Božena Růžičková

Bože­na Růžičková was the eldest of nine sib­lings, one of whom died as a child. Her moth­er’s name was Aloisie Růžičková, and her father was a boil­er­mak­er. They trav­elled in the cov­ered wag­on in which the fam­i­ly lived, so the chil­dren did not go to school. They helped their father with his work, for exam­ple, clean­ing the boil­ers that he repaired and made for house­holds and small busi­ness­es. The fam­i­ly was affect­ed by the ban on trav­el­ling [Law No. ¹¹⁷⁄₁₉₂₇ on Trav­el­ling Gyp­sies] and had to set­tle down; but they car­ried on liv­ing in the wag­on. Bože­na Růžičková says that under Ger­many[1] they were dis­persed, and she then lived with her fiancé in the vil­lage of Lobeč. 

[1] After the Ger­man inva­sion. (ed.)

When Růžičková was tak­en from Lobeč to Lety, she was preg­nant. The the Roma were tak­en togeth­er by train and upon arrival they were shaved to the skin. Růžičková recalled the direc­tor[1] admit­ting them the next day and telling them, ​“The gate has opened in front of you, the gate has closed behind you — and from here there is no return.”

There were wood­en bar­racks in the camp. The pris­on­ers slept on tiers of bunks and were giv­en blan­kets. The [warder Bedřich] Pešek was in charge of the camp kitchen, and he would beat the pris­on­ers with a bull­whip for stand­ing in the wrong queue, and steal their food. Růžičková heard that they [the warders] had a cel­lar where they kept for them­selves but­ter and oth­er food that was intend­ed for the chil­dren. The chil­dren were giv­en a thin slice of bread and half a litre of milk as their food. Cab­bages were grow­ing in the mid­dle of the camp, but when the chil­dren want­ed to pick them, they were beaten.

She recalled how one old man was strung up by his arms from pole as pun­ish­ment and left there for about two hours; then they car­ried him off.

Accord­ing to Bože­na Růžičková, bod­ies were buried in a pit; when more of them died, they used lime and cov­ered the pit with dirt.

The pris­on­ers used to go to work, only the old and infirm stayed in the camp. Although Růžičková was preg­nant, she worked in the quar­ry; she gave birth to a baby girl in the camp sick­room. An old­er woman who had expe­ri­ence helped her dur­ing the birth; the child was all right when she was born, but did not sur­vive long[2] Bože­na Růžičková escaped from the camp in 1942 and had to hide in the woods, where she was joined by her fiancé, who had also escaped from Lety. How­ev­er, she fell ill with typhus and was tak­en to a hos­pi­tal, where after a while she was arrest­ed on the basis of a denun­ci­a­tion and tak­en to the Gestapo in Jičín and then to Pankrác in Prague. She was sen­tenced to six years; her fiancé was sen­tenced to death.

Bozena Růžičková was tak­en from Pankrác on a trans­port to Ger­many, pass­ing through pris­ons in Bre­men, Ham­burg and Lübeck. Among oth­er things, she sur­vived a death march; when she could go no fur­ther, she sat down in the snow and wait­ed to be shot like the oth­ers, but a Vlaso­vite put her on a wag­on and saved her.

She was lib­er­at­ed by the British Army in Lübeck and was sent to a repa­tri­a­tion camp where she was tak­en care of by the Swedish Red Cross.

[1] A bet­ter descrip­tion would be camp com­man­der, who was Josef Janovský. (ed.)

[2] Marké­ta Růžičková, born 16 Octo­ber 1942, died 23 Decem­ber 1942. (ed.)

Bože­na Růžičková returned to Prague alone after the war; her par­ents and younger sib­lings had per­ished in the con­cen­tra­tion camp. In Prague she mar­ried Čenek Růžič­ka, a wid­ow­er who had suf­fered a sim­i­lar fate, whom she had known before the war. They moved to Liberec to find accom­mo­da­tion and work, and had a son. After her hus­band’s death, she moved in with relatives.

Bože­na and Čeněk Růžič­ka were the god­par­ents of Čeněk Růžič­ka, the co-founder and chair­man of the Com­mit­tee for the Com­pen­sa­tion of the Roma Holo­caust in the Czech Repub­lic, which has from 1997 been advo­cat­ing the demo­li­tion of the pig farm on the site of the for­mer camp in Lety.