Ceija Stojka

Nothing is more important to me than my painting, it is freedom and confidence for me. I get new strength from the people who come to me and surround me, so that I can continue to speak, tell stories and perhaps paint again. There are still so many white sheets there - empty and white - and my wanting knows no end.
(From the preface to the exhibition catalogue KAI DIKHAS - ORT DES SEHENS 2, 2012)

Ceija Stojka was a writer and painter and was born into an Austrian Lovrara family as the youngest daughter of seven siblings. The family spent winters in Vienna and drove around rural Austria in the summer as horse traders.
The Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 fundamentally and irrevocably changed the living situation of Ceija, who was five years old at the time, and that of all Sinti and Roma. The extended families were deported from their settlements in Vienna, for example the Hellerwiese and the Wankog'stätten in the 10th district of Vienna, and their homes were destroyed after the deportation.

After Stojka's father was murdered in the Dachau concentration camp, the rest of the family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1944, Ceija was sent to Ravensbrück with her mother and sister, where she had to work in the sewing room. Shortly before the end of the war, all three were taken to Bergen-Belsen, where they were finally liberated on 15 April 1945. Of the extended family of about 200 people, only she, four sisters and her mother survived. With the liberation, Ceija Stojka returned to Vienna in 1945, where she lived until her death. In the following decades she worked as a market driver and carpet dealer before she came to the public as an author and painter in the late 1980s - when she was over 50 years old. In 1988, she wrote her first book, We Live in Hiding, and was one of the first to draw attention to the fate of her people in the concentration and extermination camps. In 1992, she followed this up with Reisende auf dieser Welt (Travellers in this World), her memoirs of her time in post-war Austria. In 1989, after a trip to Japan, she began to paint her first pictures.

As a survivor, she took it upon herself throughout her life to remember the fate of the Holocaust victims. With her writings and her art, she took on the important task of a reminder of the fact, still not anchored in the collective consciousness of the majority society, that the Roma were also victims of the Holocaust. In doing so, she broke a taboo and a wall of silence. But this also meant accepting again and again to be confronted with their traumatic memories. In her work, Stojka gave poignant visual expression to what Jews call the Shoa and Roma call Porajmos, or "the devouring", thus breaking a silence that still prevails. In expressive oil paintings, watercolours and some rather fleeting sketches, she gave the indescribable a convincing form, overcoming to a small extent what she had suffered through a drastic and almost childlike-immediate representation that makes the perversion of the perpetrators and the incomprehensibility of what had happened abundantly clear. Her working method was very direct. She often applied the paint with her bare hands to canvas, paper or plain cardboard. These paintings are often accompanied by short commentary texts.

On the so-called "good days", she used powerful brushstrokes and bright colours to give a cheerful insight into the pre-war world of Lovara Roma that was familiar to her. These are "other" paintings, full of colour, carried by an atmosphere of affection and filled with a specific wind. One sees Roma carriages, places where her family used to stop, and above all nature. These paintings are like a step out of the darkness, and they show a painter whose works seem like an assurance of her existence and of a world beyond the nightmare she has experienced. Even if the old Roma carriages of the Stojka family may not correspond to the reality of life of today's Roma, their image becomes a symbol of resistance against the dispossession of a culture and traditional way of life. While some naïve painters do not succeed in depicting the closeness to nature of their people in a truly credible way, clarity and a downright natural wind emanate from these pictures. Stojka takes with her bare hands and her colour palette what seemed to have been snatched from her forever in her youth.

Ceija Stojka died in Vienna on 28 January 2013, four months before her 80th birthday. Her work, her art and her irreplaceable, loving personality must never be forgotten.