Noga Stiassny

Ceija Stojka: Reconstructing Heritage Through Art

My first encounter with Ceija Stojka’s art was eye-opening – a window into a chapter of Holocaust history I had rarely considered. With unflinching honesty, Stojka – a self-taught Roma-Austrian poet, author, painter, musician, and activist – revisits her childhood memories before, during, and after the Holocaust. Through a deeply personal lens, she illuminates the experiences of the Roma community under the Nazi regime – experiences often overlooked and silenced, and, when told, frequently given voice by outsiders. In her work, these intertwined traumatic memories resonate with haunting intensity, urging us to reflect on exclusion – not merely as part of a historical event but as an ongoing reality that shapes how heritage is narrated.

A Life Shaped by History: Ceija Stojka’s Biography

Ceija Stojka was born on 23 May, 1933, in Kraubath an der Mur, Styria, Austria, into a Lovara Romani family – part of a traditionally nomadic community renowned for horse trading. The fifth of six children, Ceija’s father, Karl Wackar Horvath, was a horse trader, while her mother, Maria Stojka, sold fabrics door-to-door and read palms. This itinerant way of life was shattered by the rise of the Nazi regime. Like Jews, the Romani were deemed “racially inferior” and subjected to systematic persecution under Nazi racial policies.

In 1941, Stojka’s father was deported to Dachau and subsequently murdered at Hartheim Castle, a Nazi euthanasia center in Upper Austria. Two years later, Ceija, her mother, and five siblings were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where many members of her extended family were killed. Over the next two years, she survived the horrors of three concentration camps: Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, and finally Bergen-Belsen, where she was liberated by British forces on April 15, 1945, at the age of 12. Of approximately 200 family members, only Ceija, her mother, and a few siblings survived the war. Estimates suggest that between 250,000 and 500,000 Roma were murdered during the Holocaust.

After the war, Ceija Stojka returned to Austria, making a living selling carpets and fabrics. Like many survivors, she remained silent for decades, suppressing her pain to rebuild her life as a wife, mother, and member of a marginalised community. Recognition of the persecution of Roma was slow and fraught with resistance and skepticism; the Roma genocide was excluded from the Nuremberg Trials, and only officially acknowledged as a racially motivated act by (West) Germany in 1982. Even today, this history remains underrepresented, while Roma and Sinti communities continue to face discrimination and prejudice.

Breaking the Silence, Breaking Taboos

In the late 1980s, Ceija Stojka broke decades of silence, turning to art as a means to confront her trauma and the enduring weight of survival. Her first autobiographical book, We Live in Secrecy: Memories of a Romani Woman (Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer Rom-Zigeunerin), published in 1988, was one of the first accounts by a Romani Holocaust survivor, uniquely told from the perspective of a Romani  woman returning to childhood. By reclaiming her story in her own words, Stojka not only confronted Austria’s ‘collective amnesia’ about its complicity in the Nazis’ crimes but also defied gender norms within her community, in which women were often discouraged from speaking out publicly.

This act of bearing witness established Stojka as a pivotal figure in the fight for Roma recognition and rights while paving the way for an extraordinary outpouring of creativity. Over the following decades, she created hundreds of paintings and drawings, sometimes completing several pieces in a single night. Her art spans two emotional and visual registers: vibrant and colorful depictions of pre-war Romani life and the jubilation of liberation, contrasted with stark, monochromatic depictions of atrocities and human suffering. Working with varied materials including acrylic paints and ink on canvas, cardboard, or paper, Ceija Stojka often used her fingers to score the paint, creating works that are tactile and immediate. Many pieces incorporate handwritten text (on the front and/or the back of the painting), linking her childhood memories to reflections as an elderly woman. This interplay between image and text invite contemplation of the connection between past and present.

Bergen-Belsen: From Catastrophe to Liberation

Bergen-Belsen, the final and most harrowing camp Ceija Stojka endured, became a recurring theme in her art. By early 1945, the camp had devolved into chaos: disease spread unchecked, starvation was rampant, and corpses covered the grounds. When British troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, they encountered approximately 60,000 emaciated survivors and thousands of unburied bodies. For Stojka, liberation was not just a moment of relief but also a confrontation with human devastation – a tension vividly reflected in her paintings of Bergen-Belsen.

Some of Stojka’s works evoke the apocalyptic despair of the camp’s final months, rendered in black tones and swirling ash that evoke the omnipresent dead. Emaciated figures with hollow eyes silently implore the viewer, their suffering haunting the living.

In contrast, other works burst with chaotic, vibrant energy, capturing the surreal jubilation of freedom. Yet even in these colourful depictions of liberation, a testimony to the overwhelming presence of death and violence remains. The living and the dead coexist in Stojka’s art, inseparably bound, mirroring the layered and unrelenting complexity of traumatic memory.

Several recurring motifs define Stojka’s work: swastikas, roll calls, barbed wire fences, and the number Z 6399 forcibly tattooed on her arm at Auschwitz – all painful reminders of the systematic dehumanization inflicted on Holocaust victims. Above all, nature plays a central and symbolic role in her art; through Stojka’s deep, almost mystical connection to the natural world, nature oscillates between being a harbinger of death and a source of solace, hope, and the promise of renewed life.

This duality is vividly expressed in Stojka’s depictions of ravens, which recur both as messengers of death and as mystical emissaries from the afterlife. The forest surrounding Bergen-Belsen, which once separated the camp from the outside world, shifts between being an oppressive barrier and a dynamic, almost sentient presence in her art. The fire that consumed the camp upon liberation to halt the spread of disease (an event Stojka witnessed firsthand), is portrayed as both devastating and eerily alive, its flames dancing with a haunting vitality.

Among these motifs, one of the most personal is the branch of a tree frequently incorporated into her signature. This image references a specific tree in Bergen-Belsen whose resin and leaves sustained Stojka, her mother, and other internees during the camp’s desperate final weeks in spring 1945. The painting Wer hat meinen Baum gefällt (Who Cut Down My Tree?) from 1996 exemplifies the profound resonance this image holds in her art. Here, the tree becomes not just a memory image of survival but also a testament to resilience and the fragile connections that sustain life amidst destruction.

The Legacy of Ceija Stojka

Ceija Stojka’s determination to break the silence surrounding her imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps as a child was integral to her reckoning with the past. Yet her legacy reaches far beyond her personal story; through her art and writings, for which she earned international recognition, Stojka not only confronted her own trauma but also helped to position Roma art within the broader framework of Holocaust art and remembrance. Alongside her brother Karl, also a self-taught artist and Auschwitz survivor, she was a prominent advocate for acknowledging the persecution of Roma and Sinti during the Nazi era, demonstrating both the healing and transformative power of art.

At a time when Roma people continue to face exclusion and violence,  Ceija Stojka’s art continues to challenge the ways in which the difficult heritage of Nazi persecution is narrated, advocating for more inclusive and diverse perspectives as part of historical accountability. Her refusal to be consumed by hatred, as she once put it, highlights the importance of reclaiming stories told in the voices of those who lived them.

Ceija Stojka passed away in Vienna in 2013 at the age of 79.

This text was written as part of MEMORISE’s Diversity & Inclusion program and accompanies the MEMORISE exhibition currently on display at Bergen-Belsen.

References and more information can be found here:

• Ceija Stojka International Association
• Foundation Kai Dikhas – Ceija Stojka
• RomArchive – Ceija Stojka
• Lith Bahlmann and Matthias Reichelt (eds.) (2014). Ceija Stojka (1993-2013): Sogar der Tod hat Angst vor Auschwitz. (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst).
• Lorely French. “Lessons from 75 Years Ago: Writer and Artist Ceija Stojka on the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, the Typhus Epidemic, and Remembering Ravensbrück”. Oh, the Humanities! (OTH) 2020.
• Ceija Stojka. The Memoirs of Ceija Stojka, Child Survivor of the Romani Holocaust. Lorely E. French ed. and trans. (New York: Boydell & Brewer, 2022).
• Karin Berger (ed.). Stojka, Ceija. Träume ich, dass ich lebe?: Befreit aus Bergen-Belsen. (Vienna: Picus, 2005).
• Karin Berger (ed.). Wir leben im Verborgenen. Aufzeichnungen einer Romni zwischen den Welten. (Vienna: Picus Verlag. 2013).
• Jason Farago. “The Survivor of Auschwitz Who Painted a Forgotten Genocide”. The New York Times 2020.
• Holocaust Memorial Day Trust – Ceija Stojka
• Ceija Stojka. Esto ha pasado (exhibition catalogue). (Museo Nacional centro de arte Reina Sofia: Madrid, 2019).