Woman sold to gypsies aged four reunited with her family

Woman sold to gypsies aged four reunited with her family
Beauty queen Olga now wants to become a doctor

By Rebecca Gillie Jul 15, 2014

http://www.parentdish.co.uk/2014/07/15/woman-sold-to-gypsies-aged-four-reunited-with-her-family/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cuk-ws-bb%7Cdl3%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D279033

A Belarusian woman who was kidnapped and sold to a gypsy family for a pair of earrings has found her birth family after 17 years of separation.

Olga Romanovich, 21, was snatched aged four after she and her mother moved from Minsk to Moldova following her parents' divorce.

The kidnappers were acquaintances of her mother, Tamara, and ran away with her little girl while she was in a shop buying cigarettes in their new hometown, Soroca.

Soroca is well known as a centre for the country's Romani gypsies, who have lived there for hundreds of years.

After being taken, Olga says that she was given to another gypsy family in exchange for a pair of earrings.

Despite her ordeal, Olga - who now hopes to train as a doctor - has fond words for the gypsy family who raised her for the next 16 years. "I was loved," she told Russian daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. "They raised me as well as they could."
Olga when she was abducted aged 4 (east2westnews)

As time went on, she learnt to speak the Romani language, and was enrolled in a Russian-language school. She then trained as a chef and a hairdresser at a college in Soroca, as well as winning a beauty contest in the town.

Known in her new family as Maria Preyda, she was treated as a daughter by the gypsies who had adopted her. But, Olga says, she was always aware that she belonged somewhere else and cherished the hope of reuniting with her birth family.

It was her adoptive grandmother who urged her to follow her instincts. "She told me 'find your relatives. If I knew anything about your real mother, I would have told you'", Olga remembers.

Interpol, working with Moldovan police, were able to help her piece together the details of her abduction, and DNA tests confirmed that 'Maria Preyda' was really Olga Romanovich.

The first person that Olga wanted to see was her birth mother, who she says is now 'very ill' and 'lives in her own world'. "She is not to blame for what happened," Olga says. "It was just fate."

After her daughter's abduction in 1997, Tamara returned to Minsk and filed a report with police, which she claims was ignored.

In the following years, she became unable to look after her three sons. The well-off family who adopted the brothers also lobbied police to investigate Olga's disappearance, and Interpol finally took on the case in 2007, 10 years after the child went missing.

Now Olga, who is living back in Belarus with a birth aunt, is looking forward to being reunited with her younger brothers and other family members.

I wonder who will pick up on this story?

malena stool wrote:I wonder who will pick up on this story?

A loathsome, pink faced, Team McCann paid bullying oath, with a terminal lying disease and a propensity for verbal diarrhea?

https://missingmadeleine.forumotion.net/t27413-it-s-those-gypsies-again

It's also in an Irish paper, I'll see if I can find the link.

But they didn't enter a bedroom and take a sleeping child

The mother was buying cigarettes. It doesn't make clear where the little girl was waiting at the time.

What this story goes to show is that despite kidnapping children in certain parts of the world, gypsies in those parts have easy access to little children on the streets.

And it also goes to show that anyone who is kidnapped and still alive years later realises how their lives have gone and understand that they have not been raised by their birth parents and even understand the culture behind this trade in children.

That is what makes me believe that Ben Needham is no longer alive and died as a small child and it is what also makes me believe that Madeleine has suffered the same fate as Ben. Ben would be old enough to understand by now and he has the birth mark that has frequently been spoken about and he probably looks like the odd one out in the family he is living with if he is alive, so I doubt he is. Admittedly he was much younger (18 months) so you never know, but I think we all have a sense deep down of where we have come from, family traits and all that.

Agreed LJC, this article does the McCanns no favors. It also draws attention to the fact that most young children are snatched by someone known to them, rather than the rare stranger abduction as Gerry claims to have occurred with Madeleine.