Concentration Camps and Czech Pork
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by
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Gwendolyn Albert
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- Three years ago, on a muddy spring day, some friends of mine and I made
our way to the South Bohemian town of Lety here in the Czech Republic. The
occasion was the unveiling of a memorial to Romany victims of a WWII-era concentration
camp there. Then, as today, there were no signs to guide us; only the sight
of a Czech television bus showed us where to park off the road. Then, as today,
we schlepped over the unpaved and gradually liquefying path to view a cracked
boulder (the "monument") and read a description of the concentration
camp on a plywood notice board translated into barely intelligible English
and German from a Czech original full of evasions. And then, as today, the
smell of the shit from 14,000 pigs at the industrial farm nearby filled the
air.
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- Two years later, thanks to both global electronic and small-town human grapevines,
the American researcher whose work had prompted the 1995 ceremony, Paul Polansky,
sat with Romany activist Lubomír Zubák in my apartment telling
us all about his work on the Lety case (see interview in Left Curve
issue 22). A few months later Polansky asked me to look through a manuscript
of poems he had written, based on the interviews he had conducted with survivors
of the Lety ordeal. Once GplusG Publishers in Prague accepted that book for
publication, Polansky was able to convince them to print the actual transcripts
of the survivors' testimony as well. Quickly following on the heels of the
bilingual edition of the poems, Living Through it Twice/Dvakrát
tím Samym: poems of the Romany Holocaust 1940-1995, the separate
Czech and English language editions of Black Silence (Czech title,
Cerné Ticho) were issued to the yawns of Czech literati and
outrage in the English-speaking "community" of Prague. The Prague
Post, a publication which postmodernly claims to have no editorial direction
whatsoever, ran a profile on Polansky and a lengthy review of Black Silence,
which attracted well over a hundred people to Prague's Globe bookstore for
a reading and lengthy discussion. Comments from the audience ranged from calls
for torching the pig farm to the more typical, if somewhat wide-eyed, question
of "How is this possible in the land of Václav Havel?"
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- Without publications to his credit, Polansky's insistence that the current
generation of Prague's governing élite has something to hide when it
comes to Czech involvement in the Holocaust sounded like paranoia even to
those familiar with the intricacies of Czechoslovak history. Fortunately,
his work now joins the ranks of Evidence by virtue of having been documented.
But the Land of Václav Havel has given him a very clear message: they
are not interested in this history. Pedantic, dismissive reviews of both the
poetry and prose are the order of the day. Most Czech reviewers focused on
the question of whether Polansky's Bukowski-influenced style in Living
Through It Twice was "really poetry," while others, including
the influential weekly RESPEKT, nitpicked individual poems as to historical
accuracy. Even more telling is the almost total local media blackout surrounding
Black Silence, those original interviews with Lety survivors (and guards)
that formed the source material for the "non-poems."
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- In general, the terms "human rights" or "humanists"
are epithets in the Land of Havel. But this is no vaccuum of ten million misguided
souls: they are simply saying out loud what supporters of fascism in the rest
of Europe (not to mention the United States) have learned to sayin code. Last
year I attended a meeting of Charles University philosophy students who were
being lectured on the concept of human rights from Greek isonomy onward by
an eminent member of the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly. One PhD candidate protested
that the entire concept of human rights was "barbaric," a kind of
"god" to be worshipped. The lecturer would not be drawn on this
any more than he could be drawn on the present-day reality of life for the
Roma minority in the Czech Republic. Those of us who were there out of interest,
not obligation, found the philosophic remove of these ostensibly intelligent
people stomach-turning.
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- It is the conditions for the Roma minority throughout Europe and Central
Asia that are barbaric. Relegated to the dust heap in the educational system
of many countries, the Roma are condemned to poverty from birth. In the Czech
Republic, the practice of sending Roma children to schools for the mentally
retarded because their first language is not Czech has been well-documented
and severely criticized. The 1990s exodus of Czech and Slovak Roma fleeing
skinhead violence has been portrayed with varying degrees of racism in the
world press; one wonders if the Canadian and British governments would have
reinstituted visa requirements for the Czech and Slovak Republics, respectively,
if the immigrants had been white. In the northern Czech town of Ústí
nad Labem, near the border with Germany, local residents have voted to build
a wall around a primarily Romani housing settlement there; it is considered
a great "compromise" that the district council suggested that a
1.80 meter high fence (with no entrance or exit), not a wall, should be erected.
Similar moves by local authorities have occurred in Slovenia, Ireland and
France, where
- the mayor of Tonnoy ordered a one-metre deep ditch to be dug along the front
and one side of a Romani camp; other citizens were reportedly so shocked with
the trench that they immediately filled up a part of it. From "whites-only"
job ads in Hungary to police violence in Bulgaria, Macedonia, Romania and
Slovakia, the Roma are pushed down to the bottom of the barrel at every opportunity.
Their poverty insures that they will be the first victims of natural disasters
(as in the recent flooding in Slovakia) or war (as in the former Yugoslavia).
The status of "refugee" is often denied them, as deportations from
Germany and refusals for asylum in Great Britain demonstrate. And Roma who
have miraculously survived the concentration camps of WWII struggle in vain
for compensation.
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- The concentration camp of Lety was designated a "gypsy camp" during
the years of the Nazi occupation. It is near the town of Písek, Czech
Republic, which is famous among the Roma these days for one reason: Tibor
Danihel, a young Roma who was drowned in the river Otava in the town of Písek
in 1993 by a group of racist skinheads. The case against his murderers was
closed in June 1997 when a regional court in Ceské Budejovice handed
down light sentences against four defendants. In December 1997, then-Minister
of Justice Ms. Vlasta Parkanová filed an extra-judicial appeal to the
Supreme Court. In February 1998 the Supreme Court overturned the ruling and
returned the case to lower court for retrial. Many irregularities were found
with the first trial. The files documenting the initial interrogations of
the skinheads were missing, and the police officer who had personally interrogated
some of the skinheads said that he could not remember at all who he had spoken
with nor what they had said. A police technician who filmed the body of the
victim on videotape deleted the film later on. Now, and only now, five years
after the fact, is the Danihel case being investigated as a murder case. But
while the Danihel case was being reopened, six more skinheads from Písek
stabbed a Romani man named Roman Morej five times in the stomach, back and
arms in a restaurant at the train station in the nearby town of Protivín
on July 4,1998. The attackers were reportedly out of police custody and back
on the streets by midnight.
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- Písek is not the only town in the Czech Republic with recent racist
violence to its credit. The decision in another drowning case, that of the
Romani woman Helena Biháriová in the river Labe (Elbe) in the
town of Vrchlabí, Czech Republic, outdid the Danihel case for outrageousness.
The judge ruled that "the river," not the woman's attackers, was
responsible for her death. It was argued that the crime was not racially motivated,
and that the most serious charge that could be brought was "aggravated
coercion resulting in death." Investigators reportedly stated during
indictment proceedings that the victim had not been "badly" beaten
and that the men were not racists. They had, said investigators, "only"
called the woman a "whore" and a "thief," and had beaten
her because she had stolen 200 Czech crowns ($6.70). The act of coercion which
resulted in death was, according to investigators, the moment at which the
two men forced the now-bloody Ms Biháriová to wash herself in
the river, as a result of which she died. State Attorney Mr. Miroslav Antl
told journalists on June 25 that there was no proof the woman had been murdered
because of her ethnic origins.
- A similar decision was reached by the state attorney in Karvina, Czech Republic,
who decided to release from custody three of the four skinheads, aged between
16 and 20, who had been charged with inflicting grievous bodily injury on
a Romani man named Milan Lacko. Mr Lacko was attacked in the town of Orlova,
near city of Ostrava, Czech Republic, on the night of May 15. The skinheads
reportedly beat him severely and left him lying in a road where he was killed
when a truck ran over him. But despite many similar incidents, such as skinheads
firebombing apartments where Roma live, it is the Roma who are associated
in the public mind with "criminality." This is a xenophobic trait
which the Czechs share with societies in the West.
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- "Human rights" as a concept in the 1990s has become commodified
and soundbitten into a marketing tactic and a "sector," one that
sometimes wields very large budgets with the guilt money of large corporations
and provides "careers." There is a very different and much more
direct connection between the corporate universe and human rights violations
which many "activists" are reluctant to acknowledge. However, even
if the hypothetical average well-fed member of the hypothetical average first-world
nation doesn't think human rights worth the bother, the corporations are decidedly
concerned. According to a Corporate Observatory Europe report distributed
online by Earth Island Journal, something called the International
Chamber of Commerce has actually met with the United Nations for some recognition
that hypercapitalism has its "rights" too. ICC President Helmut
Maucher, also a leader of the European Roundtable of Industrialists, said
in one of his first interviews on his meeting with the UN: "We have to
be careful that they [environmental and human rights activists] do not get
too much influence."
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- The International Chamber of Commerce is the code name for Coca-Cola, Unilever,
McDonald's, Goldman Sachs, Rio Tinto Zinc, ICI, Mitsubishi, Lyonnaise des
Eaux, Norsk Hydro, Siemens, BASF, Shell - in short, the transnational and
the corporate. It seems that life is just too difficult these days for these
entities, whose total gross yields exponentially dwarf those of the mostly
African nations they hope to "develop." And the UN has already anticipated
their concerns: its Center on Transnational Corporations, so crucial to the
sanctions drive against apartheid, was dismantled back in 1993. The replacement
acronym, UNCTAD, is working to "stimulate investment" in the third
world. Work on a UN "Code of Conduct" for transnational corporations
has stopped outright.
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- What does this have to do with the Lety concentration camp, Czech racism,
marauding Czech skinheads, Czech injustice, Czech apathy and Czech poverty?
EVERYTHING, although even self-proclaimed anarchists here in Prague have trouble
finding the connection. "Move the pig farm?" said one. "Won't
that cost a lot?" Indeed, cost is the government's main argument against
improving the present memorial - but then they shouldn't really talk, since
they sold the farm for 1/100 its present value.
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- History is the European weapon of choice. We must insist that the long and
sordid history of this little piece of ground be frozen in time, out of the
reach of both McDonald's and pigs of all persuasions. There are people in
the Czech Republic today who are willfully living out their own fantasies
of Hitler Youth, and people in Serbia carrying out fascist policies, while
the West scratches its head and money goes on being made. World War II never
really ended - the "pause" button just got pushed. It is now rapidly
continuing "by other means," McDonald's and new concentration camps
competing for precious European space.
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- Lety is a little piece of ground with a remarkable story to tell. First
the Czechoslovak government decides in the late 1930s to build a "work
camp" there for "undesirable elements" - gypsies, vagabonds,
etc. Its location near property owned by future Nazi collaborators, Schwarzenberg,
is probably not coincidental. Then, when Czechoslovakia "ceases to exist"
and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia is founded, gypsies or those living
the gypsy lifestyle are rounded up by the Czech police, forced onto the grounds,
beaten, raped, shot, starved and daily worked to death from 1940-43. After
the war is over, the Czech "expulsion" (read: mob violence) of ethnic
Germans from the Sudetenland drives both prisoners of war and their captors
to make use of this out-of-the-way neck of the woods once again as an execution
ground. And then, in the 1970s, the Communist government decided to build
a pig farm over the mass graves. In 1994 the farm was privatized in a move
that stinks of corruption. The farm employs less than twenty people, but two
thousand locals have signed a petition against relocating it. Local farmers
who sell piglets and grain to the farm might suffer losses if the farm were
shut down, but most calls for action specify merely that it should be relocated
out of smelling distance, which certainly would not affect the local economy.
Speculation as to the darker reasons behind local opposition includes the
idea that bodies of German prisoners of war executed by the villagers of Lety
might be discovered, or that honoring "gypsy" graves would be the
same as "giving in" to the "demands" of this "unclean,
criminal tribe" - something Republican party leader Miroslav Sládek
promised not todo in a recent billboard campaign. Czech Minister of Justice
Otokar Motejl has himself characterized the whole idea of respecting the Roma
buried at Lety as a kind of "affirmative action." And "human
rights" in the abstract, in the past - what can that mean to the average
Czech wage slave now?
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- I often wonder what someone like Emma Goldman would think if she had lived
to see our world, shaped by the atomic bomb and industrialized murder. Her
energetic words of outrage at the turn of the century truly were "200
years ahead" of their time, as a contemporary of hers wrote. Everything
dear to her we have managed to ruin. The Haymarket Martyrs don't get a decent
memorial either, but McDonald's may be covering the Czech Republic with UN
assistance in the 21st century.
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- Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 4: No one shall be held in
slavery or servitude.
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- Emma knew slavery when she saw it. So should we.
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- Ed. Note: Paul Polansky asked that we print the letter below concerning
the campaign to have the pig farm removed from the WWII internment camp at
Lety. Please send letters of support to the addresses below.
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- Dear Friends,
- From August 1940 until May 1943 the Czech government in collaboration with
the Nazis ran a death camp for Gypsies at Lety by Pisek. Thousands were murdered
and buried there in mass graves. Today the former camp site is covered over
by a large pig farm. For more than four years the survivors of Lety have protested
to the Czech government, especially to President Havel, to remove this pig
farm from the former camp site where their loved ones died. Since their protest
has fallen on deaf ears, a committee comprised of Czechs, Romanies and foreigners
has been formed in Prague. Our goal is to send one million e-mails to President
Havel asking him and the Czech government to remove the pig farm from this
holocaust site and to declare it a national memorial as stipulated in the
Helsinki Agreements. Please join us in sending an e-mail to
- President Vaclav Havel at:
- vladimir.hanzel@hrad.cz
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- For further information contact us at:
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- Remember the Lety Concentration Camp
- (Pig farm removal action group)
- PO Box 85
- 11001 Praha 1
- CZ
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- letypigfarm@hotmail.com
- voicemail: 011 420 2 961 43636
- website at: http://members.tripod.com/lety_site
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