Roma artist, writer on Nazi atrocities, dies at 79
Ceija Stojka survived three Nazi death camps and then found her
life's work: Raising awareness of the Nazis' persecution of Roma
- also known as Gypsies - in her art and her writings. Stojka carried the
horrors of those camps with her until she was in her 50s, speaking out in words
and pictures only decades after she was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen camp
at age 12. The Budapest-based European Roma Cultural Foundation
described Stokja's concentration-camp themed paintings to The Associated Press
on Wednesday as reflecting "entrenched sorrow in the bodies and spirit of
the victims." [more...]
CEIJA
STOJKA 1933 – 2013 : "If the world does not change now, if the
world does not open its doors and windows, if it does not build peace - true
peace - so that my great-grandchildren have a chance to live in this world,
then I cannot explain why I survived Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and
Ravensbruck." Go here to watch Marika Schmiedt’s film Vermachtnis
Legacy about Ceija Stojka
Stojka, who
is self-taught, didn’t begin to make art until she was 56. She suddenly felt
compelled to paint and draw and used the materials at hand - pieces of
cardboard, glass jars, postcards and salt dough. “I work with everything that
comes between my fingers,” she writes. The constant torment of the living hell
in her mind takes haunting form in her crude style: Stojka uses her fingers and
toothpicks instead of brushes to apply the paint and ink. This lends the work
an eerie, childlike quality that makes even more horrific her depictions of the
day-to-day anguish of living under constant threat of dying from starvation or
the gas chambers. [more...]
