The socialist Hungarian state wanted to eliminate the so-called 'gypsy problem'. Dismantling the separated gypsy settlements was one way to achieve that goal. That was how the gypsy settlement in my village moved from the visible top of the hill to the invisible valley.
My father was leading the conversation to convince the population of the gypsy hill to leave their mud dwellings for their new concrete houses with no facilities. They were all told that their life will be better and so my father wanted to believe in that.
There was only one public well for more than a hundred people. This was the promised better life. There were only a few people who could escape from here.
I succeeded and became a journalist and a newsreader at the public broadcaster. The governing right-wing ideology could not tolerate gay gypsy faces on the screen and I was bullied to resign and moved to the UK.
In the local steel factory, the heaviest work was always completed by gypsies. My father and my mother had to lift 15 stone pieces of steel for forty years in three shifts. In the end, they both had enough and found refuge in the alcohol.
My sister was married at a young age hoping that she could escape from the poverty we were living in. Their home is only 0.2 miles away from the gypsy settlement.
She and her husband have never had a chance for further education, but nor their children.
Their oldest could not even finish his primary school as the government reduced the school leaving age. Zsoltika found himself clearing ditches at age sixteen as part of the government's public work scheme specifically designed for gypsies. For his work, he received £100 a month.
Everyone from the old gypsy hill came to my mother's funeral, even those who flee the village a long time ago. For my father's funeral however my family did not have enough money, so I had to transfer all I had. That meant, I did not have enough left to travel there.
This trodden path all that remained from the old gypsy hill. I would doubt whether that much can be found in fifty years from the new settlement.
