I was smuggled into the UK in a washing machine box aged 13 to escape life of prostitution after being bred for sex
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TEARS streamed down my cheeks as a strange man lifted me up and dropped me into an empty washing machine box beside another little girl and closed the lid.
I was just 13 years old, and my mother had told me she was saving me from a life of prostitution by smuggling me to England.
For the last few years, I'd been forced to attend my gran Vera Zlatkov's 'hookery' classes - where she trained me and my cousins in the art of pleasing a man, so we could make money as child prostitutes.
Born to a fiery 13-year-old Gypsy girl in a Romani ghetto in Slovakia, I grew up being told all I had to offer was my body and that I'd make my Ma a lot of money in sex work one day.
She told me she was waiting until I started my periods to prostitute me - yet when I was 13, she changed her mind.
Shipped overseas in a washing machine box, I thought all my dreams had come true. But breathing in the fresh British air, I had no idea of the horrors awaiting me in my new, regal homeland.
Grim ghetto life
Before talk of England had begun, I'd come to accept that the huge, grey Soviet-style blocks where I lived, with no running water, electricity or gas, was where I'd die.
In the UK, there's a lot of pride about being from a "ghetto".
But my home in the festering borough of Drovane was less a multiple-hip-hop-album-spawning ghetto and more of a "Stepped in this puddle? LOL you got hepatitis C now" slum.
We played with stained old mattresses, wore rags and lived around the likes of rapists and paedophiles
Eliska
Growing up in the '90s, I had no toys.
My cousins and I played with stained old mattresses, wore rags and flip-flops, stole tourists' belongings to sell for food, and lived around the likes of rapists and paedophiles.
The government and police left us to our own devices, only venturing inside the borough when they had an unsolved crime and needed a random Gypsy to fill the role of suspect.
On those days, mothers would shield their sons, screaming and sobbing.
Sick birthday present
My own Ma, Lenka Zlatkov, is barely a decade older than me. She was just 13 when my street-fighting Nazi father's friends bought her as a 23rd birthday present for him.
To this day, Franz Volker - my Dad - maintains he didn't know Lenka's real age when he slept with her. Who knows? He lives in Germany and now has five children by five different women.
Outwardly, my mother was beautiful, with rebellious, glossy hair, creamy brown eyes, coral-coloured lipstick and signature smirk - yet she'd often descend into banshee episodes.
She would beat me and say the nastiest things, like "One day I will cut your tongue out of your mouth!" and "I wish I had ripped you from my womb when you first started feeding off me."
Ma had been put to work aged 11 after irritating my grandma with the amount of food she ate.
By 12, she had been with half of the men in our area - and on my own 12th birthday, she told me: "Be grateful I'm at least waiting for your periods before I send you out to work."
Terrified, I slept with a sharpened nail file near my pillow in case Lenka one day came home drunk with a paedophile willing to pay her enough money to change her mind.
We'd listen in disgust and fascination as she talked about two-hands, no-hands and other sexual tricks
Eliska
Yet there were two other things that also kept me off the streets: the threat of reprisals from my father, and the failing of my gran's School of Hoecraft and Hookery.
During Vera's special classes, my cousins and I would gather at her feet, listening in disgust and fascination as she talked about sexual tricks.
Dream trip to England
My mother was - and tragically still is - the penknife-in-her-bra-lining, abortion-scars and knuckle-duster-hidden-in-her-plaits type of prostitute, working in various locations.
But it took years for me to see her for what she is: an abused, traumatised girl.
Her fate could have been mine too - but shortly after I turned 13, Lenka said the best thing I'd ever heard: "I'm going to send you to England!"
The remark left me speechless.
"I want you to learn to read and write. You can come back and buy me a house," Ma told me.
She didn't tell me how I was getting to England - or how she'd paid for my journey - but I later found out she'd slept with so many men her body was left weak and bruised.
Hidden in washing machine box
Two months after Ma's announcement, she packed me off to England in a windowless van with a scruffy-looking driver and three other children. "Be good," she ordered, then left.
We were first driven to the Netherlands - sitting silently in the back of the van with our heads down - before being ushered into a shipping container filled with washing machine boxes.
I panicked as I was lifted into an empty one - I hated confined spaces. One of the others, Vlasta, was lowered down next to me. We tried to link hands but settled for linking fingers.
A few minutes later, the doors slammed shut and we were carried through the air onto a boat.
I had never been so frightened.
Exploited in my luxury new home
Finally, we arrived at our new home, England.
Looking traumatised, we were herded out of the container, hidden in the back of another van, given fresh, clean clothes to wear, then driven to a block of flats in South Shields.
With its stunning glass windows, it felt like the height of luxury.
During my short time in that northern seaside town, I learned to read and write and lived with a pretend "Auntie" - a local woman who sent me to clean families' homes, despite being underage.
I had always been the best dancer in my family back home - but here, the men would often paw at me, desperate for more than a dance
Eliska
Eventually, I was split up from the others and taken to South Yorkshire, where I was paid to dance in glittering outfits in front of groups of leering, overweight men.
I had always been the best dancer in my family back home.
But this was different - the men would often paw at me, desperate for more than a dance.
I also started attending school using a fake ID - where I was bullied and racially abused.
Eventually, after moving to Leicester, I sat my GCSEs, getting Bs, Cs and a rogue A in Textiles. I then moved to the West Midlands, did my A-Levels and was awarded a place at university.
Gang-raped by six men
But before my first year of university, something horrific happened.
I was walking to a taxi rank at night when I was gang-raped by six men, who called me Esméralda - from The Hunchback of Notre Dame - as they took their turns on me.
They pulled my hair back with such ferocity that my whole body rose up. When they finally left me, I passed out.
Fortunately, I was found by two women and raced to hospital.
The brutal attack threatened to turn my dream life in England into a nightmare - and it certainly didn't help when responding police officers judged me because of my background.
Yet despite spiralling into depression and binge-eating in the months after my ordeal - in my mind, being bigger made me safer - I eventually thought, "Right, back to life now."
I went to university, passed every year and graduated with a degree.
I had taken the gift of literacy and achieved something remarkable.
The educated Gypsy
Today, I love England, regularly going for picnics, reading books, visiting castles, taking photos of nature, and socialising with some of the purest, kindest people I could have hoped to meet.
I know that, if my birthplace had kept me, I'd have perhaps half a dozen kids by now.
As it is, I'm in my 20s, living in the Midlands, single with no children - and really happy.
I'm an author, but also still work as a cleaner and dancer.
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Sadly, my story isn't unique.
There are many trafficked, broken and raped boys and girls out there who have darker tales of tragedy than me - with an estimated 4,000 child victims of modern slavery in the UK.
But I'm so proud of what I've achieved.
I'm no longer the Eliska who failed Vera's banana classes.
I'm Eliska - the educated Gypsy from Drovane.
- Adapted from The Girl From Nowhere by Eliska Tanzer, published by Mirror Books and
- Names have been changed to protect identities