For nearly 50 years, a pig farm has sat atop the ruins of a Roma concentration camp in Lety

The Transmission of Memory

By Esme Rummelhart

Traveling through Central Europe, history surrounds us from every angle; fragments of old city walls in Vienna, the fortifications of empires from a distant era, back up against apartment complexes and sit across the street from McDonalds. In Prague, we absorb the streets of Old Town gazing up at astounding relics of Gothic, Renaissance, and Art Nouveau architecture, while 25 feet below us lays the city’s old floor, raised long ago to avoid the Vltava’s regular flooding. We read about these places, and their long, complicated pasts. We visit museums which tell many (sometimes contradictory) versions of history. As I immerse myself here attempting to absorb it all, it is two archeological sites and their stories, one in Vienna, Austria, and one in Lety, Czech Republic, which stick with me. These sites demonstrate archeology’s potential to illuminate histories which risk being forgotten. They demand we bridge past and present, and compel us to question, even counter, dominant historical narratives.

Plaque detail

Plaque detail

The first of these sites is on Judenplatz, a town square in the first district of Vienna, Austria. A Holocaust memorial sits on the square, while the desecrated foundations of a great medieval synagogue lay beneath it, once the place of worship for Vienna’s first Jewish community. Judenplatz was named for this Jewish community, before it was destroyed in 1421. Eventually a second Jewish community established itself, but just two and a half centuries later Emperor Leopold the First expelled this community from the city. Vienna’s third Jewish community began developing about a decade later, when Leopold invited wealthy Jews back to the city to help finance a war against the Ottoman Empire. They survived for centuries, growing to comprise about 10% of Vienna’s population, until the Holocaust destroyed Jewish life once more. The history of Jewish life and death here is something Austria has often preferred to forget, but Judenplatz holds irrefutable evidence of this history if you know where to look.

A plaque in Judenplatz from the Middle Ages celebrates the burning of the old synagogue and murder of Vienna’s first Jewish community, declaring the city ‘baptized’ or cleansed of Judaism

A plaque in Judenplatz from the Middle Ages celebrates the burning of the old synagogue and murder of Vienna’s first Jewish community, declaring the city ‘baptized’ or cleansed of Judaism

On a wall overlooking Judenplatz towers a stone plaque depicting Jesus’s baptism. It is remarkably well preserved, given it dates back to the 15th century. Without reading Latin the plaque looks innocent enough at first glance, but the inscription’s meaning illustrates this city’s horrendous, antisemitic past. The text compares the 1421 mass murder of Vienna’s first Jewish community and burning of their large synagogue at this very site to the baptism of Jesus. It celebrates the forced drowning of Jews in the Danube River and burning at the stake as a ‘cleansing’ of the city. This plaque, standing alone without explanation or apology, brings the present social climate into question as well. Until recently, a Jewish man would rent the storefront below the plaque and hand out pamphlets. He took the square’s history upon himself, informing onlookers that they stood on the site of a desecrated synagogue, the place of worship for a community of over 800 murdered Jews. To understand why he was alone in this endeavor, we must understand how Austria rewrote its history.

For decades, Austria’s role in the Holocaust has been a point of contention. When the country was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, many Austrians celebrated; they saw the event as a long-awaited return, a recognition of Austria’s historical ties to Germanic culture, and looked forward to promised prosperity. The country was integral to the expanded Third Reich, taking initiative in the oppression and murder of its Jewish citizens. Of their own accord, non-Jewish citizens organized humiliating ‘scrubbing parties,’ forcing Jewish people to scrub the streets. They plundered Jewish homes and synagogues and killed Jewish people, facing no repercussions. After World War II however, Austria officially adopted a victim theory or victim doctrine, under which the country not only denied its role as a perpetrator in the Holocaust but claimed victimhood. Austrian society collectively upheld this myth into the 1990s, when external pressures began forcing the country to reckon with its past. Still, the country often fails to remember its past.

Today, the plaque hovers alone over Judenplatz again without the man’s explanation, but across the square sits the Nameless Library (also called the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial). The memorial’s development was controversial as it required Austria to actively acknowledge its past, but it was finally completed in 2000. It is not the large memorial itself which strikes me the most, but what its construction unearthed: the foundations of the medieval synagogue.

For centuries, nobody bothered to look. As we descended below street-level into the archeological exhibit, I was overwhelmed by the layered history of this site. Its impact went beyond what any reading or discussion had facilitated. Standing on the same ground that Vienna’s first Jewish community stood, staring at the centuries-old foundations laid by their hands during the Middle Ages, the exhibit encapsulates a side of history which has been physically and metaphorically covered up for nearly 600 years. The weight of Vienna’s antisemitic history is undeniable in this space. It directly ties two genocides across time, echoing with the dangers of forgetting history. Coming face to face with such a tangible past demands we be present and ensures we will remember truthfully the fate of Vienna’s historic Jewish communities. In its capacity to transmit this powerful memory, the site itself is a tool for preventing further atrocities.

For nearly 50 years, a pig farm has sat atop the ruins of a Roma concentration camp in Lety

For nearly 50 years, a pig farm has sat atop the ruins of a Roma concentration camp in Lety

Like the Jewish people, the Romani of Central Europe endured not only oppression and genocide during the Holocaust, but also the subsequent marginalization of their history. Again, archeology has the potential to keep this history alive, this time in the small Czech town of Lety. Here, we visited a memorial near the site of a forced labor camp, which Nazi Germany transformed into a Romani concentration camp in 1942. The Romani camp operated for less than one year but imprisoned more than 1,300 Roma people, a quarter of whom died while confined there due to overcrowded, unsanitary conditions. In these deaths, children are overrepresented. Further, as the “Final Solution to the Gypsy Question,” over 500 people were transported from the Lety concentration camp to Auschwitz by May of 1943. By the end of WWII, the Holocaust had killed over 90% of Romani who once lived in the lands which are part of today’s Czech Republic. Before the war, anti-Roma laws had targeted and oppressed “wandering gypsies,” and after the war, Czechoslovakia treated the site of the Romani concentration camp with absolute negligence.

4Since 1971, a pig farm has stood atop the camp’s buried foundations. Initially state-owned, the farm was sold to a private company in 1989 following the Velvet Revolution. Despite the government and the company’s knowledge of the site’s horrendous past, it was only last year that the Czech government took any form of action, buying the farm. Reportedly, they’d been “considering the purchase” for two decades but could never find enough money. The government’s disregard for the Romani people and their history doesn’t come in the form of a victim doctrine, but instead, a more passive (and equally insulting) form of denial which they are only beginning to reconcile. Still, the foundations of the Lety camp remain below the pig farm, and now they are being unearthed.

5In preparation to visit Lety, we read about and discussed its history, which (as of the 1990s) is memorialized near the farm. After visiting this memorial, we stopped at the locked gates of the former pig farm to discuss the site. From beyond the gates, an educator from The Museum of Romani Culture approached our group and invited us in; the organization is just beginning archeological excavations of the concentration camp.

We walk past empty livestock enclosures, up a gentle hill to a muddy field. As in Judenplatz, I find myself standing where people stood decades ago, where they lived and died. I step carefully around fresh excavations, staring down at the bathroom floor buried for years in animal waste, trying not to trip over the small piles of artifacts already accumulating from the new digs. There is a black button on the ground, the same one worn by hundreds of innocent prisoners here, and I wonder who wore this one. Looking up, I take in at the same sky they saw. The day is cold, but it is only September. I keep imagining how a January night would feel here, how cold my hands and nose would be, but I know I can’t come close. I walk back down the hill, past the agricultural structures and through the gate, physically free to leave but mentally invested in this space. I am saturated with emotion and curiosity, something which this site made easily accessible.

Memory, which becomes history, can be written and read, discussed, compiled and displayed in museums, commemorated in monuments, documented visually, or transmitted countless other ways. While trying to grasp the reality of Central Europe, it is the archeological sites which most impacted me, and which I will remember. History becomes visceral, standing in places once inhabited by people who came decades or centuries before me, people whose lives and deaths are closely tied with today’s issues. These sites, like the unearthed foundations of the Judenplatz synagogue or the Lety concentration camp, hold enormous potential for remembering histories which we too often forget. As first-hand memory fades, as survivors die of age, as memory changes, what becomes the mode for the transmission of memory? Those in power can craft and disseminate their rendition of history, perhaps as a victim doctrine, or a museum. But the memory of other, non-dominant, or marginalized histories persist, occasionally transmitted through archeological sites. These spaces have the powerful ability to bring past and present together, creating unique opportunities for reflection and remembrance.