Express
July 16, 2014
A 20-YEAR-OLD beauty queen who was kidnapped and sold to gypsies for a pair of gold earrings when she was just four has been reunited with her mother.
Olga Romanovich said she cried when she finally saw her mother, Tamara, who is now very ill. “She just exists and I don’t want to hurt her,” she said.
“I do not resent what happened. She experienced a lot of things. I can’t judge her. She’s not to blame, it was fate.”
Speaking from Minsk in Belarus where she now lives with her aunt, Olga said she wants to meet her three brothers who were born after she was abducted.
Olga was snatched after Tamara ran away from her husband and her drunken, aggressive father, taking the child with her.
Desperate and destitute, the pair were cared for at a rail station by gypsies who persuaded them to move to Moldova, 500 miles from Belarus.
They were forced to beg on the street before Olga was abducted.
Tamara claims the gypsies tricked her during a car journey when they stopped at a shop and gave her money to buy cigarettes and then drove off with Olga.