Parallel Readings – Narrating Violence, Gender and Ethnicity

Roza was sterilized as young women in a concentration camp in 1944. She could thus have no children. Of course, she would have been able to adopt children. But for some reason she did not do so, although she had happy marriages. Her first husband, who was considerably older than she, had passed away and she got married again. The other woman, Mari was born in 1950 at the margin of a village, in the so-called “Gypsy lane.” In 1970, she got acquainted with a non-Roma man and became pregnant but the child was stillborn. In the hospital, while undergoing a Caesarean section, she was sterilized with no reason and notice. Ten years after, when marrying another non-Roma man, she wanted to have a child. Mari visited a number of doctors; she went through several operations without any success. She wanted to adopt a child but when the nurse told her that she should get a child who had a Gypsy mother and a “Hungarian” father she rejected the offer. Thirty years later when Mari’s uterus had to be removed she fell into depression. At that moment, she understood she had been sterilized in 1970. Analysing the two biographical interviews, one can observe both substantial differences and surprising similarities. Is ‚gendered’ violence that influenced the Jewish and Roma identities of these women in the same way? Why can the personal experience of forced sterilisation not be narrated as a collective experience - a collective ‚history’ of suffering - of ethnic groups? In my paper I will try to answer these questions.