Liberec, Czech Republic: Seven crosses commemorate Romani children imprisoned in WWII-era camps there who died in Auschwitz
In Liberec, Czech Republic, local Romani people have honored the memory of seven local Romani children who fell victim to the Holocaust. Members of the Association of Romani Representatives in the Liberec Region erected seven crosses in their memory at the site of a former camp there.
More than a year ago, activists contacted the Deputy Mayor of Liberec so a memorial commemorating the Romani victims of the Holocaust could be installed at the site on Kunratická Street. “In May of this year we visited Ivan Rous, a historian from the Museum of North Bohemia in Liberec. We wanted to find the names of the Romani people who passed through the Liberec camps so we could commission the production of Stolpersteine,” Jan Cverčko, a member of the association, explained to Romea.cz.
“Together with Mr. Rous we reached out to the Auschwitz Museum. A few weeks ago the names arrived and we were all greatly affected to learn that they were children. Ivan Rous suggested making crosses with signs listing when the children were born and when they were murdered in Auschwitz,” Cverčko said.
“The camp was cleared out in March 1943 and males were sent to Auschwitz, while the women were sent to Ravensbrück and Buchenwald. On the transport to Auschwitz there were seven children who never knew freedom, boys who were between just a few months old and three years old. None of them survived,” Rous told the Liberecký deník newspaper.
Activists installed the seven crosses on the corner of Kunratická Street several days ago. “This is important, it’s part of our history and we should be active. If we are lax about this, the Holocaust could repeat,” Ivan Kanaloš, another member of the Association of Romani Representatives in the Liberec Region, told news server Romea.cz.
A total of four successive Romani camps existed in Liberec, which at the time were referred to as “Gypsy accommodation”. Based on eyewitness testimonies, it is possible to presume that the Romani prisoners from Liberec did not survive their subsequent internment in the Nazi concentration camps to which they were deported.
One of the camps was connected to the exploitation of the labor of the Roma by the J. W. Roth firm to build the “Domov na Králově háji” housing estate and was likely to have been located in two wooden barracks near Kunratická Street on the grounds of the current quarry. The facility was probably used just in the autumn of 1939.
