To Hell and Back

As Russian soldiers advanced on Yahidne in the first few days of March, Julia Vertyenko, 35, was huddled with her husband and daughter in the cellar of her parents’ house. A light bulb hung from the ceiling, the small window was open, and along the walls were homemade shelves full of canned fruit. Her father had taken the precaution of taking a few blankets down there against the cold. The noise of battle was coming ever closer: the attackers had to be in the village soon.

Now, standing in the village street in jeans and t-shirt one blisteringly hot day in June, her hair girlishly tied in a ponytail, she says that in the weeks that followed she often thought longingly of that storeroom in her father’s house. So bright and spacious, so tidy. She had been sitting there with her family for four hours when a Russian soldier yelled through the cellar window: “Everyone out. Or I’ll throw a grenade in the house.”

Her father Igor was the first to climb up the stairs. They made him stand against the wall of the house and he thought he was going to be shot. But the Russian soldiers just laughed, smashed his mobile phone, then made themselves comfortable and fried some eggs while the family stood beside them, frozen with fear. One of the intruders gave Julia’s young daughter, Masha, a mandarin. For one day the family lived downstairs in the cellar, the Russians upstairs in the house. Then the Vertyenkos were forced out onto the street and sent to the basement of the village school a few hundred metres away. They were told it was for their own safety, but it was an order. One of the soldiers gave Masha a farewell gift, chocolate this time. Then he said, “All the best.”

Four months later, Julia Vertyenko, a programmer in the nearby city of Chernihiv, is returning with her daughter to the backyard of the Yahidne school, and to the door that leads to the basement. In the village they call it the dungeon of death. The memories of those weeks in the basement still haunt the young mother’s dreams to this day. Unlike her husband, Serhij, a vet, she is on holiday and therefore not at work but at home, in the village. Masha’s online lessons have just ended. Ivan Podgul, the neighbour who holds the key to the basement, has come with her to the dungeon, which justice officials in Kyiv are treating as the scene of a war crime. Awkwardly he unlocks the green wooden door. Behind it, a narrow staircase leads down into the cold and dark.

They were kept in here for 26 days; other villagers speak of 28 days. Every day, every hour, they were joined by more and more people, driven here by the Russians, street by street, house by house: in the end there were 360 of them crammed into the corridor and the few basement rooms, 136 of them in the one larger room alone. Julia Vertyenko stops in front of the door, hesitating. Should she go down there again? Then she says firmly, “I don’t want it to become a museum inside my head. Am I going to walk past it every day, thinking about it and feeling afraid?”

Before 24 February, when the Russian army invaded Ukraine and Moscow’s troops advanced on the tiny village from the Belarusian border, all the local children attended this school and kindergarten on the edge of the forest. What happened there made headlines around the world. The United Nations, Ukrainian NGOs and the Prosecutor General in Kyiv are all determined to investigate crimes against humanity in Ukraine and bring the perpetrators to justice.

According to the latest list drawn up by the Prosecutor General’s office, Russian troops have committed 19,530 war crimes since their invasion of Ukraine. Yahidne is right at the top of the list. Nine suspects have been identified already, most of them soldiers from the autonomous Republic of Tuva in southern Siberia, near the Mongolian border. At a press conference held on 8 June, Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova acknowledged that the perpetrators had probably returned to Russia and would have to be tried in absentia but added, “This is very important for us, for justice in Ukraine, for the victims and for their families.”

Julia Vertyenko agrees that the investigations are important, but adds, “They’re not everything, though. We also have to go on living here together. Not everyone has come to terms with what happened.” And so she does go down into the basement, Ivan Podgul holding his hand out to her just in case. Masha has skipped ahead already. At the foot of the stairs is a narrow corridor, a few old children’s chairs by the wall. To the left and right are five small rooms, more like sheds, really. It is dirty and dusty. Here and there a few old school desks with notebooks and old textbooks on them; on the floor, shovels, ropes, wooden planks. It stinks of mice and excrement. A blanket here, a sleeping bag there. The windows are shuttered, the air is stuffy. The basement has been left exactly as it was when the whole village was living in it: a dumping ground for old school furniture that had been cleared away but never thrown out, plus the residue from a coerced community facing life or death.

“We were among the first to be sent down here,” says Julia Vertyenko, heading straight for the corner in the far right of the largest room, where she sits down on a children’s chair. “This is where we squatted, there wasn’t room to move around.” She shows us how Masha used to sleep: on her mother’s lap, sometimes on her father’s, her little head on her mother’s shoulder and her legs squeezed in between her parents. Most of them had to sleep sitting up, she says; others standing, leaning against the wall.

She is speaking faster now and has switched to informal pronouns: “you know”, “do you see?”, “call me Julia”. It all has to come out, every last detail, it’s as if it is being sucked out of her. It goes on like this for hours, hours seated on the same children’s chair she sat on back then. Ivan Podgul, the keyholder and friend, crouches down beside her, adding, explaining. Only Masha does not speak a single word the whole time.

The Russians, Julia recalls, initially said they would be in the cellar for no more than five days, then they would all be let out. There was fighting going on outside, it was dangerous. But she thinks it was just much more convenient for them to gather all the Ukrainians in one place and guard them. Little by little, the basement filled up. On 13 March, her sister and niece were pushed into the room. There was rarely any food: “If the soldiers had some themselves, they would sometimes throw it across the room, as if they were feeding dogs.”

After the fourth day, she says, brushing her daughter’s hair out of her face, a few of the women were allowed out from time to time to fetch food from home. What the occupiers had left of it, at least. On a good day there might be a few potatoes each, cooked upstairs in the open, then shared out downstairs.

There was hardly any clean drinking water, even for the children. After a while, they all had diarrhoea and almost all the children had chickenpox. “You have to picture it, they all infected one another in this tight space, they were scratching themselves till they bled, many of them were running a fever.” Once, she recalls, pulling her daughter closer, they let her go home to fetch some tablets for Masha. “But they had long since been stolen.”

Podgul says the soldiers had made themselves at home in people’s houses. He calls them Buryats. Buryatia is another autonomous republic in Siberia. But whether they were from Buryatia or, as previous investigations have found, from Tuva, for Podgul they were all the same: “Even the guys guarding us were afraid of them. There was constant stress because the Buryats were even more brutal than the other Russians. Sometimes they shot each other.”

Every now and then Podgul was allowed out to go and feed his cow. Anyone who was let out of the basement had to tie a white ribbon round their arm and be back within twenty minutes exactly, Julia Vertyenko says: “They said anyone who didn’t come back would be hunted down and shot.” The door to freedom was always barricaded. “We begged to be allowed out to the latrine in the schoolyard. Downstairs there was one bucket per room, it stank to high heaven.” If the soldiers had not had too much alcohol, a few people would be allowed out. “Everything depended on their mood. Food, water, life, death.”

The buckets quickly overflowed and the air became unbearable. “At some point they started letting us go outside to the toilets at eight o’clock every morning. Anyone who was allowed upstairs for the few minutes they gave us had to step, roll or climb over dozens of people.” One man who had fled from Donetsk to Yahidne to stay with relatives looked up at the sky for too long on his way across the yard to the toilet. “They thought he was checking military coordinates. So they shot him.” After that, everyone just looked straight ahead. Julia demonstrates, staring straight ahead, motionless. “But everything was dangerous.” A boy with a tattoo of a Ukrainian trident: shot. A man found on the street: shot.

Julia says she thought everyone was going to die. She and Ivan Podgul both remember the atmosphere down there among the crammed-in people, the constant shrieking and crying, the six-week-old baby whimpering in the corner to their right, the rows, the despair. It was all burned into their memories, forever. On one occasion, the Russians tried to drag one of their neighbours outside. “She resisted the rape so loudly, yelled so wildly, that we could hear her from the basement. They sent her back down. Unharmed, I think.”

And then, says Julia Vertyenko, people started dying, one by one. Someone kept a list on a whitewashed wall in the smallest room. To the left of the door were the names of those who had been shot. To the right, the names of those who had died due to the lack of the most basic necessities: air, food, water, safety. According to Prosecutor General Iryna Venediktova at her press conference, ten people died in the school basement over the course of those four weeks, and sixteen were taken out and shot. “We were only allowed to carry the bodies up to a boiler room next to the school every few days,” says Ivan Podgul. “That’s how long they were left lying among us. Every now and then, some of them would be buried somewhere outside the school wall.”

“It sounds strange,” says Julia Vertyenko, “but sometimes I didn’t know where I would be safer: here in the middle of this starving crowd of people I knew? Or out in the open air, among armed Russians and under constant fire? In a perverse way, the basement was also a shelter.”

At some point, after an eternity that ended on the last day of March, a soldier came into the cellar. They were pulling out, he shouted. The Russians were still blowing up an ammunition depot in the pine forest behind the school, and it had been hellishly noisy for hours, as if the world was coming to an end. Then everything fell quiet. “We looked outside through a hole in the door. Then some brave person opened the door. Total silence. For a short time the only thing you could hear was the wind,” says Julia Vertyenko. Then you could hear the noise of battle again in the distance. The tanks of the occupiers were gone. The trenches they had built around the school were empty. It was only hours later that the first Ukrainian soldiers arrived in the village.

The inhabitants of Yahidne go on living with these images in their heads. The fear is slow to fade, say Julia Vertyenko, and later a kind of self-loathing was added to it. Almost four weeks without washing, almost four weeks in the same shoes, the same underwear, emaciated, covered in lice. “The first time I took my clothes off, my skin came off with them.” Everyone, she says, had scabies afterwards, or eczema.

Now, a few months on, everything seems peaceful. Everything is green and lush; a woman goes by on a bicycle. As if this were a normal village. Along the dusty roads there is the smell of elderflower. The cherries are on the verge of ripeness, pears and walnuts are still small and green, cornflowers and lupins are blooming in the gardens. A solitary rooster struts across the street. Nearly all the houses are damaged: some just have a hole in their roof, of others only the chimney remains.

The deputy mayor, Mykola Rudenok, has heard there is a journalist in the village and rushes over. He tells us that seventeen villages have been merged as part of a territorial reform, but that there is no money anywhere, the war has left almost all the inhabitants without employment, and there is a lot to do. Yahidne is now famous, for tragic reasons, but the other villages have been partially destroyed by the Russians too. “We didn’t know that more than 300 people were being held in a basement,” says Rudenok. “But what could we have done in any case? We were totally powerless ourselves.”

After the liberation, four buses set off to Khmelnytskyi Oblast, to the west, but many of the villagers who left on them came back again later. Rudenok says there is still a fear that Putin’s men will return, and that there has been a “steady nervousness” throughout the area ever since the enemy was driven out by the Ukrainian army.

At the end of June, a few days after our visit to Yahidne, Belarus-based Russian missiles are again fired at the nearby city of Chernihiv and the villages around it. Bombs fall on Kyiv, on Kharkiv, on a shopping mall in Kremenchuk. The Kremlin’s message is clear: the frontline is everywhere.

But things are moving forward: everywhere in the village people are building, polishing, hammering. Volunteers from the aid organisation Dobrobat have come to Yahidne from all over the country to help: a washing machine repairman from the Donetsk district, a carpenter from Dnipro. NGOs are sending doctors and psychologists. Julia Vertyenko and Ivan Podgul have accepted the offer of talking therapy. “It can’t do any harm to talk about what this has done to us,” Julia says.

And now? Ever since it happened there have been fierce, bitter fallings-out, in the street, between neighbours. Arguments about donations, arguments about which roof should be repaired first. A church aid organisation has driven a van up to the cultural centre, now in total ruins, and helpers are handing out bags containing oil, maize and flour. Women bicker, men shout, children push. Julia Vertyenko has got hold of two bags of food for her family and her father, and is carrying them home along the village street. “There’s been a lot of envy since it happened,” she says. “The atmosphere has been poisoned. For too long we saw too many terrible, intimate things about each other.” Does she hate the Russians for it? “Hate? No. But they took our health, destroyed our lives. It’s more that I despise them.”

In mid-June, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg asked Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov about the Ukraine war in a long interview that covered, among other things, the crimes in Yahidne. Russian officials, too, had investigated the allegations against their soldiers, whom the Ukrainian side accuses of war crimes in the tiny village. According to the Kremlin, no wrongdoing was found. The wife of one of the soldiers from Tuva had also first told a Radio Liberty reporter who had contacted her via social media that her husband could not hurt a fly. She later denied that he had ever even been in Yahidne.

Rosenberg now asked Lavrov quite specifically: Holding up to 360 people, some of them children, elderly or disabled, in a basement for a month – was this “fighting the Nazis”?

At first, Lavrov dismissed the claim as fake news, but the interviewer pressed him further: Was everyone in Yahidnelying? Lavrov conceded that “Russia is not squeaky clean.” On the contrary: “Russia is what it is. And we are not ashamed to show who we are.” And it sounded as if he was proud of it.

Translation by Paula Kirby / Voxeurop.

Sacrificed lives: on Romanian women looking after elderly people in Italy

Imagine what it’s like living the life of someone old and ill before you are old and ill yourself. Canceling your own identity and conforming to the rhythms of their lives. Waking up in the morning when they wake up, washing them, making them breakfast, keeping them company 24 hours a day.

Cooking, playing cards if asked, cleaning around the house, sometimes being criticised by them and their family, watching the TV shows they want to watch, getting them ready for bed, going to bed at the same hour as them, waking up at night if they need you or shout out because of hallucinations – some patients have dementia or Alzheimer. Day after day, year after year, for 15, 16, 20 years of your life. Years you have not lived, because there was no more room for your own life, for walks, love, music, parties, family or friends.

You only have two hours off, but not every day and only if you’re lucky enough for the Italian family that employs you to at least observe this one right you have.

You live every day in the house of strangers, some of whom treat you kindly, while others don’t. Some count the biscuits you eat and ask you why you use so much of the coffee, others keep you in the cold in winter, asking you to do the laundry by hand and treating you like a servant for the whole family, though that was not your initial agreement.

You might be doing undeclared or semi-declared work in Italy, in other words either without a contract, or with one that only declares five or six hours a day, though you work 24/7. Of course, 24/7 work is illegal in Italy, but the families are unwilling or can’t afford to pay more tax or hire two badanti,* as necessary.

You accept it all, because you are forced by the debt and poverty back in Romania. You need this job, and your family in the country needs the money you earn.

Your pension will be small, so you can expect an old age with no safety net. You can only hope your sacrifice will not be forgotten by the children you helped.

You are far from your family. Your children have grown up without you and you feel guilty for it. Sometimes, relatives in the country treat you like an ATM. You are foreign to the life you left behind. You never feel “at home” with the elderly people you look after, no matter how kind your employer family is.

You grow attached to the elderly, because you spend two, five or ten years with them. You are the only person who is by their side every day, who knows their sufferings and their habits. You take care of them as they sink deeper into their illness, you are next to them when they start to agonise. You think of the life you never had a chance to live, because you’ve lived the life and death of these old people.

If you are lucky, the Italian family will let you stay with them for a few more days or a week, until you find another job, taking care of another elderly person. If you are not lucky and have no labour contract either, the family can throw you out from one day to the next. There is no guarantee in this line of work.

You take your suitcase and move into the house of another old person, to learn their habits and get acquainted with their suffering.

You read press articles that blame you for leaving your children home alone, with offensive comments. You don’t know who these people are, those who judge your life and decisions without knowing them.

You don’t know for how long you will continue to work in Italy, because your family always needs your help. Sometimes you return home years later, after falling ill yourself, away from your children, doing the hardest job in the world.

“If I had stayed in my country, I’d be long dead”

This spring I spent a few weeks in the southern Italian region of Puglia, where I met several Romanian women working as badanti. I spoke with them in the parks in the small towns of Lecce province where they go during the two hours off which they should have each day, but which they don’t always get.

City of Cursi, Province of Lecce, Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

The reasons they left the country have been known for years and have to do with day-to-day life in Romania: unemployment, poverty, marginalisation of the vulnerable. Many Romanian women sacrificed themselves for their families when their husbands lost their jobs following the closure of factories or mines. Some are single mothers who have had to leave their children to afford raising them. Others were left without a workplace when textile workshops or various factories in Romania closed down.

In the weeks spent in Puglia, I discovered a phenomenon that should have started to worry us years ago, when a whole wave of Romanian women first left to look after elderly people in Italy: many of them fled the violence of their husbands. In the absence of programmes for survivors of domestic violence and shelters for women, migration was their solution for saving their lives.

After I published one of my articles on badante on our Facebook page, Teleleu, it gathered hundreds of comments, most of them from Romanian women looking after elderly people in Italy. Many of them said they ran away from the country because of domestic violence, but I was particularly impressed by this comment*:

“If it wasn’t for Italy, there’d be another little place in the world for me to hide from an abuser who, instead of rebuilding his life, is still looking for me to kill me for not putting up with his maltrato. I chose to live for my four children, even running away and doing honest work in this tough world, putting my life back together with someone else, because I wanted my children to be proud and happy. And today I am pleased with what I decided. If I had stayed in my country, I’d be long dead. This way I disfruto and am proud of my children, because they still have me and always had me to support them when they needed me.”

This is not the only woman who wrote to me saying she saved her life when she went to work in Italy. A. shared with me a similar story: “I was 25 when I was left to raise my child alone, after my mother told me she’d help me with her. So I left my daughter in Romania with her (biggest mistake of my life). The child’s father took drugs, beat me, was very jealous, once he wanted to drive his car off a bridge with me. He wanted to kill me. I was pregnant then, I miscarried because of the stress – and he said it wasn’t his baby. I called the police and left to work as a badante through an agency. I had no home, I had no one. I had no other choice.”

Leverano, Province of Lecce, Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

The Romanian state’s failure to build shelters, improve legislation and implement programmes supporting survivors of domestic violence has led to migration over the last few decades.

Migration is a consequence of the social problems faced by Romania, and when politicians speak of this phenomenon, they should also speak of solutions for survivors of domestic violence. 26.809 cases of domestic violence were reported in 2020, and 72 people were killed as a consequence, most of them women and children.

There is a direct link between migration and domestic violence, underage motherhood, racism, corruption, unemployment, the malfunctioning of the health and education system, as I have written before.

The number of Romanians living abroad is enormous: in Italy alone there are now 156.855 Romanian badante. The real number could be double, because DOMINA, an association for families, estimates that 57% of them do undeclared work. On the 1^st of January 2021, there were 1.076.412 Romanians living in Italy.

She lost years of her life in exchange for the over 100.000 euro she earned in Italy

Eugenia was 43 in 2011, when she ran away from home because of domestic violence; she, too, saved herself by going to work in Italy. She used to live in Tulcea, in her parents’ old house, with her husband and 17-year-old daughter.

She borrowed 100 euro from a friend, packed some summer clothes and took the bus to Lecce, in southern Italy, where she had heard there was work to be found. She only had a pack of biscuits and some bagels – her food for the two-and-a-half-day ride. You can read her whole story here.

Eugenia, 54, cares for a 94-year-old woman from Leverano, Lecce province. The photo was taken in front of the house, on the street where he lives. Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

Ileana [a pseudonym] left Romania at 41 because of domestic violence: she was afraid she’d lose her life. Still, she continued sending money to her husband, because they have two children together and they built houses for them on the land they own.

Ileana often only kept 10 euro for herself, in case she fell ill and needed medicine. She did undeclared work, with no contract, because when you need money and don’t want to go back home to your violent husband, you’ll accept anything.

She was humiliated, offended and kept in the cold by the Italian families she worked for. She was treated as a servant, lost years of her life in exchange for the over 100.000 euro she sent to her family in Romania during her 16 years of work in Italy.

Now Ileana has nothing. Her husband won’t let her return to the house he has renovated with the money she earned in Italy. She has no legal recourse against him, because the land under their house and those they built for their children belongs to him, as inheritance from his parents. She wouldn’t dare take him to court anyway, because she is afraid of her violent husband.

She has no savings, because she has sent home almost all her earnings, and in a few years she will reach retirement age. This is just a manner of speaking, since Ileana will have no pension, considering she’s done almost all her work without a contract. So I reformulate: in a few years, when Ileana becomes unable to keep up with this hard work, she will have no home and no income to rely on.

She is not the only citizen in this situation, and the Romanian state is not ready for their return. Dozens of thousands of Romanian women, now badante in Italy, will return to the country in their old age. Some will come back to their violent husbands, because they have nowhere else to go. Others won’t be able to support themselves, because their work in Italy was undeclared.

How will we support these women? What is the Romanian state’s strategy for the social problems they will face – the lack of income in old age, violence from their partners, or situations like Ileana’s, in which families don’t let them come back after they sent them all the money they earned in Italy?

Their life is a series of sacrifices

Romanian women are used to sacrificing themselves, because local society has this expectation of them. And a badante’s destiny involves sacrifice, because living 15, 16, 20 years of the lives of elderly ill people whom you look after day after day until their death is no life.

Their sacrifice goes so far that some Romanian women even find extra work cleaning during the two hours off they should have every day, like Ionela told us. “Working as a badante is like being on house arrest,” a Romanian woman commented on our Facebook page.

Mioara (left) and Neta (right), both from Craiova, work as maids in the town of Cursi, province of Lecce. Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

Priest Ioan Grancea of the Eastern Orthodox church “Sfântul Cuvios Irodion de la Lainici” in Lecce, Italy, says Romanian women don’t consider underclared work and unpaid holiday overtime a breach of their rights, because they come to Italy with the thought that they must sacrifice themselves for their families.

Many of them, apart from the difficulties they face in Italy, are subject to pressure from back home: debt they need to pay off, domestic violence, relationship problems, children who don’t understand their mothers’ sacrifices.

One of the stories that stayed with priest Ioan Grancea was the case of a Romanian badante diagnosed with fast-growing cancer while she was looking after an elderly man. The priest and a few members of the Romanian community helped her file a request for financial aid from the Italian state.

The woman didn’t wait for the documents to be processed; she found work with another family, who didn’t know she was ill. She took time off once a month to go to chemotherapy. Though the priest and the Romanian community around the church tried to convince her to change her mind, she wouldn’t hear of it – she told them she had to help her son, who was having trouble back in the country.

“To ask for your rights, first you need to afford it”

When people discuss the rights of Romanian badante and the abuse they suffer, some voices continue to blame the victims: Why do they accept to work in those conditions? Why don’t they ask for their rights?

Their vulnerability begins in Romania, the first country where their rights haven’t been observed. Romanians put up with abuse abroad because no one in their own country has taught them they have rights.

Many of the women were already badly paid and exploited in Romania. Eugenia worked at a bread factory in Tulcea, where she broke a leg going down stairs holding a crate with products. Though she limps to this day because of that work accident, the factory never paid her any damages.

Marcela grew up in a community in Curtea de Argeș where many women were beaten by their husbands, as she was. There are 30 families on Marcela’s street, and 10 women there have left to work abroad. For many Romanian women, Italy was a way out, because the Romanian state never held out a helping hand in the form of proximity bracelets for aggressors or sufficient beds in shelters.

Because they have always been on their own, these women don’t know how to ask for support from institutions when they are sexually abused. They are afraid, because in Romania domestic violence has crushed their courage.

Poverty makes you vulnerable, as one of the women who left a comment on our Facebook page put it best: “Is there any stronger force that can keep you there [in poor labour conditions] than debt and the wish to give your children a better life?”

“When you have children to raise, you work and that’s that. To ask for your rights, first you need to afford it,” another Romanian woman wrote to us.

“No one’s keeping you there by force, except for the need,” someone else said.

And a Romanian woman quoted “a saying” among badante: “Their shit [the Italian patients’] is our bread.”

The stories I learned in these last weeks are heartbreaking: single mothers, abused women, a widow who lost her job when the tailoring workshop that hired her closed, a young woman who remembers she was 14 when her mother went to Italy for work and she felt abandoned.

You can’t speak of migration without speaking of all these social problems generating it. You can’t cut out a slice of Romanian reality and ignore the whole context around it.

In the last few years, Italy has seen an influx of women from the Republic of Moldova, who come from even greater, more traumatising poverty than that in Romania – if, that is, poverty and its trauma bear any ranking.

Romanian badante blame the Moldovans for “ruining the market” because they accept undeclared work in poor conditions and for less money.

Others have complained that Romanian women don’t support each other, that they steal each other’s jobs, gossip and envy each other, ask their fellow badanti for money in exchange for finding them jobs. In the community in Lecce, a few badanti wanted to rent a one-room apartment together, to have it available for emergency situations – if one of them was thrown out by the family she works for, or is exploited by her employer, she would have this safe space to spend a week or two in, until she found a solution. They would have paid 10 or 15 euro a month each (rent is low in southern Italy), but the plan eventually fell through because of arguments between them.

Lecce, Italy, May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

I was not surprised by the story, because solidarity is a value you learn when you have the privilege of a financially comfortable life. Poverty is ugly and humiliating, it mutilates many people, and its trauma remains and changes behaviours.

Victims blame each other, but the responsibility shouldn’t rest on their shoulders. The responsible parties are the Romanian and Italian state, but so far they have been accomplices to the abuse suffered by badante.

“The Italian state is an accomplice to this situation”

Silvia Dumitrache, the founder of Associazione Donne Romene in Italia, an association defending the rights of Romanian workers, says both the Romanian and the Italian state take advantage of the badante’s sacrifices: the Romanian economy grows with the money they send home, while Italy saves on expenses.

According to the DOMINA report, the overall cost of elderly care work paid by families amounts to 11,6 billion euro – which the Italian state saves, by no longer providing such care through its public assistance service.

Moreover, the Italian state gains money from the taxes paid by the families who sign employment contracts with their badante. Silvia Dumitrache says institutions turn a blind eye to many badante  working 24/7 and to breaches of their rights: “The Italian state is an accomplice to the situation.”

Mirela Videa, employment and social affairs attaché at the Romanian Embassy in Italy, believes the Italian state should implement two solutions: providing tax rebates to families caring for elderly members and creating an institution to manage “the confluence between demand and offer”, allocating jobs and eliminating black market brokers, who exploit workers.

Silvia Dumitrache says Romania has the responsibility of informing Romanian workers, who should know their rights when they go work abroad.

Ionela and Bogdan Potcovariu work as nurses in Italy. In 2011, they bought a house in installments in Neviano. May 2022. ©Cosmin Bumbuț

While I was doing interviews with Romanian badanti, I received two recurrent answers to the question “Why did you come work in Italy?” Many women told me they had debts from buying house appliances or from loans they took out when a family member died unexpectedly and they couldn’t afford the funeral.

Migration is only a slice of Romanian reality, in which women leave their children to be able to pay the installments for their washing machine.

***

Close to Easter, I published a material describing the atmosphere among Romanians spending the holiday in Lecce province. It included a few paragraphs about badanti who can’t make it to the Romanian store for their groceries nor to the Easter Vigil in the Romanian church, because they can’t leave their elderly people alone.

The material gathered many comments on Facebook – some from badanti, some from people who understand their suffering and sacrifice. Others were offensive and stunned me with their meanness and lack of empathy.

I will end with a few of these latter comments, so we can read them and feel ashamed. Because it is not just the institutions, but also us, common Romanians, who have a responsibility to see these women, to understand their suffering and to fight for their rights – rights that should be demanded not only by them, the victims, but also by us, who have the privilege of knowing solidarity.

They’re actually the Italians’ women..it’s just their citizenship that’s Romanian..😁 I know their likes 🤣

What a Bitter life better a svervant in my own country than for foreigners

Stay wherever you can make a good living but, you expats stop deciding the fate of those of us who stayed home.

Well stay there then, but stop moaning about how you miss your country ,your family.

Italian pensioners can afford “badante” while Romanian pensioners live on 5 lei a day .

We know their kind,no poso di parlare romena..🤣 Cheap women for the italians..🤣

In that case, if you’re doing so well there, they should withdraw your right to vote in the presidential and parliament elections, you’re the reason we were stuck with Basescu and Iohannis who ruined our country

You’re all sex slaves for the Italians 

Anyway, you’d better give up Romanian citizenship, so we know who’s on our side and who isn’t .

well thats because back in the country you were an illiterate bum, there at least you wash some ass and can afford panetone from lidl. fucking illiterate scum, the moment you step outside the border you start badmouthing this country like it’s the country’s fault that you didn’t finish 8 years of school and lived your whole life in rubber boots, fuck your life in italy

Yes, they look after old people, while our own old people are left to die in misury.

no one’s asking you to come back slaaves

i … on you you’re their slaves and when you come to the country you act all big and forget romanian

Stay there, since you sold yourself for a ,,paneton,,

*I have decided to use the term badante in this text; it became commonplace in Romania in the early 2000s, when căpșunari (strawberry pickers) and badante (live-in carers) were the most important waves of migrations in our country yet. I find its social and cultural semantics crucial for the story of the Romanian diaspora. In Italy, the word badante is still used informally, though in public communication terms like “domestic worker” or “family assistant” are preferred.