The commemorative ceremony was organized by the Municipal Department of Prague 6 in partnership with our Prague Forum for Romani Histories (Faculty of Arts, Charles University) and with the Museum of Romani Culture in Brno.

The Prague Forum for Romani Histories prepared for the event a leaflet with the eyewitness testimony of Karolína Kozáková, née Růžičková. 

Karolína Kozáková published her memoirs in the year 2004 under the title Cesta životem v cikánském voze [My Journey through Life in a Gypsy Wagon]. So far, it is the only known eyewitness testimony to the internment of Romani people on the grounds of the forced labor camp in Ruzyně. 

When the transport of Roma and Sinti from Bohemia left Prague-Ruzyně for Auschwitz (to be exact, for Auschwitz II-Birkenau), Karolína Růžičková (whose married surname would later be Kozáková) was not yet 11 years old. In the interwar period, Karolína, her parents and her siblings had made their living traveling to the markets in Bohemian and Moravian towns in the horse-drawn wagon that was their home. Her father, Robert Růžička, traded horses and sharpened knives and scissors, while her mother Jana (née Čermáková), sold sewing supplies door-to-door. For the children, life on the road meant frequently changing schools, among other things. Again and again, they attended new schools among new pupils for just a short time, and their parents took great care to make sure they did so. At the beginning of 1940, the Government issued an ordinance “banning nomadism” and forcibly settling Romani people. The Růžičkas then bought a small, single-family house in Zdaboř, near Příbram....