‘THEY WILL TAKE MY DAUGHTERS’
On 22 July a longstanding wrong was righted in Czech courts. The Czech senate voted to compensate the thousands of Roma women that were sterilized forcibly or without their consent in Czechoslovakia from 1966 to 2012.
For Esma, who was forcibly sterilized in the early seventies, this move towards redress comes too late. ‘I don’t care for their money now and the ones who did it to us are probably dead,’ she says. ‘I am an old woman – I can barely walk up the stairs. I’ll have to give that money back to them when I pay for my funeral.’
The wombs of Roma women have been subjected to legislation, punishment, and invasion throughout history. The Nazi persecution of Roma women is perhaps the best-known example. Women incarcerated at – the Nazi genocide of Roma – were often summoned for ‘gynaecological examination’, purportedly to examine them for gonorrhoea, but in reality to perform sterilization and test new methods of rendering women infertile. Many did not live to tell their stories: an estimated 90 per cent of Roma living in the territory which makes up the modern-day Czech Republic were killed during the .
