Lety

On this the Holocaust Memorial Day this post is about the concentration camp at Lety close to Pisek. 

Lety was built as a labour camp for criminals by the Czechoslovak authorities, but in 1942 it was designated by the Nazis as a camp for "gypsies and gypsy half-breeds" of which there were 6500 registered in the country. The camp's capacity was increased to 600 inmates, but that was soon exceeded: by August 1100 men, women and children were crammed into thin-walled wooden huts. In December 1942 typhus broke out in the unsanitary conditions and lasted until the camp was closed in summer 1943. 326 people died at the camp, including all the 30 babies born there. The rest were transported to Auschwitz/Birkenau and the final solution of the "gypsy and gypsy half-breed question".  Only 600 Czech Roma survived the Holocaust or the Devouring as the Roma call it.

Lety camp 1942 (photo: Museum of Roma Culture.)

Lety has been a sore in the history of Czechoslovakia. There were many who argued that it was simply a labour camp for criminals and sadly there still are people who believe this. The camp guards were employees of the police force of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, not German SS officers. The brutal treatment of the prisoners went unpunished after . Over the decades since the war the Roma have had to fight for the removal of a pig farm built on the site and for a memorial to be erected to the dead. The Roma and Sinti remain the forgotten victims of the Holocaust.

This poem of mine was published in the second Poetry Birmingham Literature Journal at the end of last year:

RAINBOW OVER LETY

I view from a passing coach

the broken wheel of light –

one end stuck in rutted clay,

one in forest loam.

Under the trees the leaves are flayed skin,

the roots whitened bones.

We move too fast to watch the light fade,

the dissolution of the arch into grey.

We, who are blessed with movement,

hurry past the stillness of the dead.

The restless ones rustle but cannot leave,

they for whom movement was everything

A Final Walk

Before Christmas I spent four weeks waiting to sign the contract for the sale of the house. In the end the signing took place on the morning of my departure date. So I am again in the Czech Republic to partially empty the house and sort various other matters.

So here I am sitting in a room that no longer feels like mine - there are no books, no cds, no pictures on the wall and very limited choice of food. I will be handing over my keys on Thursday, this is the end of my life in my Czech home. I have removed the brass fox doorknocker from the front door and for the first time I haven't seen my friend and mentor the local fox during my stay, although I am hoping he will come and say goodbye before I leave.

My lovely husband is with me for this last visit, for which I am very grateful as this is all proving very hard. Today was his birthday, so we took the early evening bus into Krumlov and had a meal at Nonna Gina's, the pizza restaurant we used to regularly visit with Hannah. Afterwards we took a walk through a nearly deserted town. It was just like it used to be, when first we visited the Krumlov. Without hordes of visitors and with wood smoke hanging in the crisp air, we could enjoy the atmosphere and beauty of the historic town, imagining that around the corner might appear someone from a time gone by. I haven't felt like that for a long time.

Black Stork at the Swimming Pond

On the walk down to the train station I pass the swimming pond. The pond is now frozen over and soon the ice will be thick enough to skate on. But on hot summer days it is full of locals enjoying the cool waters. This is not a swimming pool as we Brits know it. It is fed by water from the local brook and is a place for nature as well as humans. In the spring and autumn the water is sometimes disturbed by carp rising to the surface and returning to the depths or by flies breaking the surface as they take their first flights. Occasionally a heron patrols the shallows and for a while an enterprising fisherman had a boat moored at its side.

I remember how there used to swimming ponds in England like this one. There was a ruined one a few minutes walk from my Cotswold town, where the more adventurous kids used to swim even though it was silting up. The rest of us would cycle to Stanway, where there was still an open-air swimming pond, with wooden changing cubicles and mown grass on the water. These attractions have all gone, no doubt considered unsafe and unhealthy.

A year or so ago I was walking past the pond when I was amazed to see a black stork wading in the water. Whilst white storks are a common sight in villages and fields throughout the country, the black stork is an altogether rarer sight. The black stork is a shy bird, avoiding humans and restricted primarily to the forests and lakes. I suppose I should not have been as surprised as I was, after all my village borders the Boletice forest, which for many years was a restricted area. But still I had never seen a black stork at the pond or indeed anywhere else before, and I have not seen one since.