When the trees at the Lety memorial are whispering to each other someday: Which will grow faster, the forest there, or a Czech society that is tolerant?
On a hot summer afternoon it takes quite a dose of imagination to picture that some day there will be trees providing shade and whispering to each other at the Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia. It will take years for the forest to grow so that the outdoor exhibition at the new memorial will not be completely exposed to the sun and other elements.
Even so, the natural landscape might be faster at growing than Czech society will be in its relationship toward the Romani minority. That is proved by a glance at the visitors’ books at the new Lety memorial.
Anybody who has visited a former concentration camp run by the Nazis in Europe knows the feeling. These are oppressive places with brutal histories, but they are quite often in gorgeous natural settings (such as Mauthausen in Austria or Flossenbürg in Bavaria) which aid visitors in coming to terms with the horrors which were perpetrated in these locations and soften the blow somewhat.
Such remembrance sites are a strange combination of death, beauty, calm and memories which are persistently harrowing and indelible.
When the lights go out and interest fades
There is no doubt it will also look like that at Lety u Písku someday, as is shown by a visualization of the grounds of the new memorial with fully grown trees. “As the forest grows, we believe that in our country there will also grow an improvement in the coexistence between the majority society and the Romani minority,” the director of the Museum of Romani Culture said during the tree planting there last year.
Over time, the trees will also surround the remains of some of the buildings from the industrial pig farm that once stood for decades on the site of this former concentration camp for Romani people. What has been preserved of the concrete feed lots today sticks out like a sore thumb in the open space, for now, and amplifies the absurdity and disregard of the communist regime’s approach to this place.
However, it took a democratic Czechia more than 30 years for a genuinely dignified memorial to spring up at Lety instead of the “piggery”. That definitively happened this spring and was followed with great interest by the media, politicians and the public.
As is always the case, though, it is most interesting to return to such places after the interest fades and the spotlights are turned off, and Lety is no exception.
“This wasn’t a concentration camp”
It is a hot summer day in the middle of the workweek and at high noon there is nobody, at first glance, in the space around the memorial meadow which is encircled by an enormous concrete walkway featuring the names of the concentration camp victims. The sun is burning as if it wants to drive visitors away.
Three cars come and go to the two parking lots for the memorial in the space of an hour or so. In the Information Centre, the staff confirm that the composition of the visitors is slowly changing.
Since the memorial opened, the number of those curious to see “what was built with our taxes” has declined and the number of people with a genuine interest in local history has risen. Many of them are deterred from the indoor multimedia exhibition by the CZK 100 [EUR 4] entrance fee, but the outdoor exhibition is accessible to all free of charge.
There are visitors’ books available for people to sign at both entrances to the memorial space. Most of the messages express reverence and recognition for what the Lety memorial looks like now compared to the days when the industrial pig farm was there.
Those signing the books are ordinary visitors from Czechia and from abroad, as well as diplomats and politicians. Messages of another sort can be found there too, though.
“This wasn’t a concentration camp, but a camp for people who didn’t want to work. Don’t confuse your imagination with reality. Shame on those who claim it was a concentration camp,” one of the pages in one of the visitor’s books reads.
A transfer station to hell
That remark is not much different from what Andrej Babiš, the head of the Association of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) movement who was Czech Finance Minister and Vice Prime Minister in 2016, also said about Lety, remarks for which he later apologized: “What those idiots are writing in the newspapers, that the camp in Lety was a concentration camp, is a lie. Whoever wasn’t working – bam! – he ended up there.”
Let’s recall that Babiš claimed at the time that the media had taken his words out of context. The Czech lawmaker Miloslav Rozner, a member of the “Freedom and Direct Democracy” (SPD) movement at the time, was ultimately given a suspended prison sentence for also referring to Lety as a “non-existent, pseudo-concentration camp.”
Entire families were imprisoned in the camp at Lety, including babies and the elderly. About 1,300 people passed through camp and the inhumane living conditions caused at least 335 of them to die there.
For Romani people from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, this place was a transfer station to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp. However, those are facts which some of the visitors to the Lety memorial refuse to accept.
“Disgusting, a waste of money”, “Down with the black mugs”, “Too bad more of them didn’t die here”, we read elsewhere in the visitors’ books. Those comments in particular are – not surprisingly – unsigned.
However, it is necessary to state that such outbursts are just a fraction of the overall response.
Attacks not just with a pen
It is fascinating, nevertheless, that in a time when hate is spread so easily online from the anonymity of one’s own couch and keyboard, some people find it worth their time to travel to a crime scene, in this case one of the Holocaust and its Romani victims, so they can express their racism in person there in their own handwriting. Such “attacks by pen” are also reflected in the police statistics.
The Czech Interior Ministry report on extremism and prejudicial hatred for 2023 lists 25 felonies as having been motivated by anti-Romani hatred. That’s five more cases than in 2022.
We have no choice but to believe, along with the director of the Museum of Romani Culture, that Czech-Roma coexistence will grow together with the trees at the Lety memorial. The demolition of the industrial pig farm and the building of the new memorial, albeit with a delay of many years, is a fundamental turning point in and of itself.
Even so, Czech society will have a lot of work to do to catch up with the rate at which those trees, still small today, are growing.
The Czech original of this article was written for the Institute of Independent Journalism, an independent nonprofit organization and registered institute involved in providing information, journalism and news reporting. Its analyses, articles and data are equally available for use to all under set conditions.
