Memorial service at Lety to take place on Thursday, 13 May

On Thursday, 13 May at 11 AM the annual commemoration of the Romani victims of the Holocaust will take place at the site of the former concentration camp at Lety. The ceremony is being organized by the Lidice Memorial in collaboration with the Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust and Lety municipality.

The grounds around the memorial are being spruced up at the instigation of Czech Human Rights Commissioner Michael Kocáb and should be more dignified than they have been to date. However, an industrial pig farm still remains in place in one part of the former concentration camp site. “I welcome the work that is being done there, but the pig farm must go. The survivors definitely do not agree with it staying there. In this respect it is important to us that the state has purchased the recreation center in Hodonín, the site of another Nazi concentration camp where Roma were imprisoned,” Čeněk Růžička, chair of the Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust, told news server Romea.cz.

A Czech Government resolution of 4 May 2009 transferred care for the memorial grounds of the former concentration camp at Lety to the Lidice Monument. The mission of the Lidice Monument now includes “care for the preservation in perpetuity of the memory of the suffering of the Roma interned at the former Gypsy camp at Lety by Písek, including the care and maintenance of the memorial site”.

The Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust is organizing bus transportation from Prague for those attending the commemoration. The bus will leave Prague at 8:30 AM; it will be parked in front of the main gate to the Florenc bus station, under the highway overpass, next to the final stop for the no. 133 bus. The bus will have a sign in the back window reading LETY.