According to Czech President Petr Pavle, the memorial in Lety na Písecka will be reminding what horrible deeds happened in it. In addition, it will be a memento for future generations so that nothing like this happens again. Pavel said this today at the opening of the Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial in Bohemia in Lety. He added that the existence of Roma victims during the Second World War had been neglected for a long time.
According to Prime Minister Fiala (ODS), the Roma Holocaust memorial in Lety should have been created earlier. He added that the state delayed for a long time the purchase of land from pig farm owners.
The monument stands in the place where there was a concentration camp for Roma during the Second World War. “The communist regime then built a large-capacity piggery instead and thereby showed its position. With the memorial, we are now repaying the decades-long social debt to the Roma Holocaust,” the president stated. The construction of the monument, which cost 102 million crowns, took about two years.
There was talk of building a dignified place of worship in 1995. There had been a piggery in the locality since the 1970s, which the state bought for 450 million crowns and demolished the year before. Subsequently, the construction of the monument began. “Even today, it is necessary to remember what happened here. It’s a warning about how far people can go.” said the president. He added that Lety has the ambition to bring people closer to history. “It has been 30 years since my predecessor Václav Havel revealed a modest monument at this location. Today we are following up on this event,” Pavel stated.
There is a permanent exhibition in the visitor center of the monument, outside is the Memory Trail. Part of the exhibition are testimonies of witnesses in audiovisual form. The memorial will be opened to the public on May 12, when a memorial service is regularly held in Lety.
According to historians, 1,308 Roma, men, women and children, passed through the Lety camp from August 1942 to May 1943, 327 of them died there and over 500 ended up in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The area covers over 100,000 square meters. A memorial was erected in 1995 near the emergency cemetery in Let, which is about 300 meters from the camp, and the place became a cultural monument in 1998.
“It is very positive news for me that the entire project has been completed,” said the director of the Museum of Roma Culture, Jana Horváthová. There was talk of building a memorial in Lety on the site of the pig farm almost 30 years ago. The whole process was complicated by the situation surrounding the purchase of a pig farm from a private owner. “But according to our information, until 2017, no one from the government specifically discussed it,” Horvath said.
The state bought the pig farm in 2018 for 450 million crowns from the company Agpi, which had 13,000 pigs in 13 halls there. Demolition of the piggery began last year in July, and the demolition was completed in December 2022. The remains of one hall of the piggery became part of a monument that describes the history of the place. “In the indoor exhibition, visitors will see events that cover the period from the pre-war era to recent years and the fight for the abolition of the pigsty,” said Anna Míšková from the Museum of Roma Culture.
Money for the construction of the monument was provided by several institutions, among them, for example, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the German Embassy in Prague, and grants from Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.