“When local government people visit, they wear masks and gloves, as if they’re afraid of catching something from us. They are quite hostile,” says Anna, a young Roma woman.
Having fled her home in western Ukraine, she is now living with about 40 other displaced people, all Roma, in a refugee shelter in north-west Hungary. The shelter is in a disused boarding school on a remote spot outside the hamlet of Csermajor.
There’s no fighting around their home village near Uzhhorod, on Ukraine’s western border with Slovakia. But living conditions for Roma people, always precarious, have become even harder since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, thanks to the influx of internally displaced people from elsewhere in the country.
