RECORDING: Museum of Romani Culture ceremonially opens The Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia
The Museum of Romani Culture has ceremonially opened The Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia. The memorial has opened at the site of the former concentration camp for Roma during the Second World War.
The building of a dignified remembrance site there was first discussed in 1995. The building of the memorial cost CZK 1.02 million [EUR 4 million] and took approximately two years.
Speaking during the opening, Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala (Civic Democratic Party – ODS) said the memorial should have been created much earlier, but the state, in his view, was too slow in buying out the land. Czech President Petr Pavel said the memorial is a memento for the coming generations that will, in his view, commemorate the horrible crimes that were committed there.
The memorial will open to the public on 12 May. It covers the area of the former concentration camp, over which an industrial pig farm had been standing since the 1970s.
The state bought out the farm in 2018 for CZK 450 million [EUR 17.8 million] from the AGPI company, which was raising 13,000 pigs in 13 feed halls there. The remains of one of those feed halls have now become part of the memorial.
The grounds of the memorial now cover more than 100,000 square meters including the Burial Ground, where a memorial was first installed in 1995. The outdoor part of the new facility is open to visitors year-round, while the Visitors’ Centre will have regular opening hours.
There are two permanent exhibitions, one indoors, and another on the Memory Trail outdoors. The exhibitions include eyewitness testimonies in audiovisual form.
“Finally we are able to commemorate the Romani victims of this monstrous ideology in a dignified way. However, we must acknowledge that all of this took too long. This memorial should have been standing here long before now,” the Czech PM said.
A dilatory approach to this issue, in the PM’s view, has been a continuous thread through several decades of the country’s history. The amount of time it took to prepare the memorial speaks to that fact.
President Pavel said the existence of Romani victims of the Second World War had long been forgotten. “Through this memorial, we are now paying a debt that this society has owed towards the Holocaust of the Roma for decades,” he said.
The Czech President added that the ambition of the Lety u Písku Memorial is to familiarize the public with the history of the site. “Thirty years have passed since my predecessor, Václav Havel, unveiled a modest memorial at this place. Today we are carrying on the work begun by that event,” he said.
Czech Culture Minister Martin Baxa (ODS) also spoke about paying a debt owed to Romani society. “I firmly believe that this memorial will contribute to our better comprehending our own history, that we’re accepting responsibility for the past, that we will not allow segregation and racism, that we will build, with all our strength, a civil nation from which nobody will be excluded, and that we will teach our children not to forget the victims and the causes of these terrible events,” he said.
According to Czech Foreign Affairs Minister Jan Lipavský (Pirates), the history of the site reminds us of the value of human life and it is a place of shared memory that says a great deal about the state of society. “Evil does not disappear just because we close our eyes to it. We cannot excuse evil, it is necessary to fight it,” he said.
The industrial pig farm of the 1970s, according to the Foreign Affairs Minister, became a symbol of the previous regime’s insensitivity to the memorial of the victims of racial persecution during the Second World War and for decades was a symbol of the deeply-rooted prejudices held against ethnic Roma and the symbol of their history and suffering being overlooked.
When one approaches the new facility, the first thing one sees is a wall that is meant to mark a separation from the world of the present. The visitor either walks along the wall toward the Burial Ground, or can walk into the new memorial.
Behind the wall is the building of the Visitors’ Centre, designed by architect Jan Tesař, which houses one of the permanent exhibitions. The outdoor format of the facility was designed by landscape architects.
One direct path leads straight to a large circle, a reverential walkway that circumscribes the area of the former concentration camp. Inside the circle there will just be a meadow.
Two other paths are longer, wending their way through the grounds, and serve an educational purpose through the panels installed along the way with more information about the site. A forest of both deciduous and coniferous trees will gradually grow in the rest of the space.
According to historians, between August 1942 and May 1943, 1,294 Romani people passed through the concentration camp at Lety u Písku, at least 335 of whom died there, 241 of whom were children under the age of 14. Approximately 540 of the prisoners were then forcibly transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp.
