In 2017, the government adopted a resolution on the purchase of the pig farm and on transferring the Holocaust memorial sites of Roma and Sinti to the Museum of Romani Culture. Less than a year later, the Museum assumed administration of the pig farm. It was also entrusted with its demolition and with building a dignified memorial at the site of suffering. The Museum chose to proceed through a participatory process: in cooperation with the wider public, experts, and especially representatives of the descendants of the camp’s victims, it announced an international landscape-architectural competition, which was won in 2020 by Jan Sulzer and TERRA FLORIDA, v. o. s. Representatives of the descendants of the camp’s victims were involved both in preparing the competition and as members of the jury.
The pig farm was demolished in 2022, and in the following year the construction of Lety u Písku, the Memorial of the Holocaust of Roma and Sinti in Bohemia, began. The construction of the Memorial was financed through EEA and Norway Grants, by the Czech Republic, and also by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Prague. On 23 April 2024, the Memorial was ceremonially opened, and the first visitors entered the area and its exhibitions (the outdoor Memory Trail and the indoor audiovisual Memory of the Place and Place of Memory). One of the first to visit the Memorial was the President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, who also honoured the memory of all victims of the concentration camp.
“The communist regime, instead of a monument, built a large-capacity pig farm and thus showed its attitude. With the Memorial we are now repaying a decades-long social debt towards the Roma Holocaust. The Memorial will remind of the horrific acts and will be a memento for future generations so that nothing similar ever happens again.” President Petr Pavel at the ceremonial opening of the Memorial on 23 April 2024.
