This is the third installment in our series of articles (see parts one and two) dedicated to the postwar history of the former so-called "Gypsy Camp" at Lety u Písku, or rather, the history of its locations and surroundings as influenced by the overall developments of the history of Romani people on Czechoslovak territory. The period of the 1980s was one that we might call relatively quiet, especially given what was to follow during the 1990s.
The bereaved who had lost their relatives at Lety, as well as the surviving prisoners, regularly visited both the site of the burial ground for the camp and the cemetery in the nearby village of Mirovice, where more than 200 Romani adults and children from the camp had been interred. Adolf Vondrášek, the former mayor of Mirovice, recalls that before he had a memorial plaque to the Romani victims made in 1992 - and ceremonially unveiled in the presence of a priest and local residents - a plaque had been installed by the Romani community themselves at the cemetery at some point in the 1970s or 1980s.
Vondrášek began taking an interest in the subject of the Lety camp in 1964 when he bought a house in Mirovice that had originally been the home of a former gendarme who worked at the Lety camp. Allegedly the former gendarme had moved away from the village precisely because of his infamous past.
According to an expert appraisal from 2017, the value of the buildings and some of the plots of land, given their proposed use, is CZK 77 200 000 [EUR 3 million]. The state has now paid AGPI shareholders CZK 450 million [EUR 17 million] to buy the facility and allocated another approximately CZK 120 million [EUR 4.6 million] to demolish it.
