Jana Kokyová: Descendants of Romani survivors of the Holocaust spoke and were not listened to during the implementation of the winning design for the memorial to their forebears in Lety u Písku, Czech Republic

He managed to negotiate the removal of the industrial pig farm that was built during the 1970s at the site of the concentration camp for Roma and Sinti, and subsequent to that he collaborated on the building of a dignified memorial at the site where our forebears suffered. That site has been administered from Brno by the Museum of Romani Culture (MRK) since 2019. Unfortunately, he did not live to see its ceremonial opening on 23 April 2024, but died in the middle of his unfinished work on it.

I would like to respond to the commentary by Jana Horváthová, director of the MRK, entitled “Please, let’s be fair! The dispute over the names of the Lety prisoners at the new memorial was about the size of the letters” which was published immediately after the ceremonial opening of the memorial. In that piece, she summarizes the demanding task that she was given by the Czech Culture Ministry, which is the establisher of the institution she has led for so long. Her commentary is primarily focused on the concrete Circle of Reverence that demarcates the original concentration camp where my relatives were imprisoned.

The circle serves as a walkway for visitors and is inset with spokes where the names of the prisoners are inscribed at the inner edge. That was a component of the design produced by the landscape architecture competition held by the museum in 2019, where representatives of the survivors’ families were also on the jury.

The commentary by the director is responding to part of the speech I gave during the opening of the Lety memorial in which I asked the visitors not to step on the names of the prisoners: “The names of the victims are engraved on the Circle of Reverence. The circle is not fully in accordance with our Romani culture. Do not walk on the names, it is absolutely unacceptable to walk on the names of our dead. Čeněk fought until his last breath to change this, but unfortunately nobody really listened.“

Čeněk Růžička, Jan Hauer, Rudolf Murka or Antonín Lagryn, as members of the commission on the competition or alternates, where those whose opinions were meant to carry great weight when choosing the winning design, and they approved of the submission by Jan Sulzer and Terra Florida, which I also believe is brilliant. However, they had reservations: “During the discussions by the jury, the objection was raised, chiefly by the relatives of the prisoners, to placing the names of the victims in the walkway around the center of the camp, as that means visitors will walk on the names…” – as can be seen in the publicly available document entitled “Protocol on the course of the competition”; those interested can find this statement on page 39.

Furthermore, the jury recommends: “…reconsidering whether to place the names of the victims in the walkway around the encircled space, given that the relatives of the prisoners consider it very inappropriate.“

A second design for how to display the names addresses this concern and was submitted to the second round of the international competition for the design of the memorial:

My questions are: Was this option also discussed at the MRK? Was anybody from the families of the survivors invited to that discussion? If this second option was inappropriate, was there ever a variation that was presented to the descendants of the prisoners as an alternative? If there was another option, I am not aware of it.

The demolition of the pig farm, successfully prepared by the MRK, was launched on 14 July 2022. That day a “happening” was held by those involved in the struggle to get rid of this shameful aspect of Czech society. Čeněk Růžička is smiling in the photos from that day. He had the opportunity to symbolically close one phase in the building of the memorial with a pickaxe in his hand.

That autumn, some of the external members of the working group on the exhibitions for the memorial repeatedly asked their coworkers at the MRK to inform the prisoners’ relatives about the exhibitions’ preparations and the format for placing the names of the prisoners at the circle (at the time, they were unaware of the reality of the size of the lettering for the names and were unaware of the fact that the MRK and Terra Florida had decided not to realize the other variations) and to invite them to a joint meeting to discuss these matters.

The MRK subsequently organized a meeting in December to which the families’ representatives were invited. They discussed options for where to place the names so the result would be in accordance with their culture. Jana Horváthová summarizes that working meeting as being about the size of the lettering of the names of the prisoners: “What was essential was not, as some claim today, that the names would be on the ground, but how big the letters would be, in other words, how broad the stainless steel spokes would be.” Her commentary then describes her difficult fight, as an independent director, to enlarge the letters. Perhaps she also waged that fight as a tribute to the late Čeněk Růžička.

I believe that the museum has not understood us. The essential problem with the current format for the memorial is that the families of the survivors do not want people to walk on the names of the prisoners. The current format contravenes the recommendations which were formulated after the competition’s first round. The risk that a visitor to the memorial will step on the names is increased by the size of the spokes, which were designed such that the lettering is not easy to read when one stands at the circle.

It turns out that the contractor chose an option that does not visually separate the names from the rest of the space of the walkway, and while the font and the spokes were enlarged, the names are unfortunately still so poorly visible that a visitor may not even notice he or she is standing on the names until it is too late. Likewise, anybody who is searching for the name of a specific person at the Circle of Reverence has to come very close to the names to read them, which increases the risk they will step on the other names adjacent to the one they seek.

This fact was also the subject of a meeting held on 16 May 2023 that was attended by myself, Rudolf Murka, Marie Hauerová, Dagmar Šubrtová, Helena Sadílková, Renata Berkyová, the architect Jan Sulzer and employees of the MRK. On that day we all probably saw the names on the spokes in person for the first time. What was discussed was not just the size of the letters, but also their illegibility and location.

My opinion was and is that I disagree with the design that was submitted, because even if the names would be bigger, they would still be walked on. The minutes of that meeting did not mention my opinion, despite the fact that in the e-mail communications, others asked for my opinion to be included. Helena Sadílková, for example, responded as follows: “Hello, thanks for the minutes, please add to them the part of the discussion where Ms. Kokyová expressed her view regarding people walking on the names and the proposed method for addressing that.”

In late February 2024, when the Circle of Reverence was ready, I had an opportunity to visit the exterior of the memorial as a participant in the international conference on “Commemoration and Research into the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in the 21st century“. During the tour of the grounds at Lety on that occasion, I personally witnessed guests walking on the names. The next day I wrote an e-mail to the MRK where I warned them of this and expressed my great concern as to how the descendants of the prisoners would react to that as visitors themselves. On 23 April, therefore, I arranged for the names to be separated from the “walkway” by placing candles there temporarily, and I was financially supported in that endeavor by the Živá paměti, o. p. s. organization.

I hope the museum will continue to ensure, as the director asserts in her article, that nobody will actually walk on these names, which include a large number of people who died in the camp. This is not a walkway of “fame”, as we can read in the responses to this subject on social media. The names chiefly include people who died there, and for us indigenous Czech Roma and Sinti, those names are sacred.

In December 2023, I also asked the director of the MRK, on behalf of our family, to stop hiding behind the name of Čeněk Růžička as she still does when she speculates, in her commentary, as to what he would think today of the current format for the names of the prisoners in the Circle of Reverence. I am again asking for this publicly: Čeněk Růžička strove to inform society about a culture and traditions which were almost annihilated during the Second World War. That culture and those traditions chiefly concern our respect for the dead.

It is possible to perceive the building of a dignified Lety memorial, a world-class one, as a grand gesture by Czech society with regard to the long-ignored, marginalized subject of the Holocaust of the Roma. I firmly believe the time has come to commemorate and respect the culture of these people who were supposed to have been forgotten. That is the culture of the indigenous Czech Roma and Sinti.