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Czech Government still can't find money to remove pig farm from Romani Holocaust site

10 May 2014
4 minute read

Money to get rid of the pig farm standing on the site of a former concentration camp for Romani people at Lety in the Písek district of the Czech Republic is not likely to be provided by the government of Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka. For years, the surviving relatives of the victims of the Romani Holocaust have been calling in vain for the farm to go, as have the Council of Europe, the European Union, the United Nations, and various NGOs. 

Sobotka believes the tens of millions of crowns allegedly needed to get rid of the pig farm and rebuild a new one elsewhere could instead be used to educate Romani children and to improve social conditions in the country’s socially excluded localities. The PM made his statement during today’s commemorative ceremony at Lety, which was attended by about 100 people. 

"I don’t have a good feeling that the discussion around Lety is reduced to the question of there being a pig farm nearby. I think we should talk about more essential matters, such as, for example, the latent racism that is still present in Czech society and that surfaces here from time to time," the PM said.

Sobotka believes that people visiting Lety should be reminded that the Romani Holocaust during WWII was survived by only 10 % of the Romani population living in the Bohemian and Moravian parts of Czechoslovakia prior to the war. The question of the pig farm, in his view, is very complicated because it is now private property belonging to the AGPI Písek company. 

Solving the problem would reportedly require enormous investment. "I would prefer the money be used to educate Romani children, to improve social conditions in socially excluded localities, because money is running out," Sobotka said.

However, the PM said that did not mean the environment around the current memorial shouldn’t be improved to make it a genuinely sacred place that will not be desecrated in any way. "I understand the bitterness of those who come here. This is not a matter that would be easy, none of the previous governments has been capable of dealing with it," the PM said. 

"I don’t want to be confrontational. The Prime Minister subconsciously also senses that this pig farm shouldn’t be here," said Čeněk Růžička, the organizer of the commemoration, whose entire family with the exception of his mother died in concentration camps.

Mr Růžička showed Czech Culture Minister Daniel Herman the fishpond near the former concentration camp where Romani women were forced to bathe unclothed and were then sexually abused by the camp guards. Karel Berousek, another surviving relative of the victims, also came to Lety today to support getting rid of the pig farm. 

"This has gone on long enough and no one is doing anything about it, it’s high time for it to go. My grandfather and uncle died there. They threw my uncle into quicklime, he wasn’t black anymore after that… . These are my father’s parents, these are my uncle’s," he said during a tour of an exhibition about Lety that opened at the monument today.

The Romani civic association Konexe is also against the pig farm, calling its existence on the site of the Romani genocide "a disgrace to us all and a symbol of the position of the Roma not just in the Czech Republic, but in Europe as a whole." Konexe has written an open letter to the European Commission and to Members of the European Parliament asking them to stop supporting the owner of the farm with EU subsidies, asserting that the farm would soon close without them.  

"We are therefore asking you to halt the EU agricultural supports for the industrial pig farm at Lety by Písek. Stop paying for and supporting the raising of pigs at this Romani genocide site. This farm is only still standing at this site of genocide because of your financial support. If you stop supporting it financially, it will go out of business soon," the letter reads.

The Lidice Memorial recently opened Lety for its fifth season as a state-administered monument. The remembrance site is now open daily from 9 to 5 until October.

The concentration camp at Lety was opened in August of 1940 as a disciplinary labor camp on the basis of a previous decision taken by the Czechoslovak authorities. It then became a "gypsy" concentration camp.

By May 1943, 1 308 Romani people had passed through the camp, 327 of whom perished there, and more than 500 of whom were transported to Auschwitz from it. Fewer than 600 Romani concentration camp prisoners originally from Bohemia and Moravia returned after the war. 

According to estimates, the Nazis murdered 90 % of Czech Roma. The remembrance site at Lety was first opened to the public in 1995. 

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