“It’s great news for me that the entire commission has been completed,” said Jana Horvathova, director of the Museum of Roma Culture, which organizes the monument.
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Roma and human rights activists had long demanded the removal of the Lety farm, 100 kilometers south of Prague, where some 1,300 Czech Roma had been sent between August 1942 and August 1943, the Nazi profession of what was then Czechoslovakia during World War II.
The exhibition of the Roma and Sinti Holocaust Memorial before the opening ceremony, in Lety, Czech Republic, April 23, 2024. A new monument unveiled Tuesday in the Czech Republic on the site of a former Nazi concentration camp for Roma after the crackdown on a communist-era pig farm. (Lubos Pavlicek/CTK via AP)
According to the latest investigations, at least another 335 people died there, while most of the rest were taken to the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.
“We are here first and foremost not to forget, because remembering the horrors of the afterlife is the cover that opposes reliving them,” Prime Minister Petr Fiala said at the opening rite he attended along with President Petr Pavel.
The farm, which had about 13,000 pigs and was established in the 1970s, was acquired by the government in 2018 from a personal owner for about $19 million. Previous governments have failed to do so, citing a lack of funding.
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After an archaeological study, the pig farm was demolished in 2022 before structural paintings began on the monument. The site houses the archive of survivors’ memories, as well as the main points of the efforts to eliminate the pig farm, which began after then-President Vaclav Havel. He inaugurated a nearby monument in 1995.
It is estimated that only about six hundred of the 6,500 Roma living in the occupied Czechoslovak territory in 1942 survived the war. The existing Roma minority of 250,000 faces a lot of prejudice.