Czech cabinet has no money to remove pig farm from camp site

The Czech government will have no money to remove a pig farm from the site of the former concentration camp for Romanies in Lety, south Bohemia, Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek (Civic Democrats, ODS) told journalists today.

The current government supports the construction of a new memorial near the farm, Topolanek said.

However, the Committee for Compensation of Romany Holocaust Victims (VPORH) disagrees with preserving of the pig farm on the place where 326 people died during World War Two.

"Every previous government promised to solve the problem of Lety but none of the governments found enough money to implement the project of the removal of the farm to another place. No one will manage to do this because no one will find such a sum in the state budget," Topolanek said.

The costs of the removal of the pig farm were estimated at hundreds of millions of crowns with the largest estimates speaking about 800 millions.

Jan Cech, director of the Agpi company, the owner of the wholesale pig farm, welcomed Topolanek’s decision to preserve it.

"This is positive news to us and I must frankly say that it is also logical," Cech told CTK.

The disputes around the farm also affect the company’s partners, he said.

"The insecurity concerns not only company employees and its owners, but also suppliers and buyers who do not know whether to continue their cooperation with us," Cech said.

Topolanek said that the new design of a memorial that Romanies from south Bohemia submitted to him a few weeks ago was a dignified solution to the long-lasting discussion.

The costs of its construction of the new memorial are to reach tens of millions of crowns and should be covered jointly by the state, the regional authorities, the municipality and Romanies themselves, Topolanek said.

"We can at least solve one psychological problem that harms our reputation at home and abroad," Topolanek said.

However, the VPORH disagrees with the idea.

"Relatives of the victims and former prisoners of Romany concentration camps will not allow any memorial to be built there in the current situation when the place where people had died is being desecrated and when a pig farm stands. It would be a paradox," VPORH chairman Cenek Ruzicka told CTK.

Politicians do not ask for the opinion of the Romanies who experienced the Holocaust and their relatives, he said.

"They try to pass the view of a randomly asked Romany for the position of all Romanies. Politicians know our opinion and they know what we are doing to remove the pig farm and that is why they do not contact us," Ruzicka said.

The previous governments did not take the Romany idea into consideration when the current memorial in Lety was built, he said.

He said that most Romanies currently living in the Czech Republic had no connection with the original Czech Romanies.

"There are about 250,000 Romanies living in the country, but 99 percent of them do not know what is a genocide because they did not experience it," Ruzicka said.

About 7,000 Romanies lived in the Czech Lands before World War Two and only less than 600 survived the war. At present, there are only about 3,000 to 4,000 Romanies in the Czech Republic who lived there before the war while the rest are mainly Slovak Romanies, Ruzicka said.

There was a Nazi internment camp for Romanies in Lety in 1942 in which over 300 inmates died and others were transported to the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

A large pig farm was built on the site of the camp in Lety. The previous government pledged last June, before the elections, that it would remove the farm and build a memorial on the site.