Maria's Story

Published by Diverse Publishing

ISBN: 0-9548143-1-2

£7.99

PUBLISHED APRIL 2005

Maria’s Story is a true story of love, hope and survival and of one woman’s battle to change her life.

Maria lost her legs when she was five years old, falling off a train while on her way to visit her grandmother in Siberia. At 17, during a village summer festival, she was kidnapped by a group of gypsies and smuggled to Moscow, where she was forced to beg. Living in squalor and unable to contact her family back home, she was forced into a gypsy marriage, repeatedly raped and eventually fell pregnant. Not wanting her baby to be born into that terrible environment and with the help of a kiosk worker she had befriended, she finally managed to escape the control of the gypsies to give birth in a hospital on the outskirts of Moscow.

In 2003 the author, a bodyguard working in Russia at the time, happened to pass Maria begging in a metro station.

After listening to her story an appeal was started to provide a little help for her and her son. With support from Heather Mills-McCartney, wife of Sir Paul McCartney and Icelandic prosthetic company Össur, in August 2004 Maria took her first step for almost nineteen years.

This remarkable and powerful true story shows how we all have the power and ability change someone’s life for the better.