'To delve into Gigi’s psychology one needs to begin with her roots as one of the disenfranchised Roma people. In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s after continuous harassment from the newly empowered Communist party of Bulgaria, numerous Gypsies, unwilling to settle in Communist block housing, took flight westward. Bulgarian border police were granted a 20-day leave and an engraved wristwatch for a so-called ‘display of heroism’ which amounted to firing at people fleeing across the border. Gigi's mother and three brothers were shot dead – most likely crossing the Rhodope Mountains along the Greek border, an area where, legend has it, Orpheus was born.'
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'In a rare interview, when Gigi (whom, mind you, was only seven years
old at the time) discussed this catastrophic evening she referred to a
fellow escapee shielding her body in a shallow ditch till dawn broke.
This entombment that was a ordeal of necessity for her very survival was
a theme often revisited in Gigi's lyrics, where confrontations with
dark realities inevitably led to redemptions laced with pain. The man, her redeemer, was
never identified. He dropped Gigi off at a Convent in the XXX region of
France.'
- An excerpt from ’The Lyrics of Gigi and the Darkening Cultural
Landscape of France in the 1960s’ by noted semiotician, Jean-Louis
Moreau.