PILLAR III. SURVIVORS

How can Lety be remembered? How can a genocide be remembered?

Just a few hundred Roma and Sinti from the Czech lands survived their wartime persecution. Their tormentors were never punished after the war; the commander of the camp at Lety was acquitted by the courts. The survivors continued to fear persecution, and it was difficult for them to share their memories. However, some survivors never stopped insisting on the necessity of commemorating the fate of the Roma and Sinti publicly.

In the late 1980s, Božena Pflegerová received a book with the lists of the prisoners in the “Gypsy Camps” in Bohemia and Moravia. She herself had been imprisoned in the camp at Lety and gave birth to a daughter there who subsequently died in her arms at the age of three months. She decided to write a memoir and thought about publishing it under the title “Return not Desired” („Návrat nežádoucí“). Her children preserved her manuscript, which was never published, and it is a unique documentation of the need to capture memories of trauma and to publicly pass down testimony about the camp at Lety.