When Daniela Abraham was a little girl in Slovakia in the 1980s her mother asked her why she was spending so much time scrubbing herself in the bath tub. “Because they told me I was a dirty Gypsy,” she told her mother.
Daniela is Roma. Her persecution in Slovakia began even before primary school — at nursery level: tiny tots refusing to play with her, being bullied, being called a “cigany,” meaning thief, criminal, liar.
Today Abraham, 39, lives in London, where she recently organised the first-ever collective Roma protest against Slovakian neonazis when they visited the capital to try to rally Slovakians living in Britain to their cause.
She uses her mother’s maiden name, rather than her family name, because she still has relatives living in Slovakia, where the rise of the far right is leading to even worse persecution of Roma than existed during her childhood.
In Britain she is also involved in the Sinti Roma Holocaust Memorial Trust. At least 750,000 Roma and Sinti people died in the Holocaust. More recent research says the number is more likely to have been twice that.
