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