Remembrance in Lety
Memorial services have been taking place at the site of a former
concentration camp in the town of Lety, near Prague. This is the 13th year
the Czech Republic has marked the Romany holocaust. But the site in Lety,
still borders a pig farm despite repeated calls by various groups for it to
be closed down. Radio Prague’s Rosie Johnston joins us from Lety.
So can you describe to us what went on in this morning’s events?
“We’re actually only half way through the day’s events. We are going
in a couple of minutes to lay some wreaths at Mirovice, a nearby cemetery
where many of the Romany who were interned here at Lety were actually
buried. But so far we have had a service and we’ve also witnessed a
laying of wreaths here at the Lety memorial. Jarmila Stehlíková (Minister
for Minorities and Human Rights) represented the government and laid a
wreath; there was a representative of the president’s office and Petr
Pithart was also there representing the Senate. Quite a few speeches also
took place, but maybe the most bombastic one came from Čeněk Růžička
who is the head of the Committee for the Compensation of the Romany
Holocaust. In that speech, he voiced his frustration that it has been
thirteen years since such services began being held in this place –
thirteen years of calls for the pig farm next door to us at Lety to be
moved. And still absolutely no action on that front. Another very strong
speech came from Felix Kolmer, who is the head of the International
Auschwitz Committee and he called for the Romany Holocaust in the Czech
Republic to be viewed as the kind of abomination that he personally
believes it was. He said that he was in Auschwitz in the Romany family camp
a couple of weeks after Romany families who were staying there were
exterminated. He talked of the squalor and the sheer misery of that wing of
Auschwitz and he really brought home the message that the Romany Holocaust
was a recent and shocking chapter in this country’s and also in Central
European history.”
So could you describe to us more generally what makes this particular
location so significant in Czech history and in the current political
debate as well?
“Lety is a former Romany concentration camp where 326 people perished
– most of those were children. A real thorny point is that while say
Terezín had German guards, Lety was entirely run by Czechs – so that is
why this makes it a kind of an uneasy aspect of this country’s history.
But the most controversial and contentious thing is that now Lety, the site
of the concentration camp is the site of a pig farm. Successive governments
have discussed moving it and then decided not to move it, and then in 2005,
the European Union gave a non-binding directive for the Czech Republic to
move the farm saying that a pig farm was not a fitting monument to be on
the site of the graves of the victims of the Romany Holocaust. Successive
governments have discussed complying, but there have been various reasons
given why they haven’t. The last Social Democrat government said that it
would be too expensive to do so; the current government is saying that this
would cause a vast amount of unemployment in the region. But I think that
the pressure is mounting and all eyes are turning to the Czech Republic as
it is going to head the EU in 2009 - and itself have to talk about human
rights violations on the European stage.”
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