Czech documentary film LETY screened at the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum on the same day the new Lety memorial was opened, freely available online for viewing
The documentary film LETY, filmed in 2019 by ROMEA TV, was screened on Tuesday, 23 April at the United States Memorial Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. That same day the new Lety u Písku Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia opened at the site of the WWII-era concentration camp for Roma in the Czech Republic.
LETY is freely available to view as of today on YouTube with English subtitles. The US screening featured a discussion with one of the filmmakers, Renata Berkyová, who is visiting the museum for several months on a research fellowship.
“I was very enthusiastic when the colleagues from the museum proposed screening the film. From the original plan to screen the 1960 documentary short Don’t Forget About That Little Girl (Nezapomeňte na tohle děvčátko) we ultimately expanded the idea to include the documentary film LETY, which provides viewers with important historical context,” Berkyová told news server Romea.cz.
During her research in the archival collections of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Berkyová focused, among other things, on the development of the public debate about Lety in the early 1990s. Above all, it was the American journalist Paul Polansky who published in English what he discovered about the documentation on the former concentration camp at Lety.
In 1994, a meeting was held between representatives of the Czech Embassy, representatives of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Polanský, who had initiated it. One output of that important meeting was that the Czech authorities subsequently made all of the archival materials related to the Lety camp available to the museum.
The documentary film LETY will now be included in the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collections.
LETY is freely available to view on YouTube
The documentary film LETY was filmed in 2019 by ROMEA TV, specifically by Renata Berkyová, František Bikár and Viola Tokárová, and it is available to view for free on YouTube with English subtitles. “We consider it important, in particular now that the memorial is open, to make this documentary film available to the broader public. It captures one of the most important phases leading to the dignified memorial in which Čeněk Růžička played one of the crucial roles,” Bikár explained to Romea.cz.
The documentary film LETY is based on archival footage, interviews and news reports and was premiered in 2019 at Kino Pilotů in Prague. In 2020 the film received special recognition from the director of the AKE DIKHEA? film festival in Germany, Hamze Bytyçi.
