The girl who played with the dead

Everything was forbidden, except dying. There was only barbed wire and dead people. Mountains of corpses, which you could climb.” At the age of 12, Ceija Stojka played with the dead, who had become her protectors. Her mother had taught her to lose her fear of them, to wrap herself in their clothes and to curl up in the hollows of bodies emptied of flesh and viscera to protect herself from the cold. “There I could find peace and it protected me from the wind. I liked doing it,” she confessed many years later to filmmaker Karin Berger. That, and chewing the sap from the branches of a small tree that peeked through the cracks in the barracks, was what saved her life, without water or food, in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where she had been transferred after surviving Auschwitz and Ravensbrück.

Before reaching adulthood, she had seen things she should never have seen and heard atrocious sounds she could never forget, but like the majority of Roma and Sinti Gypsies who escaped the Nazis' attempted extermination (there were half a million direct victims), she preferred to remain silent, rebuilding her life in silence, her hair dyed blond as a protective shield against racism. They were imprisoned in extermination camps, sterilized, enslaved, tortured in medical experiments, or shot in mass killings. But for post-war justice, this was not a Roma holocaust but a legitimate persecution by Hitler's men against the "Gypsy plague," whom they associated with delinquency, laziness, and antisocial behavior.

How did her mother save her from the Roma Holocaust, yet she couldn't protect her drug-addicted son?

Born in Austria to a family of horse dealers, Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) returned to Vienna on foot and made a living as a street carpet seller. She was 54 when the death of one of her two sons from an overdose brought her back to that atrocious time. How was it possible that her mother had saved her from the massacre, yet she hadn't been able to protect her son? Encouraged by Berger, who would later dedicate a documentary to her, she recounted her story, silenced for so many years in "I Dream I Live?" A Gypsy Girl in Bergen-Belsen . Above all, she began to create a visual archive in the form of paintings in which she captured everything from her happy childhood, riding in a wagon through sunflower fields, to the annihilation of the Roma population, herself and her compatriots as emaciated, faceless stick figures, the boots of SS members in the foreground, as if they were gigantic chimneys.

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In 2019, the Reina Sofía Museum dedicated a beautiful exhibition to her, and now some of her paintings are part of the "Fabulous Landscapes " exhibition that Manuel Borja-Villel is presenting in the Victòria Eugènia Pavilion. The artist signs them, at the bottom, with a branch of that saving tree drawn next to her name.