Ceija Stojka. She was an Austrian Roma (Gypsy) writer, musician, and painter who was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust .
Summary
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- 1 Biographical summary
- 1Trayectoria
- 2 Ceija painter
- 3 Muerte
- 2 Literary works
- 3Premios
- 4Fuente
biographical synthesis
He was born in Steiermark, on March 23, 1933 , in a gypsy ethnic group called “lovari”, belonging to the gypsy group of the lovara, originally nomadic horse merchants. He remembers having spent a happy childhood in the middle of nature, moving with his family through the fields of Austria .
Nomadism was definitively forbidden to them after Hitler ‘s Germany annexed Austria, so in 1939 the Stojkas parked the car on the outskirts of Vienna and created a wooden cabin. Ceija was barely eight years old when, in 1941 , she saw the Gestapo men arrive in search of her father. He was taken away to be killed in the Dachau concentration camp . A few months later the Nazi agents showed up again, this time to deport the rest of the family. The wagons of the train that took them to Auschwitzas if they were shipments of cattle, they were so packed that, during the long journey, the little girl could not even bend down, according to her autobiography.
Trajectory
She was interned with her family in the Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps , and was a survivor of the Nazi Holocaust.
At the end of World War II , after having suffered the horrors of the Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen Belsen concentration camps, he learned that his mother and four of his five siblings were the only survivors of a family clan of two hundred people.
I survived by eating paper and pieces of skin.
In 1988 Ceija Stojka wrote the first Roma autograph of Nazi persecution under the title, We Live in Isolation: The Memoirs of a Roma . It was a cry of alert about the silent persecution of the gypsies, as she herself commented:
I started writing because I had to open up, scream.
Painter Ceija
In 1989 at the age of 56, he began painting using his fingers or sticks instead of brushes. Also most of her pictorial work reflects the horrors of Nazism. Her work has been exhibited in Europe , Japan and the US . In 2005 the Jewish Museum in Vienna organized an exhibition with the title “Ceija Stojka, Leben”.
Exhibition of one of his paintings in Vienna
Death
He died on January 28, 2013 , at the age of 79 in a hospital in Vienna (Austria).
Literary works
- Travelers in This World, 1992
- We Live in Isolation: The Memoirs of a Roma, 1998
- I can’t, 2003
- Liberado de Bergen-Belsen, 2005
In addition to being a writer and painter, she documented and published the songs of the Lovari gypsies about the Holocaust in an audio CD entitled Soñe .
