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The life of Susana and Victor who suffered a series of home invasions and a sexual assault due to the high immigration after Romania's revolution.

For many of the 4 million people who fled Romania amid the 1989 revolution, there were elderly relatives and parents who stayed behind. Without the presence of their younger kin, those who remained were left doubly vulnerable to the precarity of life in impoverished rural areas, such as scant access to running water, phone lines, or gainful employment, and a rise in the rate of violent crime. These factors have placed Romania’s elderly population in a, particularly dangerous position.

Victor, 95, and Susana, 92, fell into this socioeconomic gap. They had already outlived all of their relatives and friends when their only child, a daughter, passed away. A series of home invasions soon followed, and Susana was sexually assaulted in an attempted robbery on July 30th, 2019. While her physical pain healed within a few weeks, the psychological trauma pushed the couple much further, making Susana more reliant than ever on Victor, who himself had lost his vision two years earlier. Alone in a ghost village, their humble lifestyle became unbearably harsh. Liver cirrhosis put Victor in the hospital two months after Susana’s ordeal, and his death from the disease on October 8th 2019 has filled Susana’s remaining days with apprehension.