Eternal trauma

“When Mimi was murdered, I died too”

The 57-year-old in front of a picture of Michelle: "Losing a loved one to murder is a terrible trauma for the bereaved."(Bild: Markus Wenzel)

Whenever women become victims of violence, Romana Fahrngruber relives her own drama - the moment she found her beloved daughter dead. The 16-year-old girl was stabbed to death in 2018 by a boy she had loved dearly.

In the past ten days, four women and a 13-year-old girl have been killed in Vienna: a mother and her daughter - presumably after a separation dispute - by the husband and father respectively, three prostitutes by a young Afghan, allegedly out of a pure desire to kill.

Romana Fahrngruber followed the news about the crimes. "It made me feel extremely bad mentally," she says. And my flashbacks were once again particularly intense: I kept seeing the body of my Michelle, my Mimi, lying on the ground in front of me."