“It really bothers me that the traditional Roma culture is dying out. I understand that the pressure of the society on our culture is huge, incredibly huge, but yet, our culture is so beautiful… The society is what it is and I won’t send a message to the society, I’ll rather tell the Roma to rediscover their culture. To look for all the attributes of the culture, because not all Roma know it, and to rediscover all the beauty of our culture, the relations, how it works in the families. That’s what I’d really like.”
“My mum, when I then asked her about it… She was transferred from Lety to Auschwitz and because she was young and the Germans welcomed such work force, she survived. Later, I asked her which had been worse, whether Auschwitz or Lety. And she told me quite clearly: ‘In the Lety camp I lived in such a small space and I was more on display.’ Of course, I had known much more about Auschwitz before I learned something about Lety. At school we had learned about Auschwitz and what had happened there many times. And also from the other Roma – when they met, they would talk about Auschwitz, but never about Lety. So, knowing all the details about Auschwitz, I was surprised that Lety had been a worse experience for her. She explained it to me: ‘I lived in such a small space, I was more on display and they beat me,’ that is the Czechs.”
“He put her in a car and drove her to Mladá Boleslav, he had a friend there who was the chief of the infectious disease ward, and he thought he could save her there. She was in the infectious ward for about two days but then someone from the village must have given her away. Probably someone… I don’t know this for sure but intuitively I assume that it could have been someone from the mayor’s family, someone there could have known. So that’s how the Czech policemen learned about it and they came for her after those two days. The chief of the infectious ward didn’t turn her in, precisely because it was Czech policemen. He just somehow justified it. They left without her but then the next day they came back again, this time with some Nazi official. There were no excuses to be made anymore. So they put her in a passenger car and drove her directly to the Lety camp, where she met… The concentration camp in Lety near Písek, where she met her whole family and all the Roma from the Loukov village who had been arrested and put on that register.”
Čeněk Růžička was born October 28, 1946 in Liberec. He comes from an ancient Roma family that has been settled in the Czech lands from several centuries. Both his parents were interned in the concentration camp in Lety near Písek from 1942 to 1943, his mother Alžběta Růžičková was then deported to Auschwitz, father Jan ended up in the Dora concentration camp. Their relatives did not survive the Roma Holocaust. After the war the family lived a nomadic life until its official ban in the late 1950s. Since 1997 Čeněk Růžička has devoted himself to the commemoration of the Roma Holocaust. He has fought to remove the pig farm that stands in the place of the former Lety concentration camp. He engages in lecturing and exhibition work. He received the Alice Garrigue Masaryk Award from the US ambassador. He founded the Committee for the Redress of the Roma Holocaust. Čeněk Růžička died on December 9th, 2022.
