When Austrian born Roma artist Ceija Stojka started to exhibit her paintings, she was 60 years old. She may have started her art at an older age than most, but what she was able to achieve in the last twenty years of her life are worth mentioning for the past as well as the future of the world, not to mention the very present.
Today is May 23, the day when the Austrian born Roma artist Ceija Stojka was born back in 1933. When Ceija and her family were deported to Auschwitz on the orders of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, she was a nine-year-old girl. When her memoirs and artwork started to gain recognition, she was sixty years old. What has happened in that interim period is a testament to the power of remembering and of resisting in the face of evil and ethnic hatred.
Between February and June of this year, an exhibit at the Drawing Center in New York commemorates the art of this Roma artist who found her calling many years after the horrors of the time she spent in Nazi camps. Today, the exhibit desk in New York commemorates May 16 as Roma Resistance Day, in honor of those Roma who were able to resist the SS officers.
One woman who was able to save four out of five of her children was Ceijka’s mother who encouraged her little girl to look strong and able to do physical work. And only a few days after she, her mother and three other siblings were sent to the women’s work camp at Ravensbrück, more than four-thousand Roma and Sinti were murdered back in Auschwitz. Before 1939, the population of Roma and Sinti in Austria was approximately eleven thousand, after the Porajmos (Roma’s name for the Holocaust of their people) only about two-thousand survived. Of the roughly two-hundred members of Ceija’s family, only six survived.
And yet, the more than one-thousand paintings and drawings of hers remain for the world at large to see and to never forget.
Ceija Stojka never received formal artistic training. Before the deportation and the murder of her father by the Nazis, her family was a horse-trading family until their way of life was violently interrupted by Nazi rule.
She and the rest of her family were liberated at the end of World War II, but she didn’t start writing or painting until the late eighties. Encouraged and supported by the German filmmaker Karin Berger, Ceija started to write down her memoirs and subsequently to paint and draw by 1989.
She painted “Z 6399,” representing her own arm tattooed with “Z” (identifying the zigeuner/gypsies with a patch that the Roma themselves were forced to sew on) and what number prisoner she was.
She painted fields full of corpses and ominous flocks of ravens over the fields of Auschwitz.
And she painted giant boots seen from the eyes of a little girl.
She also painted a few landscapes from her years before the deportation of her people. Among those were beautiful sunflowers, emblems for the Roma and symbols of life, nourishment and resistance.
Forty-five years after declaring them “Gypsy nuisance,” the Austrian government recognized the Roma as an official ethnic group in 1993. And yet, former Nazi official Kurt Waldheim was elected president of Austria in 1986. The year before she died, the seventy-nine-year-old Ceija was quoted as saying “Auschwitz is only sleeping.” Whether humanity will learn to forcefully and permanently fight the evils of ethnic hatred remains to be seen but one thing is for certain, Ceija Stojka and her artwork will remain as forceful reminders that remembrance and resistance deserve to be alive and well around the world. I do not know if writer Isabel Fonseca was thinking of Ceija Stojka when she titled her 1995 book about the Roma “Bury Me Standing,” but there could be no better example of someone who has passed and has yet remained “standing” than Ceija Stojka.