Ceija Stojka. This has happened

The first monographic exhibition in Spain devoted to the Austrian painter, Ceija Stojka, whose work constitutes an exceptional testimony of the persecution and genocide suffered by gypsies in Nazi Germany.

Stojka (Kraubath, 1933 - Vienna, 2013) belonged to one of the communities who were victims of the Holocaust. Few people know her story and that of the Romany community.  During the Second World War, she survived three concentration camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen. She was ten years old when she was deported. However, it wasn’t until she was forty years old that she embarked on a great poetic work providing testimony, firstly through her writings and then through drawings and paintings. The works of Stojka portray her experiences at the camps, but also recall her happy family life before and after Nazism.Her work served to reveal the racial persecution suffered by gypsies during the thirties and forties and gave rise to official recognition by the Austrian government of gypsy genocide. Furthermore, there was an impetus driven by the vindicating associative approach of this collection.