The Prague Jewish Community has joined the critics of Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) chairman Tomio Okamura’s comments on the wartime concentration camp for Roma in Lety, in southern Bohemia, and asked him to apologise to the victims for trampling on their legacy.
In a recent interview on DVTV online news broadcaster, Okamura said the camp was unguarded and people could freely move around. He also said the camp was not fenced, a statement he later withdrew and apologised for.
In the past four days, more than two thousand people have signed an open letter criticising Okamura, who is a deputy head of the Chamber of Deputies.
On Sunday, Czech Television cited statements deputy Miroslav Rozner made at the SPD’s recent congress closed to the public, where he criticised the state purchase of a pig farm standing on the site of the former camp in Lety with the aim to pull it down.
“Undoubtedly, I would never throw half a billion crowns out of the window for the removal of a well-running company for the sake of a never existing so-called concentration camp,” Rozner told the congress.
The Prague Jewish Community (PZO) called on Okamura to apologise in public for trampling on the victims’ legacy. “In the same way, it is calling [on him to] apologise to all historians and other experts who deal with the issue for having distorted the information on the concentration camp in Lety,” PZO wrote on its website. Apart from the PZO, an apology has also been demanded from Okamura by the Brno-based Museum of Roma Culture.
His statements have also been criticised by the European anti-racism movement EGAM, which called it a clear denial of the Roma Holocaust and an effort to create parallel history.
From August 1942 to May 1943, a total of 1308 Roma people gradually stayed in the Lety camp, where 327 of them died and over 500 ended up in Auschwitz.
Experts say the Nazis exterminated 90 percent of Bohemian and Moravian Roma people.
