Ceija Stojka Dies At Age 79
Ceija Stojka, a writer, painter and musician, and survivor of the Holocaust, died on Monday at age 79 in a Vienna hospital. She was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany at age 12.
She had been raising awareness of the Nazis’ persecution of Roma – also known as Gypsies – in her art and her writings.
Her family’s persecution under the Nazis began in 1941 and ended four years later with Stojka’s liberation from the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. While her mother and four siblings also survived, Stojka’s father and brother were killed in Auschwitz, two of the more than 1 million Roma estimated to have been killed under Hitler. In all, nearly 200 members of her extended family perished under the Nazis.
Stojka kept those experiences to herself for decades at a time most Austrians embraced the popular notion that they and their nation were victims of Hitler instead of his willing accomplices.
“If I could write down all my thoughts, they would surely be an endless book of suffering,” she told an interviewer before embarking on her 1988 autobiography “We Live in Seclusion.” “But my thoughts race more quickly than my hands are able to put everything to paper.”