Groundbreaking Czech Roma leader Karel Holomek dies at 86
One of Czechia’s most important Roma leaders, Karel Holomek, has died at the age of 86. An activist, politician and journalist, Mr. Holomek was involved in the foundation of the national Museum of Romani Culture and numerous other key initiatives.
The Roma news website Romea broke the news that Karel Holomek had died on Sunday at the age of 86, describing him as one of the most important members of the country’s Romany community.
Holomek was a man of many activities. In an interview with the Memory of Nations project, he recalled one of them: distributing samizdat literature in the late communist period.
“I found myself among a group of people who were distributing those books. People knew that as a construction site manager I had a service car, and drove from site to site. They knew that was perfect for distributing samizdat, including the magazines Svědectví and Listy, and that I could get it to technical experts. Which I did.”
Holomek also founded a Roma rights organisation, the first in Czechoslovakia, in the1980s. But it was after the fall of communism that he really came into his own.
As a member of Civic Forum he sat as an MP for two years on the Czech National Council, though he will be best remembered for his decades of service to the country’s Romany community.
Gwendolyn Albert is a human rights activist and translates for Roma news website Romea.
“Karel Holomek was one of the very most eminent Romany figures in the Czech Republic and former Czechoslovakia – and I’d really say in the international Romany scene as well. He was among the founders of the Museum of Romani Culture here in the Czech Republic. He also was a blogger and a political commentator.”
Gwendolyn Albert says it is hard to say which of Karel Holomek’s projects and campaigns could be categorised as his greatest achievement.
“I would say that probably it was the work he did to negotiate the state transforming the site of a former World War II concentration camp for Romany people at Hodonín u Kunštátu into the memorial that it is today. The state runs it and the Museum of Romani Culture administers it. He was greatly part of those negotiations, including insisting that the name of the monument referred to the Roma genocide and the Roma Holocaust.”
Albert says Holomek’s work on that memorial paved the way for the state finally buying out a notorious pig farm at the better-known Lety concentration camp for Romanies in South Bohemia. A memorial will be unveiled there too next year.
“Hodonín didn’t have something as shocking going on there, even though it was used for quite some time as a recreational facility, which is kind of wrong. But in my opinion that is the thing that he did that is the greatest contribution – along with the Museum of Romani Culture itself, which today administers both of those memorials.”
In 2002 Karel Holomek received Czechia’s Medal of Merit from then president Václav Havel.
