I am not an academic researcher, I am not a journalist, I am a novelist who has known the Gypsy people for most of my life. I am a European by origin who has grown up in World War II. Then too people were persecuted and nailed to the cross, anybody in Germany who did not agree with the Nazis. We were lucky insofar that we were never caught and trapped in those death camps at the mercy of common men turned full-time abusers. Through massacres and ever present death, what gave us wings was hope in a world on the other side of war.
I am sure it is what held Romanian Gypsies/Roma together and going. In Romania they were enslaved until 1865, again I am no academic researcher, but that is what I have read over and over - then pushed out of sight into abject poverty and neglect, no human rights, no opportunity. But, and this is merely human, I am convinced that hope kept them believing in a better future, somewhere down the line.
Europe Unites. The barriers to their prisons FINALLY opened. The day, I am sure, they had been praying for over a century has become reality. Their leaders, those with knowledge of the world on the other side of the invisible barbed wire that has kept them closed off from the world at large, warns them. They do not have the tools to survive in the modern world, they never had access to them.
Again, I compare their destiny to my own. Walking out of the world of war where hope had made life despite it all even beautiful at moments, we walked into the aftermath, where a whole culture lay bombed to the ground and the horrible truth of Nazi persecutions now lay bare, destroying all remaining beliefs in humanity.
Again, racial hatred is out of the bag, is spreading as Europe is nailing her Gypsies to the cross.
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