16 THE CARAVAN
later be celebrated on the soft grass, in the shadow
of the scarecrow witch, circled by empty cans.
At one edge of the field, Veronika Kmetzová
stencilled big letters onto a blank white banner
to spell out “Amare Předlice”—Our Předlice. She
stood in front of another banner with a picture
of what appeared to be a pig farm called Lety.
A farm of that name was a concentration camp
for Roma people during the Second World War.
Kmetzová’s great-grandmother had lived, worked
and died there. “My grandmother told me once
about a pile of dead bodies in the camp, and how
weak my grandfather was,” she said. It is a his-
tory she was both aware of but also distant from
while growing up, as it was rarely brought up by
her family. Kmetzová said she first visited the
camp several years ago. “We definitely left with
heavy hearts,” she said. She thought it was her
duty to see the place, learn the history and teach
it to her children. She felt that it is important for
the Roma to recognise what happened to them
collectively, and to ensure that the memory of it
stays alive.The history of Lety was recovered from obscu-
rity in Black Silence, a controversial 1998 book by
Paul Polansky, an American author researching
the Czech Roma. Polansky told me over the phone
that in 1939, just weeks before the Nazis invaded
Czechoslovakia, the country’s government decid-
ed to build a labour camp in the quiet southern Bo-
hemian village of Lety u Písku. When the original
population of inmates—local, white-collar Jewish
people—proved to be inefficient manual labourers,
they were replaced by around 1,300 Roma people.
After the war, the camp was largely forgotten,
as Czechslovakia’s decimated Roma population
could not memorialise it. The state subsequently
banned nomadic behaviour, dispersed settlements
and moved people into state housing blocks. Once
again viewing them as ready unskilled labour, it
also brought in Roma from Slovakia and forcibly
settled communities in areas close to the German
border. In 1973, the Czech government transferred
the land to a local agriculture firm, AGPI, which
installed a pig farm on the property.
“Around 300 Czech Roma survived World
War II,” Polansky told me. “And only 100 were
left by the mid 1990s.” In the 1990s, Polansky
began gathering as many interviews from the
Roma as he could, collecting over 400 oralhistories. Eventually, he uncovered documents
from a regional library in Bohemia as well as
testimonies from elderly people in and around
the village of Lety, which indicated that the
camp was a fully Czech operation. In 1995, the
Czech government erected a memorial to Lety
next to the former camp, and held an inaugural
memorial service attended by the president at
the time, Václav Havel.
Human-rights groups such as Konexe and the
European Grassroots Anti-Racism Movement,
or EGAM, have mobilised around the image of
the pig farm. After years of pressure, in October
2017 the Czech government agreed to pay AGPI
17.5 million euros to purchase the pig farm, and
to replace it with a memorial to the victims. “The
construction of a dignified memorial will have an
impact for all Roma in the Czech Republic,” Ben-
jamin Abtan, the president of EGAM, told me. His
group is planning to cooperate with the Museum
of Romani Culture in Brno to make the site “a
place of dignity and transmission.”
There are those, however, who refute the idea
of a single Roma identity. In his writings, Slawo-
mir Kapralski—a professor at the University
of Kraków—suggests one possible path to the
creation of a common identity. Kapralski argues
that it is through memorialising the shared history
of suffering and persecution, with the Holocaust
as ground zero, that the Roma identity might be
preserved. Polansky went as far as to say that
academic projects to construct a unified Roma
identity are “pure hogwash.” He alluded to the
1995 ceremony for the memorial in Lety, and told
me that he and other organisers had invited Roma
people, who had refused to participate because, as
a Slovakian man told him, “they”—referring to the
Roma in Lety—“weren’t our Roma.”
Polansky added that conditions for Czech
Roma are worsening. “It’s very, very difficult to
get Czechs to be in favour of Roma issues,” he
said. Over the course of his interviews, he found
that nearly every Roma person he spoke with felt
that life was better under Communism, and that
conditions have declined since 1989. Abtan echoed
Polansky’s views. “Apart from poverty,” he said,
“the educational system doesn’t allow Roma indi-
viduals to build a future because of lack of access,
lack of quality, and discrimination.”
Andrej Babiš, a far-right billionaire and the
Czech Republic’s second-richest man, was sworn
in as prime minister in early December 2017. Soon
afterwards, I asked Brož, via email, if things had
gotten worse for the Roma since the far right’s
ascension to government. He responded with a
terse line—“Not yet.” sEli Naegele contributed additional reportage.Human-rights groups have mobilised around the
image of the pig farm in Lety. The EGAM hopes to
make the site “a place of dignity and transmission”
for the Roma.
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shifting impressions · the lede