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THE LETY SURVIVORS SPEAK...

In 1994 the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Office of the President engaged in a cover-up trying to convince American writer Paul Polansky that there were no longer any living survivors of Lety, the World War II Romany (Gypsy) death camp in southern Bohemia.

The blatant lies from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and their insistence that Polansky look for a better project, motivated him to find over a hundred Lety survivors still living today in the Czech Republic.

These stories are the result of that search. Reading the survivors' own words shows why the President's Office in Prague does not want the world to know what really happened to the Czech Romany during WW II - because it is still happening today.

HOW IT ALL STARTED...

The villlage of Lety in south Bohemia sent the first Czech pioneer to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1848. Thousands of families followed. I discovered this information in the State Archive of Trebon in 1992 while researching the 19th century exodus of Bohemian peasants. I saw Lety as the cradle of Czech emigration to the American Midwest. The reading-room director where I worked perceived Lety in a different light.

"There was a concentration camp there during the war," she told me. "It was a Gypsy camp. All the inmates died of typhus."

I had visited Lety often, interviewing the local historian, the mayor, several old-timers. No one had mentioned a World War II death camp.

"We have more than 40,000 documents," the reading room director told me. "But no one is allowed to study them for fifty years."

A Gypsy concentration camp? Everyone died of typhus? It didn’t make sense. Typhus wasn’t the bubonic plague. They could easily control it. My dream of asking the Czech government to put up a monument at Lety to honor the cradle of emigration to America suddenly waned.

That same day I re-interviewed the local historian, a retired school teacher who had published seventeen books on the Lety region, from medieval families to stone quarries. I asked him why he had never written about the Gypsy concentration camp.

"Gypsies aren’t worth writing about," he said. "But if you want more information, ask Dr. Kalbache down the road. He was a doctor at Lety."

Eighty-year-old Dr. Kalbache told me his mind was as active as ever. He still remembered all his Greek and Latin from high school. But when I asked him about Lety he couldn’t recall a thing. "That was a long time ago," he said. Finally he told me Lety had been a recreation camp for unemployed Gypsies. "Unfortunately, they were a dirty people and brought disease with them into the camp." Dr. Kalbache declared that he had left long before the tragedy because the camp commander wouldn’t pay his gas mileage from Mirovice to Lety, a distance of three kilometers.

I returned to see the mayor of Lety. He revealed that the camp was where the pig farm is today. The mayor had been born after the war so he knew nothing else. He advised me to speak with an older person who would have been alive during World War II.

I drove out to the pig farm, a few miles to the east. I stopped an old man on a bicycle, and asked if he knew anything about the Gypsy camp during the war.

"Everybody knows about it," he said. "In 1942/43 I rode by it every day on my way to work."

"Was it a German camp?" I asked.

"Of course not," he said. "No Germans were in this area during the war."

"Who were the guards?"

"Czech policemen."

"Did all the prisoners die?"

"Most of them."

"How did they die?" I asked.

"That’s not for me to say," he said, and pedaled off.

Two years later in January 1994, the director of Trebon archives granted me special permission to study the Lety records. He hadn’t seen the records himself, but he didn’t think I would find anything very interesting in the thirty-one boxes that covered twenty-five feet of shelf space. He appeared tired of me pestering him and his staff. He also allowed my Czech assistant to see the records with me.

The first day I discovered a cover-up.