09. December 2022

Activist and memorialist Čeněk Růžička died

It was with deep sadness that we received the news on 9 December 2022 of the death of one of the most prominent Romani activists fighting to commemorate the Holocaust of the Roma and Sinti.

Čeněk Růžička was the chair of the Committee for the Reparation of the Romani Holocaust and has been a less prominent voice in the past 25 years calling for the removal of the large-scale pig farm in Lety and the construction of a dignified memorial to the local prisoners. He was also a close collaborator of the Museum of Romani Culture.

The Liberec native was born into a family of original Czech Roma on 28 October 1946. The whole family was racially persecuted during World War II, both parents were interned in the camp in Lety near Písek. Unlike most of their other relatives, they survived their imprisonment in the concentration camps, and even with little Čeněk they travelled until the official ban at the end of the 1950s. He trained and worked as a stonemason, then as a merchant.

Since 1997 he has long commemorated the events of the Romani Holocaust and has devoted himself to lecturing and educational activities. Under his patronage, a traditional commemoration was held in Lety u Písku to honour the memory of the victims of the local camp.

He also participated in the creation of a memorial site in the Mirovice cemetery, where memorial plaques with the names of victims of racial violence are placed.