Ceija Stojka
Ceija Stojka was an Austrian-Roma writer, painter, activist, and musician who survived three concentration camps under National Socialism. While her father had been brought to Dachau in 1941 and murdered shortly thereafter, she avoided falling victim to the 1944 mass gassing of all remaining Roma prisoners in Auschwitz thanks to having been transferred to Ravensbrück only a few weeks before, following which she was ultimately liberated from Bergen-Belsen by the British Army in 1945. Stojka published accounts of the traumas that had haunted her since her early life in a 1988 autobiography
[“We Live in Seclusion: The Memories of a Romani”], and she only began painting in 1989 at the age of 56. Although Stojka’s career as a self-taught visual artist began very late, she did create approximately 1,000 paintings and drawings before her death in 2013. Her work, rooted in German expressionism and folk art, testifies to her experiences in the concentration camps. It is a unique and impressive oeuvre that addresses her persecution and the genocide committed against Europe’s Roma and Sinti during the Nazi regime. For her, painting served as a means of coming to terms with moments through which she had gone, from being deported to Auschwitz on a cattle car in March 1943 to the tattooing of a prisoner number on her arm including the letter Z—which stood for “Zigeuner,” the German equivalent of the perjorative term “Gypsy.” Stojka’s paintings represent the numerous beatings, acts of torture, and killings that she had been forced to witness as a child. She painted and also drew on paper and cardboard, applying acrylics either with a brush or directly with her fingers. She also used ink in her paper drawings, in which she highlighted the contours of people and—quite frequently—elements of barbed-wire fencing. Another recurrent motif is that of birds in outdoor scenes, in which she likewise placed an emphasis on sharp lines as well as vivid colors. Stojka’s aim was to deal with the pain inflicted upon her during her early life while also alluding to how the life of Europe’s Roma population has remained subject to prosecution, cultural depreciation, and political exclusion right up to our present era. W.S.
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