By Gwendolyn Albert

The decade-long quest for the removal of a pig farm on the site of the former Lety Nazi concentration camp in south Bohemia, a structure that has desecrated the Holocaust site since the 1970s, recently entered a new phase. Pressure from the European Parliament (EP) last spring brought the issue to the fore once again, and the reactions of some politicians demonstrate the fault lines along which political life in the Czech Republic is divided. As ever, interpretations of the country's World War II past continue to push buttons across the political spectrum.

The facts are not disputed by serious students of the Holocaust. In addition to those murdered directly at Lety, two transports were made to Auschwitz from there; its role as part of the conveyor belt that shipped millions to death is clear. Yet in response to EP pressure, Communist MEP Miroslav Ransdorf said last April that "there have been rampant lies told about Lety. No real concentration camp was ever there." Two weeks later, President Václav Klaus said, "the victims of this camp were primarily connected to an epidemic of spotted typhus, not with what we traditionally conceive of as concentration camp victims."

The comments demonstrate a failure to understand that it is immaterial whether the murder method was imprisoning people in inhumane conditions or shutting them in the gas chambers: Both methods achieved the perpetrators' aim. It is hard to imagine similar comments being made by a Czech president about those who succumbed to disease at, for example, Terezín, without prompting an international outcry.

Other Czech politicians, however, do not engage in such quibbling. In remarks June 6 at the opening of an exhibition on Lety at the Chamber of Deputies, Prime Minister Jiří Paroubek said: "It is our ongoing task to fight against ethnic intolerance and primitive nationalism, because those are the roots of racism. Let us be aware that we encounter expressions of intolerance and even of admiration for Nazism today in our society. It is enough to recall the meetings of nationalist skinheads, the verbal and physical attacks on members of the Roma ethnicity, and other examples of ethnic intolerance." It is refreshing — and, unfortunately, rare — to hear an official condemn the phenomenon that is neo-Nazism here.

The most recent, absurd twist on this all came about just a few weeks ago, when the latest incarnation of Czech right-wing extremism, the National Party, erected a Lety counter-monument in the public parking lot of the former concentration camp site. The four-ton boulder bearing the inscription "To the Victims" — meaning the "real" victims of World War II, the Czechs — was accompanied by a media flurry and statements about Lety even more horrendous than Ransdorf's.

National Party spokespeople blamed the Lety prisoners for having caused the typhus to which they succumbed through their own "unhygienic practices," a statement clearly intended to resonate with deeply rooted European stereotypes of the Roma as "dirty." Such statements would be laughable if not for the fact that they are received by far too many people in this country with a completely straight face.

Imprisonment of Roma at the Lety camp may have happened when this country was a Nazi protectorate, but it is a historical fact that the immediate perpetrators of murder there were Czechoslovaks in charge of the camp management; the camp was ultimately closed by the Nazi command because of the typhus outbreak. It was communist-era Czechoslovakia that decided to build a pig farm on this site.

When the farm finally became an issue in the early 1990s, the authorities took half-measures that ultimately satisfied no one: While President Václav Havel worked to erect a well-intended (albeit criticized) monument, the Cabinet moved to speedily privatize the state-owned farm at a suspiciously low price, instead of removing it as per international agreements requiring Holocaust site preservation.

Now right-wing extremists are attempting to leverage the rumored cost of moving the farm into votes. Ten years ago, the now-discredited Republican Party attempted to rile voters over social benefits being paid to unemployed Roma; two years into this country's EU membership, that tactic has been replaced with outright Holocaust denial.

The choice of words placed on the National Party counter-monument — "To the Victims" — shows what is really at stake: a familiar version of the Czech self-image as Central Europe's eternal victim, repeatedly invaded, repeatedly betrayed, always the sufferer, never the perpetrator. The Romany community's demand that the present-day government take responsibility for past wrongs, with all of the complicated issues it raises concerning the Nazi Protectorate era, is a challenge to that identity.

Acknowledging that a person, country or "nation" can be either victim or perpetrator depending on the circumstances, and taking responsibility accordingly, is far less comfortable than assuming automatic absolution.

The record shows that if anyone has been victimized in this country since 1989, it is indeed the Roma minority, and the perpetrator has been the Czech majority. According to the World Bank, 50 percent of Romany men who were employed in the Czechoslovakia of 1988 were no longer employed in the Czech Republic of 1993. The state left them to the fate of poverty.

The state drafted tricky legislation attempting to deprive Roma of citizenship, leaving many in legal limbo. Educators oversaw the segregation of 70 percent of Romany children into "special schools" for the mentally inferior. Czech Airlines marked Roma passengers on their flight lists, and when the Roma began emigrating, UK consular officials one-upped the Czechs by pre-screening passengers flying from Prague and informing those who looked Romany that they would not be admitted to the United Kingdom.

Czechs built the wall in Ústí nad Labem, turned impoverished Roma onto the streets, institutionalized their children for parental infractions as insignificant as failing to buy a pram, and scrawled "Gypsies to the Gas" in letters large and small across this country.

Doctors sterilized Romany women without their informed consent. The case of a Romany man who died under suspicious circumstances in police custody in 2002 still waits before the European Court for Human Rights after the Czech courts failed to acknowledge any wrongdoing.

Racially motivated crime rose from 17 reported incidents in 1990 to 402 in 2001; the perpetrators were overwhelmingly Czech. Skinheads have murdered and maimed, and when the victims were Roma, until recently Czech courts gave the perpetrators either suspended sentences or no sentences at all. And that skinhead violence has had deadly results not only for the Roma minority, but for foreigners and others who don't fit in here.

When right-wing extremists hold rallies at Holocaust sites with skinheads waving the Czech flag in the name of the nation's "victimization" and denying the Holocaust, they need to be stopped. Prime Minister Paroubek should do now what should have been done 10 years ago: move the pig farm and start a discussion on how the nationalist extremism that remains alive and well in this country is simply a repetition of Hitler's crime.