Ceija Stojka

BIOGRAPHY

Nothing is more important to me than my painting, it is freedom and confidence for me. The people who come to me and surround me give me new strength so that I can continue to speak, tell stories and maybe even paint again. There are still so many blank pages – empty and white – and my desire knows no end.
(From the foreword to the exhibition catalogue KAI DIKHAS – ORT DES SEHENS 2, 2012)

Ceija Stojka was a writer and painter and was born into an Austrian Lovrara family as the youngest daughter of seven siblings. The family spent the winters in Vienna and travelled through rural Austria as horse traders in the summer.
The annexation of Austria in March 1938 fundamentally and irrevocably changed the life situation of Ceija, who was five years old at the time, and that of all Sinti and Roma. The extended families were deported from their settlements in Vienna, such as Hellerwiese and Wankog’stätten in Vienna’s 10th district, and their homes were destroyed after the deportation.

After Stojka’s father was murdered in Dachau concentration camp, the rest of the family was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1944, Ceija was sent to Ravensbrück with her mother and sister, where she had to work in the sewing room. Shortly before the end of the war, all three were taken to Bergen-Belsen, where they were finally liberated on 15 April 1945. Of the extended family of around 200 people, only she, four sisters and her mother survived. After liberation, Ceija Stojka returned to Vienna in 1945, where she lived until her death. In the decades that followed, she worked as a market driver and carpet dealer, before becoming a public author and painter in the late 1980s, when she was over 50 years old. In 1988 she wrote her first book We live in secrecy and was one of the first to draw attention to the fate of her people in the concentration and extermination camps. This was followed in 1992 by Travellers in this world her memories of her time in post-war Austria. In 1989, after a trip to Japan, she began to paint her first pictures.

As a survivor, she took it upon herself throughout her life to remember the fate of the Holocaust victims. With her writings and her art, she took on the important task of passing on a reminder of the fact that the Roma were also victims of the Holocaust, a fact that is still not anchored in the collective consciousness of mainstream society. In doing so, she broke a taboo and a wall of silence. However, this also meant accepting to be confronted with their traumatic memories again and again. In her work, Stojka gave the events, which were described by Jews as Shoa and by Roma as Porajmos, which is roughly translated as “the devouring”, and thus broke a silence that still prevailed. In expressive oil paintings, watercolours and a few rather fleeting sketches, she gave the indescribable a convincing form, overcoming to a small extent what she had suffered through a drastic and almost childlike-immediate depiction that makes the perversion of the perpetrators and the incomprehensibility of what had happened abundantly clear. Her working method was very direct. She often applied the paint to canvas, paper or plain cardboard with her bare hands. These pictures are often accompanied by short commentary texts.

On the so-called “good days”, she gave a cheerful insight into her familiar pre-war world of Lovara Roma with powerful brushstrokes and bright colours. These are “other” pictures, full of colour, carried by an atmosphere of affection and filled with a specific wind. You can see Roma caravans, places where her family used to stop and, above all, nature. These paintings are like a step out of the darkness, and they show a painter whose works seem like an affirmation of her existence and a world beyond the nightmare she has experienced. Even if the old Roma wagons of the Stojka family may not correspond to the reality of life for today’s Roma, their image becomes a symbol of resistance against the dispossession of a culture and traditional way of life. While some naïve painters fail to portray their people’s closeness to nature in a truly credible way, these pictures emanate clarity and a downright natural breeze. With her bare hands and her colour palette, Stojka reclaims what seemed to have been snatched from her forever in her youth.

Ceija Stojka died on 28 January 2013 in Vienna, four months before her 80th birthday. Her work, her art and her irreplaceable, loving personality must never be forgotten.