Story
One year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Towards Dialogue Foundation has launched the publication of a series of testimonies by Ukrainian Roma refugee women. Their poignant stories bear witness to the enormously traumatic experience of war.
This text was created as part of the series 'Stories of Roma refugee women' in cooperation with the Foundation Towards Dialogue. It originally appeared on the Foundation's website.
We meet in a small house on the outskirts of Warsaw, where Rada lives with a family of many people. The apartment is cozy, though so small that it's certainly hard to get the space everyone needs. Almost immediately, tea, sugar and homemade doughnuts appear on the table. Our meeting is accompanied by Rada's son-in-law and her minor daughter, who is watching cartoons and music videos on her phone. She gets very angry when Rada tells her to turn it down. Instead, offended, she puts the phone down, but immediately finds another one and sits even closer. She laughs at us, and we laugh along with her.
It's another place they've been staying since the start of the war in Ukraine. Rada tries to count the temporary stay centers and apartments where they have spent several months, sometimes a week, and sometimes just a few days. Eventually she lays her hands on the table, but during the complicated enumeration, she runs out of fingers. They moved more than ten times in a year. Mostly because they were unwanted or conditions proved unbearable. The wandering seems to have no end, because here someone doesn't want them too. "They are getting rid of us because we are Roma. They said directly that they don't want gypsies here." - she explains. Rada doesn't know how long it will be before they have to move again to a new location. She dreams of a real home that she can take care of.
She recalls most fondly the apartment where a man involved in the government program took them in. "He set out food for us - one or two meals a day. Mostly bread and not very nutritious products. My little ones went hungry because most of the meals were too spicy, unsuitable for them. To requests for other purchases, he did not respond." - Rada says, and doesn't get out of her amazement how a grown man couldn't know that children should not eat spicy sausage. A local, friendly Roma intervened and helped with translation and negotiation. Things were a little lighter from then on, until they had to move again.
"Discrimination began as soon as we crossed the Polish border - immediately there was someone who took our documents and wanted to take advantage of us" - begins Rada. When arriving in Poland, they didn't know where to go or who to trust. The man introduced himself as a border guard employee and immediately told them to identify themselves. He took away the ID cards. As it turned out, he planned to extort money from the family in this way, and taking away their only pass for legal residence was a way that he was not the only one to practice. And in this situation, a kind man appeared, a Polish journalist, who helped the refugees and solved the problem.
"Later, legal services showed up and it was suggested to us that young children should go to the city in a bus first, and adults separately in subsequent buses," Rada adds and asks how it is possible, in the face of war, to separate children from their mother. It's just one example of the procedures the authorities used to deal with people from the Roma community. Unfortunately, they differed from those practiced for Ukrainians, about whose origins no one doubted. Roma men and women were inconvenienced - at the border and in many temporary residence centers. Even though they were all fleeing the same war.
"There are bad and good people everywhere. Avoid the bad ones, run away from them. And do your own thing."
Asked for a lesson or advice she could share with others in the Roma community, she replies: "There are bad and good people everywhere. Avoid the bad ones, run away from them. And do your own thing." Despite the devastating experience, Rada found a full-time job as a translator and cultural mediator at UNHCR, an international refugee rights organization. Her husband also found a position and supports Rada in her daily activities. They desire what everyone else does - security. Rada is expecting grandchildren and she is not waiting, but working hard for a better future - for herself, her family, and all those affected by the refugee experience.
Please note that the views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.