VIDEO INTERVIEWS: The effort in the Czech Republic to build a dignified memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti at Lety u Písku took almost 30 years

A camp was in operation on that site for three years, during which time its names and its purposes were transformed, and Romani people were in the minority of those imprisoned there in the beginning, but that changed in the summer of 1942. What had originally been a penal labor camp was changed into a “Gypsy Camp”, through which a large number of the Romani people living on the territory of Bohemia would pass.

The same role was fulfilled by another “Gypsy Camp” in Hodonín u Kunštátu in Moravia. Hundreds of people died in both locations, in particular because of the shockingly poor conditions for maintaining personal hygiene, contagious disease, and ill-treatment by the camp personnel.

In 1973, an industrial pig farm was built in Lety, overlapping the site of the WWII-era concentration camp and staying in operation there for the next 45 years. The fates of the Romani people who passed through that concentration camp were not officially commemorated until after the fall of the communist regime, notwithstanding efforts made by descendants of the survivors during the socialist era.

INTERVIEWS

Jana Horváthová, director of the Museum of Romani Culture.

Zdeněk Daniel, descendant of Holocaust survivors, an architect and fine artist who participated in the preparation of the landscape architecture competition for The Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia as an external member of the working group.

Rudolf Murka, descendant of Holocaust survivors of Roma and Sinti origin, member of the jury for the landscape architecture competition to design The Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia.

Jana Kokyová, chair of the Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust in the Czech Republic.

Jozef Miker, activist and co-founder of the Konexe association.

Marcus Pape, journalist, human rights activist, and author of the book about the Lety concentration camp A Nikdo Vám Nebude Věřit [And Nobody Will Believe You] (GplusG, Prague: 1997).

Former Czech Culture Minister Daniel Herman (2014-2017).

Pavel Moravec, who co-designed and produced the bust of the late Mr. Čeněk Růžička (1946-2022) now installed at The Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia and originally intended for the Centre for the Roma and Sinti in Prague, which has yet to open.

In 1995, when Czech President Václav Havel unveiled the first official memorial to the victims of this concentration camp, discussion of how to create a more dignified remembrance site there began. Two years later, the ministers Jan Ruml (Civic Democratic Party – ODS) and Pavel Bratinka (Civic Democratic Alliance – ODA) declared that they would be proposing to the Government that it purchase the industrial pig farm on the site, demolish it, and have a dignified memorial to the Holocaust and its Romani victims built at the site.

It took another 20 years for the industrial pig farm to be purchased. It was not until August 2017 that the administration of Czech Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka (Czech Social Democratic Party) approved the buyout of the farm and declassified the sales contract on 23 October of that same year, which showed the state had paid approximately CZK 450 million [EUR 17.8 million] for it.

Representatives of the state took over the farm at the start of April 2018 and it was demolished during the second half of 2022. In June 2020, the winning design was announced for the format of the new memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti (a sub-group of the Roma who have lived in Western Europe since the 14th century), which was built over the next four years.

The building of the memorial that has now been ceremonially opened, including its indoor and outdoor exhibitions, cost approximately CZK 110 million [EUR 4.4 million]. The money came from the Czech Culture Ministry; a grant from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway; and the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Since August 2019, The Hodonín u Kunštátu Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Moravia has been in operation, built over the course of five years for almost CZK 100 million [EUR 4 million] and initially designed and realized by the National Pedagogical Museum and Library of J. A. Comenius. The Brno-based Museum of Romani Culture took over the site in 2018.

In 2021 a new exhibition opened at that memorial called “Hodonín u Kunštátu Camp: Intersecting Tragedies 1940-1950. Central Europe“. Most of that exhibition is in the newly-constructed Information Centre at the memorial, while the rest of it is in the reconstructed building of the former barracks for the concentration camp prisoners.

Persecution of the Roma during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia

The persecution of the Roma during the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was partially based on practices from the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) as well as on the laws of Nazi Germany. On the basis of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, it was established in the Germany of the 1930s that Jewish people were “racial enemy number one”, while “gypsies and gypsy half-breeds” were “racial enemy number two”.

In Germany and other countries under the domination of Hitler’s “Third Reich”, Romani people were persecuted and deported to different kinds of camps, including extermination camps. Most of the Roma from Bohemia and Moravia – from forced labor camps and from both “Gypsy Camps” – were forcibly transported to Auschwitz.

Of the 5,500 Roma who were apprehended by the Nazis, just 500 returned to Bohemia and Moravia after the war. The Roma had been discriminated against during the First Czechoslovak Republic, during which, from July 1928 to August 1929, a registration process for what were legally referred to as “wandering gypsies” was implemented, the data from which was later abused by the administration of the occupying forces of Nazi Germany.

The first decree in this regard, chiefly banning life on the road, was announced by the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in late March 1939. The adoption of an ordinance on setting up penal labor camps, which were meant to incarcerate able-bodied men older than 18 who were unable to document that they had a proper way of making a living was the start of the persecution of the Roma.

That regulation took effect in April 1939. However, it took more than a year for the penal labor camps to start being built, and they began operations in early August 1940.

One was located near Hodonín u Kunštátu, while the other, which is the most famous today, was located two kilometers from Lety u Písku village. The fenced-off part of the camp at Lety was 0.66 of a hectare in area adjoining 11.2 ares of unfenced agricultural land.

The models for establishing both of these camps were facilities that already existed elsewhere, for example, in Lackenbach (in Austria before the Anschluss). Mainly Roma families who met the conditions for the imposition of preventive detention were to be incarcerated in the penal labor camps.

The camps’ purpose was to educate “gypsies, gypsy half-breeds and persons wandering the land in the gypsy way” in discipline, order and work. However, as of 1942, Romani people comprised just 10 to 15 % of those incarcerated in the various camps, a situation that did not change until after March 1942, when an edict on crime prevention was adopted, followed in June by a law on “eliminating” what was called “the gypsy nuisance”.

Thus began the era of the expressly racial persecution of Romani people and those who were partially of Romani origin in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. After the March 1942 renaming of the camps as “collection” camps, in August 1942, just a few months after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the facilities in Hodonín and Lety were transformed into “Gypsy Camps”.

The authorities either released or relocated the non-Romani prisoners at these sites. A head count of “gypsies and gypsy half-breeds” had been undertaken on the territory of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during which the Czech gendarmerie, supervised by the German Criminal Police, had identified as many as 6,500 persons identified as belonging to those categories.

The children, men and women imprisoned at Lety worked in a quarry, on building the local roads, in the fields or in the forest. Because the camp guards stole the groceries intended for the prisoners’ rations and underfed them, because they were forced to perform hard labor, because they were provided with poor conditions for maintaining their personal hygiene (especially a lack of water), as well as because of the enormous overcrowding of the camp, at the end of 1942 a deadly epidemic of spotted typhoid and typhus broke out at Lety.

The order by SS head Heinrich Himmler in December 1942 to deport the Roma to Auschwitz, where death awaited most of them, had even more deadly results for the Lety prisoners. According to historians, 1,294 Romani people passed through the camp at Lety between August 1942 and May 1943, with at least 335 people dying there, 241 of whom were children younger than 14.

Another 540 Lety prisoners were forcibly transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp. The “Gypsy Camp” at Hodonín saw 1,375 Romani people pass through, 207 of whom died there and more than 800 of whom were deported to that same part of Auschwitz.

Dozens of these prisoners did manage to escape both “Gypsy Camps”. As of March 1943, Romani people who had never been imprisoned in either Hodonín or Lety and who had remained at large were rounded up and forcibly transported to Auschwitz as well.