In The News

Artist and writer Ceija Stojka passes away

Artist and writer Ceija Stojka passes away

THE death has taken place of the artist and writer Ceija Stojka who survived the Holocaust and used her work to highlight the plight of fellow Roma gypsies at the hands of the Nazis.

Ms. Stojka, who was 79, had been born in Austria in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. During the Second World War, she and her family were deported to concentration camps.

More than 200 members of her extended family were eventually rounded-up by the Nazis. By the time she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, at the age of 12, only her mother and four siblings had survived. In total, hundreds of thousands of members of the Roma people died in the Holocaust.

She returned to live in Austria after the war, but she could never forget the horrors of the concentration camps, telling friends that: “I remember Auschwitz every waking moment of my life”.

Ms. Stojka was in her mid-fifties before she turned to art as a way of telling the story of her life and plight of the Roma people. A self-taught artist, many of her paintings depicted scenes from the death camps (see below).

Her autobiography, We Live In Seclusion, which was published in 1988, also helped bring the plight of the Romas to international attention.

She was also interviewed for a new documentary on the Holocaust, Forget Us Not, which will be released later this year (see below).

To view some of Ceija Stojka’s paintings, click here.

To see the trailer for the documentary, Forget Us Not, which features Ceija Stojka, click here.

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