Romani writer and artist whose inspiration was her family’s wartime ordeal at the hands of the Nazis
For decades after the war Ceija Stojka kept quiet about her horrifying experiences. She and her extended Romani family had been deported from Austria to Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Few relatives survived, but she did. Rebuilding life after 1945 in an Austria reluctant to acknowledge its Nazi past, she was wary of drawing attention to her background, fearful of further persecution.
But from the 1980s she became aware of widespread publicity for Holocaust denial, and increased popularity for politicians such as Jörg Haider, who argued that the Nazi period had not been as bad as had been portrayed.