“But we have to go out, we have to open ourselves up”: Publication History of Ceija Stojka”s Memoirs

Is this the whole world?” With this question begins the groundbreaking memoir of Austrian Romani writer, painter, musician, and activist Ceija Stojka as told from the perspective of a nine-year-old child interned in the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ultimately, she spent more than two years in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Bergen-Belsen. From the mid-1980s until her death in 2013, Stojka filled over thirty handwritten notebooks with intimate memories, comments, and illustrations about a wide range of topics, in no particular chronological or linear order, including growing up in a Romani family in pre-Nazi times, being interned in the concentration camps, and facing postwar challenges while reestablishing her life in Austria. Researcher, author, and filmmaker Karin Berger first met her while researching the topic of women”s resistance in Austria, and published her interview with Ceija and her sister, Kathi, in 1987. The relationship between Stojka and Berger led to the publication of three memoirs and the production of two documentary films spanning the time frame from 1933 until around 2005.

Encouraged by Berger, Stojka published Wir leben im Verborgenen: Erinnerungen einer Rom-Zigeunerin (We Live in Secrecy: Memories of a Romni-Gypsy) in 1988, when she was fifty-five years old. It was the first memoir by a Romani woman in Austria about the atrocities wrought against Roma under National Socialism, and one of the first in the German-speaking countries. Indeed, she became the best-known Austrian Romani woman survivor. Her memoir inspired a wave of published testimonies, memoirs, interviews, and biographies by and about other Roma and Sinti persecuted under National Socialism. To my knowledge, only two works by German-speaking Roma and Sinti have appeared in English: Otto Rosenberg”s Das Brennglas (1998) as A Gypsy in Auschwitz (1999) and Walter Stanoski Winter”s Z 3105 as Winter Time: Memoirs of a German Sinto Who Survived Auschwitz (2004). Likewise, no English translations of works by Roma and Sinti survivors in languages other than German exist, except for poems by the Polish Bronisława Wajs, who was known as “Papusza.”