The children put up for auction in 1851 had names

The oldest document to mention enslaved Roma north of the Danube dates from 1385: Dan I, Prince of Wallachia, transfers to the monastery of Tismana 40 sălașe, or households, first given by Vladislav I. In Moldavia the first mention is from 1428, when Alexander the Good gives 31 households to the monastery of Bistrița. From then until 1856 almost five hundred years went by.

Documents of the time call enslaved Roma țigani, “Gypsies”; the word appears here only in quotations.

The enslaved had three kinds of owner: the prince, who owned the most, the monasteries and the boyars. The prince's slaves usually travelled the country practising their trades and paid a tax to the treasury. Those of the monasteries and the boyars worked where they were put: smiths, masons, cooks, coachmen, musicians, servants at the manor, labourers on the estate.

An owner could sell them, exchange them for other goods, bequeath them, give them as a dowry or use them to settle a debt. The Heleșteni auction arose from two of these: a boyar's debts and the dowry his widow claimed back.

Marriage needed the owner's consent. When two slaves of different owners married without it, custom annulled the marriage and divided the children equally between the two owners. A free person who married a slave became a slave too, along with the children. Only after 1766 did a few laws try to stop children being divided.

Owners had no right of life and death over them, but the enslaved could be beaten, starved and locked in their owners' prisons, and women at boyar households were often sexually abused. Mihail Kogălniceanu remembered seeing, as a young man in the streets of Iași, people in chains at their hands and feet, some with iron horns fixed to their foreheads and tied by a collar round the neck.

Moldavia's Calimach Code of 1817 called slavery “against the natural right of man”, and Wallachia's Caragea Code of 1818 said that “the master has no power over the Gypsy's life”. Neither code abolished slavery, which lasted four more decades.

Slavery was abolished in stages, one category at a time. Between 1843 and 1847 the two principalities freed the slaves of the state and of the monasteries; the boyars' slaves were freed only in 1855 and 1856. In 1848 one liberation was reversed after three months.

Slaves of the state and of the monasteries were freed without anyone being compensated. For the boyars' slaves, though, one rule held from 1832 on: the owner must lose nothing. The state paid the market price, sometimes more, even though some voices called for freeing slaves without compensation. Even the 1848 revolution promised owners compensation.

The laws of 1855–1856 kept the rule. In Moldavia an owner received 8 ducats for a vătraș, as slaves settled on an estate were called, or for a lingurar, a spoon-maker, and 4 ducats for a lăieș, a slave with no fixed place. For invalids and babies he received nothing. The treasury had no money, so owners got state bonds paying ten per cent a year. In Wallachia the price was 10 ducats a person, paid in instalments over several years.

In Wallachia the compensation fund was fed by the taxes paid by all Roma liable to tax: the newly freed, and also former state and monastery slaves. In Moldavia part came from the taxes of former state and monastery slaves and of privately owned slaves freed earlier, and the rest from the treasury and the clergy's funds.

The people who had been enslaved received no compensation. In Wallachia the law required them to settle in a village, build houses and not leave for fourteen years, two census periods of seven years each.

Some owners gave up the money. Newspapers printed their declarations almost daily, and lists of their names were published. An owner who waived received in exchange a ten-year tax exemption for the people he had freed, which helped him settle those with no fixed place on his estate. Wallachian boyars were, Achim writes, less generous than Moldavian ones.

The laws of 1855 and 1856 freed, according to the historian Viorel Achim, approximately 250,000 people. Another count, by Venera Achim, cited by Ciprian Necula, reaches 266,335: 166,335 in Wallachia and some 100,000 in Moldavia. Neither is an exact figure.

Once freed, the Roma paid taxes and owed the labour required of peasants. Some of the formerly enslaved received plots on the estates where they lived, and after the 1864 reform became smallholders. Many refused the land and the duties tied to it; many left the villages where they had been settled, and the authorities answered with police measures. At the same time, some Roma left the Principalities.

In 2012 the sociologist Ciprian Necula noted that the Roma had never been compensated for slavery, financially or morally, and that Romania had no museum, monument or public ceremonies devoted to it. Since 2011, 20 February has been by law the day to commemorate the emancipation of the Roma, in memory of the law Știrbei promulgated.

Gaster found no record of the auction's outcome, and these sources do not follow the people of Heleșteni after September 1851. The youngest of them were almost five when Moldavia abolished slavery and could have lived into the twentieth century.