The Museum of Roma Culture has announced a competition for the design of the Lety memorial

Brno - The Museum of Romani Culture today announced a landscape-architectural competition for the design of a memorial to the Romani Holocaust in Lety, Písek, where a Romani labor camp stood during the war. The winner of the competition is expected to be announced in May next year, said museum director Jana Horváthová to reporters. The results of the competition will be followed by the demolition of the pig farm that is on the site. The museum aims to open the memorial in 2023.

The competition has two rounds and is international; interested parties from around the world can submit proposals until January 17, said Petr Návrat from the company ONplan, which is assisting the museum with the competition. The competition aims to address not only the design of the memorial but also the landscape surrounding it. According to Návrat, seven proposals will advance from the first round, and the winner will be chosen by a panel consisting of experts and survivors in April to May of next year.

The demolition of the pig farm, for which the state allocated around 110 million crowns, will follow the competition. The demolition also includes the reclamation of the environment in preparation for subsequent construction. The actual construction of the memorial is expected to begin most likely after 2021. Over 30 million crowns has been earmarked for the first phase of construction, along with more than seven million for equipment. Part of the funding has been received from Norwegian funds. The Holocaust Memorial for Roma and Sinti in Bohemia will also feature an exhibition. "The memorial will have four main missions: to honor the memory of the victims, to inform about what happened there, to educate about it in schools, and to stimulate discussion," stated Horváthová.

The camp stood in the place where a pig farm was established during the communist regime in the 1970s. Last year, the state purchased the pig farm from Agpi for 450 million crowns. The company had around 13,000 pigs there as recently as last year. A recent archaeological survey at the site concluded, revealing that the largest part of the Romani camp was located precisely in the area of the former pig farm. Archaeologists found, near the camp at the site of the cultural monument Lety, individual graves, including a grave with the remains of a female prisoner or a grave of a newborn.

According to historians, from August 1942 to May 1943, 1,308 Romani people, men, women, and children, passed through the camp in Lety, of whom 327 died in the camp and over five hundred ended up in Auschwitz. Approximately 600 Romani prisoners returned from the concentration camps after the war. According to expert estimates, the Nazis exterminated 90 percent of Czech and Moravian Roma.