2024-04-29 17:15:48
Where the Nazis overcrowded more than 1,300 Roma and then the communists set up a pig farm, a museum rises this Thursday in memory of those who died there or were sent to Auschwitz. It is in Leti, Czech Republic, and its opening also has a history of obstacles and injustices.
That place ninety kilometers from Prague became a concentration camp in August 1942, under the German occupation of what was then Czechoslovakia.
In the middle of World War II, the Nazis advanced their plans for racist extermination. For more than a year, until August 1943, citizens of Romani origin and culture were taken there. There were 1,308 gypsy men, women and children, and 335 died there. The rest were transferred to the extermination camp in Polish territory, according to historians cited by local media.
Once the war was over, the country became a satellite of the Soviet Union, that barren land had no use until the communist government decided to install a large pig farm in the 1970s. The pig farm was built very close to the cemetery where the bodies of the victims were. It was a way to silence the gypsy clamor for recognition of the murders and affronts to their people, which was beginning to be heard.
The Roma associations persevered, despite the censorship, and finally in 1995 they managed to have a monument erected in that improvised cemetery about 300 meters from the Marranos facility. But decades passed until the Government of the Czech Republic became involved in the struggle of the Museum of Romani Culture and bought the property in 2018 with a dozen warehouses with 13,000 pigs, for about 18 million euros.
Social debt
Three years later came the demolition of the livestock complex and the construction of an exhibition space of 100,000 square meters began, which shows Czech Roma history from before the war to the very opening of the place. It will be open to the public on May 12. You can see a permanent exhibition with survivors’ testimonies in audiovisual format and an installation called ‘The Path of Memory’.
The political issue influenced both the delay and the official opening of the museum, which was attended by Czech President Petr Pavel. “With this monument we are paying off a social debt of decades with the Roma holocaust,” he said. «Even today it is necessary to remember what happened here. “It’s a warning of how far people can go.”
He was accompanied by Prime Minister Petr Fiala, who added: “At last we can commemorate with dignity the Roma victims of a monstrous ideology.” A museum of memory as atonement for the Nazi murders and the pig-sty mockery of the communists.
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