Prague, Jan 4 (CTK) – The Hodonin Memorial on the site of the wartime concentration camp for Romanies in Hodonin u Kunstatu, south Moravia, will open in summer, according to an Education Ministry’s report that the cabinet will discuss next week.
Apart from the so-called gypsy camp, the Memorial will present information on an internment centre for the deportation of Germans from the country and on a forced labour camp, in which the complex turned shortly after World War Two and in the 1950s, respectively.
The reconstruction of the Hodonin Memorial was completed last summer. At present, a permanent exhibition is being prepared. The Education Ministry plans to open it to the public in August.
The only building for prisoners that has remained in the former camp will house the emotional part of the exhibition showing the everyday life of the Romany inmates – the meals, hygiene, labour regime and repressions.
In the reconstructed house of the guards, the equipment used in the camp will be displayed.
An information centre will provide the Czechoslovak and European context of the historical developments. Films on World War Two, the Holocaust, totalitarian regimes and human rights will be shown in a cinema hall in which lectures and temporary exhibitions may also take place.
Each of the camp’s victims, 207 Romanies and 81 Germans who died during the deportation, will be remembered by one vertical pole in the memorial.
In 2009, the Education Ministry bought the camp premises from a private owner. In 2011, the government approved the building of the memorial in its current version, which is to cost 98 million crowns in total. In 2012, the Comenius National Education Museum and Library became the administrator of the complex.
During World War Two, the Nazis established two camps for Romanies in the Czech territory, in Hodonin and Lety, south Bohemia.
A pig farm has been operating on the site of the former camp in Lety and the government has been considering its purchase for a long time. The Culture Ministry will order an expert opinion on the price of the land later this month and it is to receive it by the end of March, the ministry’s spokeswoman Simona Cigankova told CTK yesterday.
Culture Minister Daniel Herman said the pig farm owners recently started considering the sale of the farm for the first time.
