Roma artist, Holocaust survivor Ceija Stojka dies

VIENNA -- Ceija Stojka survived three Nazi death camps and then found her life's work: raising awareness of the Nazis' persecution of Roma -- also known as Gypsies -- in her art and her writings.

Stojka carried the horrors of those camps with her until she was in her 50s, speaking out in words and pictures only decades after she was liberated from the Bergen-Belsen camp at age 12.

Her death Monday at age 79 in a Vienna hospital was announced by her publisher.

The European Roma Cultural Foundation described Stojka's concentration-camp themed paintings as reflecting "entrenched sorrow in the bodies and spirit of the victims."

Her family's persecution under the Nazis began in 1941 and ended four years later with Stojka's liberation from the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. While her mother and four siblings also survived, Stojka's father and brother were killed in Auschwitz, two of the more than 1 million Roma estimated to have been killed under Adolf Hitler.

Stojka kept those experiences to herself for decades at a time most Austrians embraced the popular notion that they and their nation were victims of Hitler instead of his willing accomplices.

Born in Austria to a nomadic family of horse traders, Stojka returned after the end of the Nazi era and made a living selling carpets. She started speaking out in the 1980s, as Austrian awareness of the country's complicity in Nazi crimes grew. And she started painting -- dark, somber pictures depicting the death camps that alternated with joyful images of prewar life on the road in her family's horse-drawn wagon.

Despite those happier images, she never forgot the horrors of the Nazi era -- and implored audiences not to let history repeat itself.