Ceija Stojka (pronounced “Tchaïa Stoïka”) was born in 1933 in southeastern Austria into a Roma family. At that time, the Roma – then referred to as “Gypsies” – were quite numerous in this region. In 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. The racial policy of Adolf Hitler designated the Roma, like the Jews and Germans of non-Germanic origin, as foreigners in their own country. Stripped of their rights and persecuted, they were deported to concentration camps. Ceija was arrested on March 3, 1943, together with her mother and siblings. She was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, then transferred to Ravensbrück and later Bergen-Belsen, from which she emerged alive in May 1945.
While the genocide of the Jews – the Shoah – was quickly recognized, that of the Roma, known as the Samudaripen in Romani, remained ignored for a long time. In 1988, at the age of 55, Ceija Stojka became the first person in her country to bear witness to it by publishing a book in which she recounted her childhood and her family’s deportation. Shortly afterward, she began to paint and draw, self-taught, in order to express her “feelings and memories.” From then until her death in 2013, she created around 1,000 works. Her art evokes both the horrors of the camps and the happy moments of her youth or of her life after the war.
Today, Ceija Stojka is internationally recognized as an artist and an essential witness to the genocide of the Roma. Her work contributes to the memory of this tragedy and to greater knowledge of these peoples, who constitute the largest minority in Europe.
The exhibition invites you to discover the life and work of this exceptional woman. A total of 112 paintings and drawings are presented, the result of a joint project between the Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology and the Museum of the Resistance and Deportation in Besançon. Ceija Stojka’s production is traditionally divided between “light works,” landscapes and scenes evoking Romani life in caravans, and “dark works,” which bear witness to the terrible years of deportation. Beyond this binary vision, the exhibition proposes that you discover her works through the prism of the eye, a recurring and polysemic motif in her paintings and drawings. From the beauty of nature to the violence of the camps, Ceija Stojka offers a lucid, sensitive, and profoundly human on the world.
The exhibition concludes with a focus on the situation of the Roma in France during the Second World War, drawing on the example of the internment camp that existed in Arc-et-Senans (Doubs) between 1941 and 1943.
