New world campaign to "Shut the Pig Farm" launched over Czech Roma Holocaust site

The Roma Association Forum (Romské sdružení Forum) is launching an international campaign called “Zrušte vepřín” (“Shut the Pig Farm”). The main aim of the campaign is to try to pressure the Czech government into immediately removing an industrial pig farm from the site of a former concentration camp for Roma people at Lety by Písek. The press release of the launch reads as follows:

“It is completely unthinkable to us that the memory of the victims of the Roma Holocaust will continue to be desecrated. For us, the former concentration camp at Lety by Písek is a symbol of chronic anti-Gypsyism, hatred, and racism. Roma people are still pressing for reparations for the past wrongdoings committed against them. Lety by Písek is a site where immeasurable harms were perpetrated, as were the deaths of Roma children and elders, men and women.

The Roma concentration camp at Lety was established by the authorities of what was the Czech part of former Czechoslovakia prior to that country’s occupation by Nazi Germany. The administration of the camp was then taken up by the German Protectorate authorities. Czech police officers were in charge of the camp management. “Hitler’s executioners” at Lety were Czech volunteers who have hundreds of Roma lives on their consciences.

We call on the Government of the Czech Republic to immediately remove the pig farm from this site where Roma Holocaust victims are buried. The Czech state must rehabilitate the WWII-era Roma victims of Czech and German persecution and redress them.

The first step in the persecution of the Roma occurred when the authorities confiscated their property. After that, Czech guards at the Lety camp either murdered them outright or systematically exposed them to cruel treatment there, to which the victims sooner or later succumbed. The Czech state is therefore responsible for financially and morally redressing the harms committed against Roma children, their grandparents and their parents.

It is no longer possible to tolerate the actions and approach taken by the Czech state with respect to the Roma Holocaust and the Lety by Písek concentration camp! The Roma Association Forum (Romské sdružení Forum) is therefore addressing this campaign to the international community and NGOs worldwide. We do not want pigs prancing around, wallowing in their own excrement, and fouling the surroundings with their unbearable stench at a site where Roma Holocaust victims are buried.

Chair of the Roma Association Forum (Romské sdružení Forum)Ondřej Giňa, Jr.”