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Pigheaded behavior

The purported solutions at Lety are simply more evasive tactics
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February 20th, 2008 issue

By Gwendolyn Albert

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European Parliament has recently reiterated its call for the industrial pig farm located on the site of the World War II-era Lety concentration camp to be removed. The EP is to be commended for keeping pressure on the Czech government, and for correctly identifying this issue as one in need of specific attention.

Unfortunately, the response to international criticism of the government’s mismanagement of this Holocaust site has led to some very strange scenarios.

The government’s recently established Working Committee on Lety, chaired by Human Rights and Minorities Minister Džamila Stehlíková, includes representatives of AGPI (the firm that owns the farm); south Bohemian regional government officials; members of the south Bohemian Roma community; and the Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust (VPORH), the Lety survivors’ organization that has been agitating for the removal of the farm for more than a decade now. In the aftermath of the EP’s reiteration of its 2005 call, this committee held meetings and publicized visits to Lety — meetings and visits from which VPORH members were excluded — and used the opportunity to broadly publicize proposals with which VPORH does not agree.

While the minister pays lip service to the importance of the survivors’ opinions, in reality their concerns are being completely sidelined.

English-language translations of the Czech press on this issue can be found at the Web site Romea.cz. One fact is crystal clear from all of the verbiage: Moving the farm seems to be completely off the table. For example, one proposal calls for transferring “official management” of the former concentration camp site from the competency of the town of Lety to the Museum of Roma Culture in Brno, halfway across the country. Given that the EP’s call is specifically “to abolish the pig-fattening industry on the former concentration camp in Lety,” one wonders whether the government and south Bohemian officials really believe that throwing taxpayers’ money away on the wrong task will somehow stop the criticism.

Over the repeatedly (and publicly) expressed disagreement of VPORH President Čeněk Růžička, whose family members lost their lives at Lety, the committee is publicizing a proposed “solution” for the Lety site that does not involve removing the farm at all. This solution was designed by AGPI in conjunction with the south Bohemian regional government, and involves an investment of 50 million Kč ($2.9 million) to develop a memorial adjacent to the farm — despite the fact that a memorial already exists at the site.

Some members of the present-day south Bohemian Roma community who serve on the committee, none of whom lost any relatives at Lety during the war, as their roots are in Slovakia (and none of whom were elected by their community to play this representative role), were approached by the south Bohemian regional government to lend their support to this scheme. Regrettably, they have done so.

This occasion for difference in opinion between the other Roma on the committee and VPORH, entirely manufactured by the regional government, is now being referred to by officials and in the press as a “dispute within the Roma community.” This tactic diverts attention from the real issue: desecration of a Holocaust site and the government’s responsibility for remedying the matter.

To observers of Roma-related matters in this country, this tactic comes as no surprise. As it has done and is doing in many other matters, from segregation in education to the definition of “social housing,” the government is shifting to local and regional officials what should be a matter for resolution at the highest level.

In a Feb. 4 interview on Czech radio, both Czech MEP Jan Březina (KDU-ČSL) and south Bohemian Regional Governor Jan Zahradník (ODS) offered classic examples of how confused politicians’ reasoning can become when they try to defend the indefensible, and are ignorant to boot. For example, while the Lety survivors would never and have never questioned the fact that Nazi Germany bears ultimate responsibility for the Holocaust — which should be self-evident to any educated person — Březina tried to make it seem as if the survivors’ focus on how Lety was run is in some way an attempt to deny Nazi responsibility. He would like to make Lety a German problem, not a Czech one, so that the Germans can be asked to foot the bill for the pig farm’s removal.

The pig farm, however, was placed in that location by the Czechoslovak state, and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered the responsibility of any state other than the Czech Republic.

Shockingly, Březina spoke in the interview about the staff at Lety as if their “plight” in running the camp for their protectorate overlords was comparable to the suffering they inflicted on their victims. This is simply willful ignorance of the facts. It has been well-documented that the cruelty, sadism and mismanagement that led to the death of hundreds at Lety, many of them children, was due to the initiative of the camp commander and his lackeys, not any orders from on high. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the Lety story is that, after conditions there deteriorated so badly that a typhus epidemic threatened the surrounding area, the protectorate authorities actually shut down the camp.

MEP Březina’s expression of sympathy for the camp guards is not only gruesome and inappropriate, it precisely echoes sentiments expressed by extreme right-wing parties such as the National Party (NS), which demonstrated in memory of the guards at last year’s commemorative service, and which has recently founded paramilitary units called the National Guard. The National Party chairwoman is infamous for using the term “final solution” in her propaganda regarding the Roma.

For his part, Zahradník keeps emphasizing that the south Bohemian Roma (or at least the few he has hand-picked) are behind his proposal, a thin attempt to establish political cover for his boondoggle. In reality, the support of present-day south Bohemian Roma, whose families never lost anyone at Lety, is entirely irrelevant to whether the farm should stay or go.

Removing the pig farm is a matter of honoring all victims of the Holocaust, wherever they may have perished and wherever the survivors and their descendants may be living now. This is why European Parliament has taken up the matter. As its recent repetition of the call for the farm’s removal indicates, the elected representatives of Europe are not likely to be distracted from their aim, no matter how many costly memorials are erected against the wishes of the survivors.

— The author is director of the Women’s Initiatives Network at the Peacework Development Fund. She has been a member of the Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust since its founding in 1996.

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