Roma, on Move, Test Europe’s ‘Open Borders’

By SUZANNE DALEY
September 16, 2010

BUCHAREST, Romania — This city is full of stark, Soviet-era housing blocks, and the grimmest among them — gray towers of one-room apartments with communal bathrooms and no hot water — are given over to the Roma population.

Children reflected in a puddle of water in Ferentari, a suburb of Bucharest inhabited mostly by Roma.

Roma like Maria Murariu, 62, who tends to her dying husband in a foul-smelling room no bigger than a jail cell. She has not found work in five years.

“There is not much for us in Romania,â€