The ‘Zigeunerlager’ [cikánsky tábor, CT] Lety near Pisek (known officially as ‘Zigeunerlager I’ [CT I]) was one of two camps in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia established especially for people labelled as ‘Gypsies’, many of them Roma and Sinti. Both the camp in Lety near Písek and its twin institution in Hodonín near Kunštát were established by the ‘Decree on Combating the Gypsy Menace’ issued in the Protectorate on 24 June 1942. In both places there were already camps which had served successively as ‘Arbeits-Straflager’ [penal labour camps] and ‘Anhaltelager’ [custody camps]. The ‘Anhaltelager’ were now converted to a new type of camp and all their inmates who were not categorised as ‘Gypsies’ were transferred to other Penal Work houses; security measures were intensified, and following the registration of ‘Gypsies’ in the Protectorate, the transportation of whole families into these two camps started on 2 August 1942.
The structure of the occupation administration meant that the camp, its staff and the inmates were subject to different authorities. While the Kriminalzentrale [Criminal Police Headquarters] had absolute authority over the inmates, the camp was administered by the Ministry of the Interior and the Regional Authority in Prague [Landesbehörde Prag], which also employed the entire camp staff.
Commandant and Guards
The camp was guarded by 21 former Czechoslovak gendarmes in the summer of 1942, and by the winter, their number had grown to 36. Some of them volunteered, while for others assignment to the camp was meant to be a punishment. Survivors reported that the guards could be roughly divided into two groups: one that fulfilled their duties according to the rules, sometimes even applying those rules leniently, and another that made full use of the scope of action that their commandant allowed them, going well beyond the official rules in terms of harassment, violence, and brutality. Some survivors’ reports also indicate sexualised violence against women. From the start of the operation of the camp in August 1942 until the end of January 1943, Josef Janovský (1888–1956) served as camp commandant. He then was replaced by Štěpán Blahynka (1894–1956), commandant of the ‘Zigeunerlager’ Hodonin near Kunstadt. After Blahyna returned to Hodonin, the liquidation of the camp in Lety was supervised by František Havelka (1911–1976), the camp’s former accountant.
Camp Infrastructure
As part of the preparations for the conversion of the former ‘Anhaltelager’ into a camp for Roma and Sinti, its capacity was increased. It could now accommodate about 300 people during the summer. In winter, certain areas were not suitable to accommodate people.
The core of the camp was made up of 50 mobile wooden barracks used originally to accommodate road construction workers, arranged in a square. Each unit had bunk beds for six people. One larger barrack block closed one of the sides of the quadrangle. Inside this quadrangle, two larger barrack blocks were situated. An administrative building, including accommodation for guards, a doctor’s room, a kitchen and common rooms for the staff, was located next to the entrance on the east side of the camp, outside the fenced-off area of the camp. Further service barracks, horse stables, a garage and sanitary facilities surrounded the original quadrangle of the camp on two sides, finally adding an irregular triangle to the camp area to the west. Until the end of 1942, the camp had one well, and the nearby pond was used as an additional water supply. A second well was completed in December 1942. Since some of the internees were transported to the camp with their wagons, several of these also stood on the camp site. One of them was used as for transporting dead bodies, especially during winter 1942/1943, when a burial ground was established a few hundred meters from the camp in the surrounding woods.
In the camp, women, men, and children up to 14 years were housed separately in different barracks. However, contact among family members was possible on a regular basis during the day.
Camp Rules and Forced Labour
On 15 July 1942, during a meeting called on the basis of the order implementing the ‘Decree on Combating the Gypsy Menace’, the designated commandants of the ‘Zigeunerlager’ were instructed by German police officers about the rules for the planned camps. They were ordered to draft their own sets of rules. On 27 August 1942, Josef Janovský issued his rules for the camp in Lety, on 30 September 1942, another set of rules was issued by the Protectorate administration. The two sets of rules differ, especially regarding the purpose of the camp and the punishments prescribed for violations of the rules by the inmates. The purpose of the camp as defined by Josef Janovský seamlessly followed the definition of the target group in Law No. 117/1927, while the newer set of rules clearly excluded ‘others living in Gypsy fashion’. Janovský’s rules included much crueler punishments than the later official camp rules. Survivor reports confirm that Janovský usually followed his own rules, as reflected most obviously in the punishments that were meted out. More generally, the existence of these two sets of rules and the way in which they emerged reflect the kind of strategies used by the German occupiers to force Czech authorities and officers to participate as well as the real difference between Czechoslovak law and National Socialist policy in the way the targeted groups were defined.
During their stay in Lety, all inmates above the age of three were forced to work. Smaller children were given tasks they could perform according to their age, while children above the age of ten worked alongside the adults. Work assignments could be inside or outside the camp. A considerable number of tasks contributed to the everyday operation of the camp, while work details outside of the camp mainly performed tasks in agriculture and forestry, road construction and stone quarrying. These details were put together on demand by local companies, farmers, forest, or estate managers. Some lasted only a day, while some groups did not return to the camp until its dissolution in summer 1943. External users of forced labour had to pay the camp administration a fee for each worker. The money was used to cover the camp’s operating expenses including the wages of guards and other personnel.
Everyday Survival in the Camp
The everyday routine in the camp was strictly structured. During the summer months, the days started at 5 am, and a night curfew set in by 9 pm. During the winter, the system was shifted to 6 am and 8 pm respectively. Inmates worked for eight to ten hours a day, with one meal before work, one during working hours and one after work. Nutrition was very poor in the Lety camp. Survivors report an endless repetition of the same meals: bread and a hot or warm drink for breakfast, watery soup or potatoes for lunch and in the evening either soup or bread. It is documented that the authorities denied the inmates the higher rations normal for those performing hard physical labour. Theft by the guards may have played a role as well, though documented cases are rare. Hygiene posed another serious challenge in the camp. The lack of water and facilities made it impossible to keep oneself clean. Another aspect contributing to the outbreak of abdominal and spotted typhus in the camp was the refusal of the German Criminal police to allow a mobile disinfection station in the camp. Inadequate clothing and poor accommodation also played a role in the rapid deterioration of health of the inmates. Though some of them had brought warm blankets and clothes to the camp, these items were taken from them upon arrival. Most however arrived in summer clothing only. The camp was not supplied with additional clothing until November 1942, and the amount and quality of the goods supplied was not sufficient since the barracks could not be properly heated and fuel was not distributed regularly in any case. The situation in the camp was known to several of the authorities, and some individuals, as for example Jiří Letov (1897–1963), tried to intervene, but they were without success during 1942.
Typhoid
The first suspicions of cases of typhoid fever arose in September 1942. Test samples were sent to a laboratory but returned negative. The first positive results were recorded in the beginning of December 1942. By the end of the month, the whole camp was put under quarantine, after not only inmates, but also staff members had been infected, including the doctor visiting the camp on a regular basis. In response to the spread of the disease, the medical staff of the camp was increased and nutrition was improved. After a second doctor working for the camp fell ill and had to quit his duties, two doctors were placed directly in the camp. One of them, Michal Bohin (1895–1956) was categorised as Jewish and therefore also counted as a camp inmate. With the help of additional medical supplies he was finally able to bring the disease under control.
More than 90 inmates of the Lety camp were admitted to hospitals in surrounding localities. This practice ended abruptly once the situation in the camp had been brought under control. Once cured, the inmates were either returned to the camp or deported directly from the hospital.
Deaths in the Camp
In total, 329 people died at the Lety camp, most of them during the winter of 1942/1943. The causes of death given in the camp’s official documents clearly reflect the conditions in the camp, and survivors reported that many inmates died as a result of the physical violence exercised by the guards. Until the beginning of 1943, camp inmates were buried in the public cemetery in the nearby town of Mirovice. With mortality rising from the spread of disease, a new burial ground was opened in the vicinity of the camp. Here, about 120 people were buried in individual as well as mass graves.
Deportations
The first deportation of inmates of the camp in Lety took place on 2 December 1942. 78 women and 16 men, mostly elderly people categorised as ‘asocials’, were taken to Auschwitz I concentration camp. For the second deportation on 7 May 1943, the definition of ‘racial Gypsy’ was applied. 420 Lety inmates were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp on 7 May 1943. Seven others were transferred to the camp in Hodonín near Kunštát. The reasons for this are not entirely clear, but all of them were of either German or Slovak citizenship and were later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The remaining inmates were categorised as ‘racial non-Gypsies’ and released from the camp but may have been subject to further repression on different grounds. After this, the camp was closed. Whatever could be disinfected was distributed or sold elsewhere in the Protectorate, everything else was burned to the ground. In order to prevent a further spread of disease, a 30-year closure period was imposed.
Historiography
After the end of this closure period at the beginning of the 1970s, a pig farm was built where the camp once had been. While the knowledge of the place’s history was alive in the village, this did not cause any reactions until 1994, when the US-American author and human rights activist Paul Polansky (1942–2021) accidentally discovered the records of the camp administration in the State Regional Archives in Třeboň. He published an article in a newspaper that caught the interest of higher diplomatic levels, since he claimed that during World War II the Czech people had committed a standalone genocide of Roma and Sinti in Lety.
His insensitive approach especially towards historian Ctibor Nečas (1933–2017), who had first published on the Lety camp in the 1970s but whom Polansky accused of conspiracy to conceal the history of the camp, caused conflicts but also finally paved the way towards a discussion on the history of the persecution as well as the continuing discrimination against Roma and Sinti in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. In the course of this debate, some errors made in the first approaches to the subject, especially in Polansky’s work, have been corrected. For example, his 1998 collection of Lety survivor reports, published under the title ‘Black Silence. Lety Survivors Speak’, is not a reliable source, and the reports are therefore not included in the online database of Roma testimonies created by the Prague Forum for Romani Histories at the Institute for Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno. The database is accessible at www.romatestimonies.com.
Further important works are Ctibor Nečas’s ‘The Holocaust of the Czech Roma’ and Markus Papes’s ‘…a nikdo vám nebude věřit’, which however oscillates between memory culture activism and a scientific study. Research on the overarching administrative structures and imperatives that shaped the context of the establishment and operation of the camp and influenced the conditions the inmates had to endure remains fragmentary.
Commemoration
The first overt and visible acts of commemoration were undertaken immediately after the war by survivors and their relatives. A first fully public commemorative event was held in 1968. None of these efforts gained official support or wider public interest, especially during the communist period. This only changed after the first public interventions by Paul Polansky. The first official monument was erected close to the burial ground in 1995 and opened by Czech president Václav Havel (1936–2011), but it was harshly criticised by many family members of survivors and activists supporting them. Their criticism was directed at the ongoing operation of the pig farm on the former camp site, the exclusion of Romani people from decision making about the memorial and the possible function of the memorial as a fig leaf concealing the contemporary situation of Romani people in the Czech Republic and society’s reluctance to acknowledge the genocide. Their demand for removal of the pig farm was not fulfilled until the end of 2017, when the Czech government finally bought the farm and closed it down. The area was assigned to the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno, which took responsibility for coordinating the construction of a new memorial on the site of the camp itself.
In April 2024, the new ‘Memorial to the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti in Bohemia’ was opened. Of the former pig farm, only one shed remains as a symbol for the efforts of survivors, descendants and activists fighting for a dignified commemoration of the victims of the camp and the genocide of Roma and Sinti in the Protectorate. It also points to still prevailing racist and antigypsyist views and behaviours in Czech society and the still incomplete process of recognition of the genocide. A newly built educational centre houses the permanent exhibition and offers space for further activities, educational as well as cultural. The centre is complemented by a path of remembrance in the outdoor area on the site of the former camp.
