Marie Čovejová

* 1963

  • "They said that I have three children and that for now, so that I don't have to worry too much, they will perform an operation on me, after which I will be "at rest" for five years. And that in five years, I can have more children again, perhaps a boy, so I have little couples in the family. They were able to say it so beautifully that one truly believed them. So I agreed to it. But if they hadn't said that if I didn't go, I would lose my three children, I would never have gone. I was really worried about my children. We were both afraid. And indeed, one woman who didn't go had children taken into a children’s home but got them back after a year. It was clearly a matter of getting as many women as possible to undergo these procedures."

  • “The worst part was that they gave some women cash for it at the time. Or for families where the social authorities saw that they didn't have washing machines - that they were washing the children's clothes by hand - they bought them a washing machine, and that was all. Indeed, this was happening. And there was an awful lot of it. It was very humiliating. They just took away our femininity, such an attack on the body. None of us, mainly Romani women, would ever do it if we had been instructed. It was so quick and arranged that the fear for our children prevailed, lest they get into children's homes. This is what they did to us, the worst thing they could. Just fear, which forced us to undergo this procedure."

  • "I also had a son, but now I don't because a tragedy happened in my life. He got sick, he had epilepsy, he was fifteen years old. And because he had frequent seizures, he died at sixteen, drowned in the water. It's very desolating for me, even though it's been fifteen years. So my only son left. I only have two daughters left. Then I didn't have any more children, nor could I, because when my son was born in the period when the government suggested that no Roma children be born. Social workers visited us and said that we would either undergo an operation they would perform on us, or they would take our children away from us to children's homes. That was also perhaps the worst turning point in my life."

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Ostrava, 20.01.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 01:54:05
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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    Ostrava, 27.01.2022

    (audio)
    délka: 54:11
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of the region - Central Moravia
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If I wasn‘t afraid that they would take my children from me, I wouldn‘t have gone for sterilization

Marie Čovejová / around the year 1980
Marie Čovejová / around the year 1980
zdroj: witness archive

Marie Čovejová, née Kotlárová, was born on May 10, 1963, in Krnov. She has ten siblings. She grew up in Hynčice in the Krnov region. After elementary school, she started working in a textile factory in Krnov and then in local foundries. She gave birth to three children. In 1986, doctors and social workers convinced her to undergo sterilization. She was 23 years old then. They threatened to take her children to an orphanage and claimed that she could get pregnant again after five years. At the beginning of the 2000s, she started attending the Ostrava Association of Illegally Sterilized Women. After a retraining course, she started working as a nurse in a home for the elderly in Krnov. In 2022, she lived in Krnov and helped sterilized women get compensation.