Czechs start razing pig farm built over WWII Roma camp
The demolition of a sprawling pig farm, built on the site of a wartime concentration camp for the Roma minority south of Prague, got underway on Friday following decades of controversy.
Targeted by the Nazis, some 1,300 Roma were imprisoned in the Lety camp during World War II, and 327 died there, including 241 children under 14 years of age.
More than 500 others were sent on to Nazi Germany's infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied southern Poland.
The Moscow-controlled communist regime, which ruled in former Czechoslovakia after the war, built the pig farm on the site in the 1970s.
The regime was toppled in 1989, four years before Czechoslovakia split into two states.
But even then successive Czech governments took decades to finally allow the demolition as the largely impoverished Roma minority stayed on the sidelines of society.
"Today marks the beginning of the end of one of the most shameful chapters in our modern history," parliament speaker Marketa Pekarova Adamova said at a ceremony in Lety.
Together with other officials, she symbolically started the demolition by dismantling a model made of little concrete bricks.
