi resistance as a member of a partisan group; after the war he was awarded the Medal for Heroism in memoriam by the Czech President. Vice-mayor Langr’s plan was that Serinek’s name would be linked to the specific site of this local tragic history and not just with the new development for the larger area.
The motion was also meant to respond to the wishes of the local Romani community, which has long strived for dignified commemoration of the local Romani victims of the Holocaust and their historical relationship to these specific spaces in the city. “Unfortunately, the plan to rename part of Kunratická Street as Serinkova Street lost by just three votes. I greatly regret this, because as a city we have once again demonstrated how little we care about the Romani community – all the more so as this was their own idea to ideologically unify the territory that has such a strong tie to the Holocaust of the Roma due to the existence of the Nazi camp from 1941–1943 in the area of the quarry. That camp, from which we can say the railway line ultimately led to Auschwitz, was also run by the city,” Langr told Liberecká drbna.
Some opposition members of the local assembly proposed a different solution during the debate on the motion, and that was to name a new street after Serinek elsewhere that will be part of the development instead of naming it Nová Kunratická Street. Langr disagreed with that proposal.
“On the one hand, that location will have no historical authenticity to it, and on the other hand, this is something like a message to the Roma from on high saying ‘We’ll give you a street here, but only where we want it.’ It doesn’t work like that,” Langr said.
The site of the former concentration camp, the existence of which is memorialized in archival materials of the time in question and through historical research, is currently named “Children Who Never Knew the World” („Dětem, které nepoznaly svět“) after the local memorial there. This spring that memorial was vandalized by an unidentified perpetrator.
Despite having failed in this local assembly session, Langr is not giving up on his plan. He admits he will be resubmitting the motion to rename the street because, as he says, this is a matter of basic respect for the memory of the Roma, of historical justice, and of principle.
