![]() ![]() In a close-knit rural community of winding roads, fields and dirt-tracks, when Andrei, a father of a 14 year-old boy, was the first to discover what was happening. “He always told the kids not to take pictures with him. Their son remembers seeing Roth playing with their camera at the end of the night. But later, the family noticed all recordings in which Roth appeared had vanished. The party was recorded that day on Dan's video camera. “They felt more family with me and our group than at home.”ĭan, the father of a muscular teen named Rares, recalls the German attending the boy’s 14th birthday party in 2009. “Some of the boys spent years with me, came each weekend to me and stayed over,” Roth says. Most boys we spoke to said they felt special being inside his circle. #Naked boys of azov films freeTo the boys, Roth was a benevolent figure who provided them with free ice cream, soda, pizza and trips to shopping malls. “He was playing a kind of Robin Hood in our village,” says Maria, a cosmetician and strip club waitress whose son Cristi was - and remains - one of Roth’s closest followers. ![]() Roth would take the boys on minibreaks to other cities for karate tournaments or on holiday - travel almost none of the kids could afford. “He was a good psychologist,” says Georgiana, the mother of one of Roth’s recruits. Over late-nights around their dinner tables, Roth would speak of their sons’ physical and emotional development, offering support and advice. He also spent time visiting the boys’ parents. It helped him give more boys the chance to take up his lessons. Roth, described by parents as “a good talker,” embraced this openness. In 2003, he traveled to the town of Seini, a pastoral farming area where families invite strangers inside their modest homes with warm handshakes and friendly banter. “We hung a banner in front of the school advertising his lessons.” “He was charming,” says Tamara Volcovinschi, principal of the ‘Ion Creanga’ school in Satu Mare. Soon Roth was coaching 200 young boys from schools across the region’s towns and villages. Outside the town, he started teaching in a rural primary school - and then his pupil numbers boomed. “My child was in the first grade at the time - and I wouldn’t even consider it.” Reiz decided against allowing him to teach at the school. Handing out flyers and business cards attracting kids to his self-defense workshops, he went further to convince the principal to take him on - offering to buy the school a photocopier if she hired him. “He volunteered to help and took a lot of time to convince people.” “He was very polite,” says principal Maria Reiz, sitting in the same office where she met Roth. There he asked the school’s principal if he could teach karate to the students. One afternoon, he passed through the tree-lined entrance to the town’s German-speaking Johan Ettinger school. ![]() He was taking up a job in business administration by a German-owned company that made furniture in the region.īut he had a side passion - giving poor kids the chance to learn martial arts for free. In the fall of 2001, 23 year-old Markus Rudolph Roth arrived in north Romania’s Satu Mare, a gritty town of crumbling facades, collapsing red-clay roofs and gutted industrial buildings. ![]()
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