THEME OF THE MEMORIAL
A unique testimony of an unfinished story
It was not until the 1980s that Božena Pflegerová decided to write her war memories. She was over sixty years old. She focused on the so-called Gypsy camp in Lety u Písku. None of the survivors described it in such detail. She listed the names of her fellow prisoners and torturers. She described the mass grave behind the camp and the circumstances in which her three-month-old daughter Štěpánka died in the camp. She testified about the violence and the everyday proximity of death, sexual abuse of the imprisoned women, of the conditions in which everyone had been gradually deprived of humanity. It resulted in a few notebooks and a story that she started writing several times but never finished. It is an eloquent proof of the incommunicability of horrific experiences and the need to give testimony.
In her manuscript, she emphasizes the inseparability of the camp at Lety u Písku from Auschwitz-Birkenau, the main site of the genocide of European Roma and Sinti. As a title she chose a note “Return unwanted” that had been written in documents of those people who were selected for transportation. “With these two words, I want to name my memories from the Gypsy collection camp Lety u Písku. It was only a transfer station to the extermination camps in Auschwitz-Birkenau, where there was no return for people who had a drop of gypsy blood in them. ”Her second husband, Antonín Hauer, lost his closest family during the war – his wife, Rozálie Burianská, and four children, Marie, Vilém, Matěj and Berta. They died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Jan Hauer, his son born after the war, later found out under what circumstances they all had died – they were so drastic that he could never tell his father. And yet it was his father who, twenty years after the war, involved him in the search for the fate of his immediate family. Jan Hauer, guided by the desire to know the history of his family, has been collecting historical documents and precious pre-war photographs for twenty years. Including photos of siblings he never knew.
It was thanks to him that the testimony of his mother, Božena Pflegerová, has recently got known outside the family circle. It was the time of conclusion of a contract on the purchase of a large-scale pig farm operating since the mid-1970s in Lety u Písku. The farm gradually took up almost the entire area of the former camp. It stood near the provisional burial site, where the dead were deposited when a typhoid epidemic had broken out in the camp. In May 1995, President Václav Havel unveiled the Memorial to the victims. In the mud, in the rain, and in the smell of a pig farm which was an integral part of all subsequent acts of commemoration. It was a persistent reminder of the lack of respect for the people who had suffered and died in the camp. Only in 2018, after twenty years of appeals from individuals and international organizations, the Czech state bought the pig farm. This opened the way to a truly dignified honour of the local Roma Holocaust victims.
Genocide, its disturbing preconditions and memento
The Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti meant almost complete slaughtering of a whole group of people who co-created the multinational Czechoslovakia founded in 1918 on democratic ideals. It still is an unrecognized loss of society. The Roma and Sinti communities have been part of the history of the Czech lands since the 16th century. On the threshold of World War II, they represented a socially differentiated society – from poor families of wage-labourers and “world-going” to successful businessmen, house and villa owners. At the time of the war, all of them primarily fought for their lives. Some were involved in the resistance. Rarely were they defended by their non-Romani neighbours and only few were saved from transports and almost certain death.
On a Europe-wide scale, the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia presents one of the most consistent attempts to genocide European Roma and Sinti. Only about one out of ten of them survived the war persecution. Genocide was undeniably a direct consequence of the Nazi ideology. However, it followed local social assumptions dating back to the pre-war period. In the Czech lands, “Gypsies” were treated as a group that had to be registered, checked and pacified by the police, even at the cost of violating democratic principles and the current constitution for a long time. The Nazi approach was easily linked up with such thinking about “Gypsies”. A part of the local society agreed with the war persecution of the Sinti and Roma, some of them were directly involved and benefited from it.
Having failed to admit these facts to this day, it makes it impossible to cope with this dark side of local history. The war history of the Protectorate Roma and Sinti is still little known of, difficult to accept and often opposed. This is manifested in public statements by some political leaders in the past and present, balancing on the edge of Holocaust denial. Even in manifestations of vandalism towards the Memorial that has been standing at Lety u Písku since 1995. The newly built Memorial will probably face the same acts.
The so-called Gypsy camp in Lety u Písku was razed to the ground in August 1943. It would seem that its story was over. However, what (did not) happened here over the next seven decades is as important to understand the local specifics of the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti and their position in society as what did happen during the war. The thought of “Gypsies” leading to the displacing Roma from society and even from social historical awareness did not disappear with the end of the war or with the fall of communism. Sensitivity of the society to the manifestations of stereotyping, discrimination and segregation of the Roma is changing, but only in some parts of it. During the first ten years of newly acquired democracy, nine Roma people were killed by right-wing extremists in the Czech Republic alone. One of the fatal attacks took place on the same day when Václav Havel was unveiling a Memorial place in Lety u Písku.
The Memorial of the fight for memory which was to be replaced
The consequences of the war tragedy for the Roma and Sinti survivors can only be approximated. Only individuals out of the numerous communities remained. They were surrounded by emptiness. They had lost most of their relatives, often all their financial means and their homes. In the post-war Czechoslovakia, if their fate was mentioned at all, they were included in the general category of victims of Nazism. It was not desirable to remind the specifics of their war persecution. The idea of the Roma as a distinctive minority would have been strengthened and that was declared unfounded and harmful in Communist Czechoslovakia. The topic of the Holocaust of the Roma was not part of school education during communism, it did not appear in museums or the media, and there were no specific memorial days. The Roma were described as “citizens of Gypsy origin”, the new regime was supposed to “re-educate” them, “rid them of their backwardness” and “disperse” them in a single mass of “citizens of socialist Czechoslovakia”. The perpetrators who committed war crimes against the Roma and Sinti were not punished. “Gypsy registers” were again compiled as a basis for new policy proposals, the bulk of which was once again called “the solution to the Gypsy question” in a frightening ignorance of the historical context.
Some of the survivors decided to protect their new families by keeping silent about the war past – not to burden them with trauma. They did not want to bind their children to the history clearly pointing to their ethnic origin. Some have changed their surname. And they stopped speaking Romani. They tried not to be recognizable as “Gypsies”, because many perceived and still perceive such identification as threatening.
In the 1990s, the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti became known as the “Forgotten Holocaust”. As if everyone had forgotten it. It would be more accurate to talk about the Holocaust as “displaced” by the society. The survivors could never forget. The Holocaust became irreversibly and inherently part of them, as well as part of their children’s lived reality – for example, they have always grown up without grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, cousins, without their proximity, visits and narration. They did not avoid intergenerational transfer of traumas. The survivors and their descendants who wanted to remember and recall fought the silence of the majority. The only thing that helped during such fight was their own willpower and people in their immediate vicinity. Yet some survivors strove for public commemoration of war suffering and its victims, as well as their personal testimony. Moreover, as members of a minority, not officially recognized by the state, they had very limited opportunities to do so. Some wrote down their memories, others shared them – however difficult it was – not only with their children, but also with historians and other researchers. By taking care of the memory of their families actually cared for the memory of us all. Their efforts over the years have been supported by a few local initiatives, the names of Roma and Sinti can be found in some memorials to the victims of war or, very rarely, a plague reminiscing of a non-existent Roma colony. In addition, they also used the space they had as survivors in both places where the dead from the Lety camp were gradually buried: they placed a commemorating plaque in the cemetery in Mirovice and erected a cross on the alternative burial ground. They regularly went to this reverential place as well as to Auschwitz.
However, the pig farm stopped the people from dignified remembrance of the suffering and death of hundreds of people in the Lety camp. It became a symbol of the dismissive attitude of the so-called majority society towards the Roma. It also denied the core values of the Roma and Sinti communities as respect for family and old age, dignity, justice and the duty to uphold these values in his life and in relation to others. Despite this, Čeněk Růžička, another descendant of the survivors, has held an annual reverent gathering in Lety u Písku since 1998. For twenty years he had steadfastly fought for a place of remembrance that would reflect the dignity of what had happened here.
Removing the pig farm and building a new Memorial in Lety u Písku is a significant shift in the struggle for the historical memory of our entire society. But it is definitely not the end.
Memory, landscape, milestone on the journey to understand
Slightly descending slope, bordered by woods from two sides, meadows, groves, at the bottom of the slope there is a pond reflecting the surrounding peaceful landscape and changes in the sky. The undulating blue-green contours roughly cut by the rectangle of a concrete pig farm. In its upper part and its surroundings, it is possible to anticipate other scars of geometric shapes that are almost invisible today – the ground plan of the former concentration camp and its buildings. It was not just time and nature that contributed to the gradual wiping of its tracks in the landscape and in collective memory. A recent archaeological research has shown exactly where the camp was. Identifying all victims and graves is a difficult task for historians and archaeologists. The cross, which once stood on the site of the burial ground, lay cut down in the grass until the mid-1990s. And then it disappeared. Together with other reminders of the suffering that the local landscape had witnessed.
The landscape has its relentlessly long-lasting memory, sometimes hidden deep underground, in the imprints of long-forgotten paths and the foundations of houses in relief, visible, for example, from aerial photographs. People’s memory is much shorter; it is a negotiated memory, influenced by the hierarchy of power, in which the forces of the “majority” and “minorities” are not in balance.
Is it possible to express the tension between the grim war and post-war history of this place and the magic of nature here?
Is it possible to show how substantial the memory of survivors, standing for decades on the periphery, has been preserved despite everything?
Is it possible here to materialize the reminder of past events as a common painful history that would also allow a more hopeful look to the future?