In the second round of the competition for the design of the memorial in Lety, there are seven proposals for the design of the memorial in Lety

Brno - Seven proposals from 41 have advanced to the second round of the international landscape architecture competition for the design of the Roma Holocaust memorial in Lety near Písek. The winner will be announced in the first half of May, said Lucie Horáková, spokesperson for the Museum of Roma Culture in Brno, which aims to construct the memorial in Lety. The results of the competition will be followed by the demolition of the pig farm, which stands on the site of the former concentration camp for Roma. The museum hopes to open the memorial in 2023.

Proposals were submitted and evaluated anonymously. Horáková did not want to provide further information about the seven advancing proposals. "It would compromise anonymity, which is one of the conditions of the competition," she stated.

According to the museum's director Jana Horváthová, the jury evaluated each proposal and wrote recommendations for the seven advancing submissions on how to further develop their designs for the second round. "They can work on it until April 21, which is the deadline for closing the second round. In the first half of May, we are still considering two dates for the final assessment," said Horáková.

The new memorial and exhibition is intended, according to the museum, to honor the memory of the Holocaust victims among Roma and Sinti, to inform, educate, and stimulate discussion about the past, as well as the current social situation, and to address issues of minority discrimination and human rights.

The competition will be followed by the demolition of the pig farm, for which the state has allocated around 110 million crowns. The demolition also includes the reclamation of the environment in preparation for the subsequent construction. The memorial itself, costing several tens of millions of crowns, could possibly start being built next year. The memorial will also include an exhibition.

During the war, there was a Roma concentration camp in Lety. During the communist regime in the 1970s, a pig farm was established there. Two years ago, the state purchased the pig farm for 450 million crowns from the company Agpi, which then had 13,000 pigs there. According to historians, from August 1942 to May 1943, 1,308 Roma, men, women, and children passed through the camp in Lety, 327 of whom died there, and over five hundred ended up in Auschwitz.