Prague, June 29 (CTK) – The preparations for the opening of a memorial to Czech Roma Holocaust victims in Hodonin u Kunstatu, south Moravia, scheduled for this July, were stopped due to the unclear position of its administrator and its form, the Education Ministry said today.
The Education Ministry Pedagogical Museum is in charge of the project, but the Government Council for Roma Minority Affairs has asked the government to transfer the area under the Culture Ministry and its Roma Culture Museum.
“The museum has stopped the work on the exhibition because there are roughly 95 million crowns involved in the form of the work on the memorial,” the Education Ministry said.
“The date of the opening was planned in accordance with the completion of the exhibition. The opening is connected with the administrator’s role,” it added.
If the site is transferred, the Culture Ministry and the Roma Culture Museum will have to agree on the date of the opening, the ministry said.
The construction was finished a year ago. The exhibition was to be finished by the end of this June, too.
The pilot operation was to start in July and the memorial was to open to the public in August.
In the “Gypsy camp” in Hodonin u Kunstatu, the authorities of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia held Romanies from Moravia before their transport to Oswiecim (Auschwitz) between August 1942 and September 1943.
A total of 1,396 persons passed through the facility, 207 of whom died in it.
When the Romanies left the camp, it served as a field hospital for Red Army soldiers.
After the war, Germans were interned in the camp before they were transferred from Czechoslovakia. Many of them died there of typhoid.
In the 1950s, a forced labour camp was in Hodonin for two years. Then there was a recreational facility there.
The Culture Ministry says the memorial is supposed to be transferred under the Roma Culture Museum by January 1, 2018. The government is yet to decide on the transfer.
($1=23.141 crowns)
