The Museum of the City of Lodz presented the work of Austrian Roma artist and writer, Ceija Strojka for the first time in Poland in 2024. The title of the exhibition is 'I can’t forget it'.
It is hardly surprising that Ceija Stroika could not forget because over the course of the Second World War, she survived three concentration camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Belsen).
Born in Styria, Austria, she lived a semi nomadic life, close to nature with her father and mother Sidonie and her siblings as part of a large extended family. However, a drastic event changed their lives forever when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938. She was deported along with family when she was just ten years old. Her father Wacker was deported in 1941 to Dachau, then to Mauthausen, before he was killed at Hartheim Castle in Austria in 1942. After his death, the entire family went in to hiding sometimes staying with friends, or friends of friends, or sometimes hiding in a park in Vienna’s 16th District until they too were deported. Out of her entire extended family of two hundred people, only six survived the war: she, her mother and four siblings.
On 3rd March 1943, Ceija, her mother, brothers and sisters were incarcerated in Vienna’s Rossauer Lande prison. Her sister Kathi, was also held in the Lackenbach Roma internment and transit camp. This camp was infamous for having been the place where five thousand Roma from Burgenland in Austria were deported between 1941 and 1942 to the Lodz ghetto before being murdered at Chelmo.
The Stoijka family were then deported to Auschwitz where they were again held in the Romani family camp, while there, Ceija was tattooed with the number Z6399. She is reported as saying she survived among the dead who she saw as her friends, being kept warm by hiding under piled up bodies, keeping herself alive by eating leather from belts, scraps of fabric and later the sap from branches of trees.
This account is an indication of the strength and courage of many women who saw the lives of their children and their families being extinguished and fought to keep them alive and safe as long as possible. While all victims suffered, Roma women suffered a double burden, firstly being seen as a member of a group often stereotyped as ‘criminal, suspicious and worthless’ and secondly as a Roma woman in a closed patriarchal society. In the Polish history discourse on the history of World War 11, Roma prisoners1 marked with the ‘black triangle’ did not exist leading them to be ‘forgotten members of the Holocaust.’ Within ghettos, Roma was again segregated, in the Lodz ghetto, a double fence and water ditch surrounded the camp, death and disease was rampant with many dying from typhoid.
In winter 1945, Ceija and her mother are taken by truck, and then by foot, to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, from which they are liberated by English troops. It took Ceija and her mother four months to get back to Vienna on foot, crossing Germany and Czechoslovakia from north to south. There they found their siblings who miraculously had also all survived. After staying a while in an apartment abandoned by fleeing Nazis, the family was forced to leave when the owners returned. Unable to find accommodation, they resumed their travelling life as horse traders, on the road in their caravan during the summer and in furnished rooms during the winter. Ceija sold fabrics door to door and was given a licence to sell rugs on a market stall which she did until the 1980’s. She married and had three children and life began again.
Like many Roma artists and writers, it was only much later in life when she dared to allow herself to remember the horror of what happened or when it became impossible to forget as repressed memories came flooding back. It was only in the 1980s, more than forty years later, that she finally broke her silence and became one of the first Roma women to talk about her memories and experiences of the Holocaust.
She described her childhood in several books and in more than 1,500 paintings and drawings. Stojka was a self-taught artist who gradually developed her own style, with bright colours and strong expressiveness. She painted not only with a brush, but also with her hands, and she did all her work at home, in the kitchen or living room. Her first paintings were the "light pictures", memories of happy times that preceded the war, depicting life in the wagons, family, markets, and the celebration of a lush nature. The second were the "dark pictures", showing oppression against the Roma under the Nazi regime, including arrest, atrocities, exterminations, survival, and liberation.
Writing was more difficult for her, as her schooling was limited. She also became increasingly convinced that she needed to record and write about her experiences for a new generation, lest they forget the horrors that she and her people had suffered. She described her memories on paper as her confidant and friend. She said, ‘I wanted to talk to someone. But there was no one to listen to me and the paper is patient [.…] Once I had started the memories came flooding back. Afterwards, I said to myself: here is the truth, it is over.
She also credits Karin Berger, documentary maker with giving her enormous help and support in revealing her stories. In 1999 The film Ceija Stojka, a documentary by Karin Berger, was released and broadcasted in 2000. In 2006, Ceija Stojka and Karin Berger receive the documentary prize from Austrian television for Unter den Brettern hellgrünes Gras [The Green Green Grass beneath].
Art as Power and Resistance
The emergence of Ceija Strojka’s voice through her poetry, writings and art coincided with a growing recognition of Roma history and culture in Austria and became a powerful expression of resistance to violence and oppression. In Austria, the genocide of Roma or Porajmos in Romani, saw the extermination of 90% of the Romani community was not mentioned in history books or discussed in the public sphere. It was not until the attack on the Romani village of Oberwart in 1995 that her voice became a powerful advocate for the recognition of the Romani as a recognised ethnic minority. In Ceija Strojka’s art, past, present, and future are intertwined, she invites us not to close our eyes, not to forget.
If the world does not change now – if the world does not open its doors and windows – if it does not build peace, true peace – so that my great-grandchildren have a chance to live in this world, then I will not be able to explain why I survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Ravensbrück .” — Ceija Stoijka
'I can’t forget it.' - Ceija Stojka (1933-2013)