Dear survivors, Dear Romani men and women, Dear visitors,
It is
mid-May and we have assembled, as we do every year, to honor the memory of the
Romani victims of the Holocaust, to remember the victims of the Lety
concentration camp, and to remember the victims of the genocide perpetrated
against the Romani people.
Because Romani people in the Czech Republic
are second-class citizens, we cannot assemble today at the places where that
genocide actually happened. On the sites where the Lety camp used to stand and
where Romani men and women were tortured and died, there is farm where the pigs
are rolling around in their own feces. It is difficult to imagine a greater
humiliation for the survivors and the relatives of the victims. It is hard to
imagine a less sensitive approach from the state which first build this
industrial pig farm on these genocide sites and now is refusing to remove it. It
is difficult to imagine a greater sign of disrespect toward the Romani victims
of the Holocaust than what is happening here.
This state of affairs, in
which pigs are being raised and their feces are being industrially processed on
genocide sites, is part of a broader phenomenon that is very widespread in our
country, and that is the phenomenon of denying the Romani Holocaust. We
encounter this denial almost daily, it is part of the media environment and
public discussions – the deniers are active in internet discussions about the
pig farm here and there are Czech-language web pages and Facebook pages focused
on denying the Romani Holocaust. The worst thing is that the genocide of Romani
people, which happened at the sites of today’s pig farm, is openly denied and
doubted by politicians as well, most recently by Czech MP Tomio Okamura.
Holocaust denial is still a felony in the Czech Republic, but the authorities
and police tolerate the denal of the Romani Holocaust, and nobody is ever
prosecuted for it.
Most inhabitants of our country
unfortunately have only minimal awareness of the events at Lety and of the
Romani Holocaust generally. This histroy is taught in schools only under
exceptional circumstances and as a side matter. This past is half-forgotten even
though Romani people were probably the most extensively affected of all the
groups targeted by the Holocast on the territory of our state and currently are
the biggest minority group living in this country.
It is precisely
this lack of societa; awareness about the genocide of Romani people, as well as
the all but entirely lacking academic research into this blood-soaked subject,
that are some of the reasons why the denial of the Romani Holocaust is so
widespread.
Human rights activists, relatives of the victims and
survivors have been fighting for the removal of the pig farm and the pig feces
from these genocide sites since the 1990s. Many institutions have asked the
Czech Government to remove the industrial farm from these genocide sites, such
as the European Parliament and the United Nations. Many individuals have also
sought the same result, all in vain. The Czech Government’s usual answer is that
the Czech state allegedly does not have enough money to remove the farm – or
that to remove it would be a matter so complicated and demanding that our
country couldn’t handle it – or that it will take many more years before the
farm can be removed.
That’s how it goes year in and year out:
The farm stays where it is, and the survivors and relatives of the victims die
off.
It is clear, however, that if the political will to do so were to
exist, then buying the farm and tearing it down would take at the most a few
months’ time – maybe even just weeks if we hurried. Where there’s a will,
there’s a way.
In conclusion I would
like to invite you all, after this commemoration organized by Mr Růžička is
over, for a guided tour that begins at 15:00 called “Get to know the territory
of a genocide” and is organized by our civic association. We will walk through
the territory of the former concentration camp, visit the quarry where the
prisoners worked, visit the fishpond in which, according to the survivors’
testimonies, Romani children were drowned, and we will place flowers at an
improvised remembrance site near the fence around the farm. I recommend this
tour primarily to anybody who has never visited the former concentration camp
and who has only visited the very nicely-designed official memorial.
Tomorrow, Saturday 14 May, there will be funeral procession starting at
14:00 from the pig farm to the cemetery in nearby Mirovice where we will lay
flowers at the graves of the children who died in the Lety camp.
