Every night at eight o’clock the French police turn up, check the names of the 11 members of the family and then tell them to leave France. ‘Go back to Romania,’ say the officers. ‘You are not welcome here.’
Now, the Rostas have their final marching orders. The police have given them a deadline to pack their few miserable belongings, including the battered pushchairs of the two children, a girl called Diana, five, and a ten-month-old boy, Armando.
This weekend, the cars they live in ― a Renault, Citroen and Suzuki ― will have been towed away by the Paris authorities and the Rostas will be homeless.
‘We are frightened because we will have nowhere else to go. We came here to feed our children, to get a better life,’ says the head of the family, 58-year-old Toma, in a frayed check shirt.
‘In Romania, we are squashed together in a house with two rooms, no water, no heating, no toilet and no work. Now we are not wanted in France.’
Toma could not have spoken a truer word. He is one of 20,000 Eastern European gipsies or Roma (the vast majority from Romania and Bulgaria and half living in Paris) who have descended on France over the past three years, only to be met by a wave of hostility.
A firecracker has been hurled into this powder keg by French Interior Minister Manuel Valls, an immigrant from Catalonia in Spain. Valls said the forced evacuation of Roma from squatter camps was vital ― and polls showed three-quarters of the French supported him.
The gipsies, he pronounced, deserved to be thrown out of France because they failed to integrate, bringing crime and mafia-style gangs with them.
As things stand, the people of Romania and Bulgaria can spend up to 90 days at a stretch in other EU countries without needing visas.
But from January, when EU controls on their borders controversially come tumbling down, they will be allowed ‘free movement’ across Europe.
The authorities in Britain are already struggling with the numbers who have arrived and are making futile attempts to persuade them to return home.
A group of 60 East European gipsies who set up camp in Hyde Park this summer were given temporary housing, food and shelter.
Twenty received state-funded flight tickets back to Romania. But many of the 20 are back and sleeping rough again in the capital while begging on the streets.
In Germany, too, I found rising numbers of Roma arrivals provoking anger ― as well as a backlash against the gipsies.
Germany, of course, has an appalling history when it comes to the Roma. Before and during World War II, Hitler tried to wipe them out.
One chilling protocol, approved by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels in 1942, declared: ‘Gipsies are to be exterminated. The idea of extermination by work is best.’
Unable to stop this influx, in desperation Berlin has introduced an ‘integration plan’.
Of the 65 schools in Neukolln, nearly half have ‘welcome classes’ for Roma gipsy children where German is taught before they enter the main schools.
It is a multi-cultural place: there is a famous flea market and the streets are full of African migrants from the former French colonies who arrived as cheap-to-pay workers in the capital half a century ago.
It is the sort of area in which you would think the Rostas might feel at home.
Yet even the settled migrants have spat at the Rostas in the streets. I watched in horror as one African drove by fast in his car, swerving to try to knock Victor and Alin off their bicycles and into the gutter.
‘Everyone hates us gipsy people here in Paris, just like they hate us in the rest of Europe,’ said Victor to me sadly afterwards.
ユダヤ人同様欧州で歴史的にずっと虐げられてきているジプシーたちが、ＥＵの移住の自由化で、フランスやドイツに移住しはじめ、ゴミ漁りや売春で生活を凌いでいるが、受入国に同化できないから、出て行けというフランスの大臣、ナチの虐殺の対象となった歴史があるせいか、むしろ、ドイツに同化させて、ドイツ語を教えようとする、ドイツ。
低賃金で植民地からやってきたアフリカ系移民ともうまくやっていけず、欧州全部から嫌われている、と。
日本だと、学者先生が、”欧米”について美化して、空想でものが書けるようであるが、実態はかなり違うようである。
