Ceija Stojka was born in Austria in 1933, the fth of six children. Her family were Lovara Roma horse traders from Central Europe. Ceija was ten years old when she was deported with her mother, Marie Sidi, and other family members. She survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen.
It was only forty years later, in 1988 at the age of fty- ve, that she felt the need and the necessity to tell her story and embarked on a vast act of memory. Though considered illiterate, she wrote several poignant books in a poetic and highly personal style. In doing so, she became the rst Roma woman to have survived the death camps and recount her experiences so that they can never be forgotten or denied, and to raise a voice against the pervasive racism in Austria when far right and nationalist parties are winning more and more votes.
The four books she published between 1988 and 2005 quickly established her as a pro-Roma militant and activist in Austria. However, her testimony goes beyond the written word. From the 1990s Ceija Stojka threw herself into painting and drawing, again entirely self-taught. She worked every day in her apartment on Kaiserstrasse in Vienna, until shortly before her death in 2013. In two decades she produced more than a thousand paintings and drawings on paper, cardboard or canvas.
