Leiden…, 2004

Ceija Stojka

Annika Gunnarsson: Ceija Stojka was born in Austria in 1933 and died in 2013. She was a Lovari Roma. At the age of ten, she was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. This was followed by the Nazi extermination camps of Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, before British troops liberated the camps at the end of the war. Ceija, four of her siblings and her mother were the only survivors of the Stojka family, which numbered around 200 before the war.

Forty years after the war, Ceija Stojka began to share her memories and experiences of the concentration camps. She was a self-taught writer and artist. And it was at home, in her kitchen and living room, that she developed her stories.

To give the stories context, she used both images and text. In the drawing Leiden… she has written: “I cannot suffer, drawing is enough.” But even if she herself could not suffer, no one looking at the women lying on the ground surrounded by barbed wire can fail to see that they suffered hardship before they were killed. Hardship that no words or images can describe.

However, Ceija Stojka’s images preserve the memory of those whose history would otherwise have been invisible. She herself emphasised the importance of not forgetting, or denying, what happened to the Roma. And she worked tirelessly against the racism and antiziganism that still characterises Europe. She said: “I am afraid that Europe is forgetting its history and that Auschwitz is only sleeping”.