On Sunday, May 12, 2024, the memorial to the Roma Holocaust at the site of the concentration camp in Lety u Písek was opened to the public. Three decades of debates about the nature of the place, which used to be a pig farm, were thus concluded.

But the reality of the perpetrators was not acknowledged for a very long time. The participation of Czech gendarmes and camp commanders in the genocide of the Roma during the Second World War was denied throughout the forty years of communism.

The taboo was broken after the revolution by historian Ctibor Nečas and journalist Markus Pape, and courageous activists from the ranks of the Roma and Sinti also played their part. For example, Jan Hauer, Antonín Lagryn and Čeněk Růžička, mostly sons of Lety prisoners, who also told about the fates of their parents and their own for the Memory of the Nation.

• „Mordovali je Češi.“ Jak Romové vzpomínali na takzvaný cikánský tábor v Letech. In: Hidacipes. 18.05.2024. https://hlidacipes.org/mordovali-je-cesi-jak-romove-vzpominali-na-takzvany-cikansky-tabor-v-letech/