Pisek, South Bohemia, Aug 1 (CTK) – The trade unions of agriculture workers demand a compensation amounting to two-year wages for the employees of the pig farm in Lety, south Bohemia, situated at the site of a former Nazi camp for the Roma, if the state bought it, the unions told CTK today.
They say the financial compensation for the farm’s employees must be included in the contract of purchase of the complex.
The general meeting of its owner, the AGPI firm, gave consent to the transfer of the Lety pig farm near the Roma Holocaust Memorial to the state on Monday.
The firm did not release the purchasing price for the farm.
AGPI board deputy chairman Jan Cech told CTK today that there were no trade unions in the Lety farm.
“We have nine direct employees and other people participate in the production in some way,” Cech said. He added that he did not know about any financial compensation demands by the Lety employees.
“Moreover, the pig farm in Lety has not been sold yet,” he pointed out.
“We ask Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka to secure talks to resolve all disputable and legal matters concerning the employees before signing the contract (on the sale of the pig farm),” Bohumir Dufek, head of the agriculture and food industry employees’ trade unions of the Association of Free Trade Unions (ASO), said in a press release.
The construction of the Lety pig farm started under the communist regime in 1972. The current complex on a 7.1-hectare includes 13 halls with 13,000 pigs in total. The AGPI firm installed new technologies in a half of the halls in 2013-2015.
The labour camp in Lety was opened in 1940. A similar facility existed in Hodonin u Kunstatu, south Moravia. In 1942, both facilities turned into internment camps and in August of the same year, Romany camps were established there.
Until May 1943, 1308 Roma men, women and children were interned there, 327 of whom perished in the camp and over 500 were sent to the extermination camp in Auschwitz where most of them died. According to estimates, the Nazis murdered 90 percent of Czech Roma people.
Roma organisations have been striving for the pig farm’s relocation for years. The European Parliament (EP) as well as other international organisations have called on the Czech Republic repeatedly to remove the farm from the commemorative site.
