Art exhibition shines light on Romani persecution during Holocaust

Geoff Bennett:

It is a lesser known chapter of the Holocaust, the murder of some 500,000 Roma and Sinti people, members of a long marginalized and often persecuted minority in Europe.

One way into that history is through the work of an artist who survived it herself.

Jeffrey Brown reports now for our Art in Action series, which explores the intersection of art and democracy as part of our Canvas coverage.

Jeffrey Brown:

Auschwitz 1944, ravens and smoke in a dark sky, a tattooed forearm floating in space, the letter Z for the German word for gypsy used as a derogatory term, the works and actual serial number of Ceija Stojka, who survived the camps as a young girl and many decades later, in her 50s, turned to art as a way to remember the horror, honor her fellow Romani people, and warn the world of continuing threats of right-wing nationalism.

Stojka died in 2013 at age 79, a writer, artist and activist who, says Rutgers professor Ethel Brooks, herself of Romani heritage and chair of the European Roma Rights Center, became a hero to many in her community and beyond.

Ethel Brooks, Rutgers University:

She was there to say, no, we are -- we have this history and we have each other. We have beauty and we have art and we have stories that should be shared with each other and with the world. It's just -- it's everything.

Jeffrey Brown:

Ceija Stojka: Making Visible at The Drawing Center, a museum in New York, is the first major U.S. exhibition on the artist, with more than 60 paintings and drawings made between 1992 and 2011, not documentary in style, but acts of memory and imagination based on her own experiences and stories she was told.

Stojka was self-taught, often working at her kitchen table in Vienna. But, says exhibition curator Lynne Cooke, she developed a sophisticated style of contemporary art-making.

Lynne Cooke, Curator, Ceija Stojka Making Visible:

She restlessly experimented with processes and materials and invented new vocabularies to get at the same set of questions over and over again, and that's very rare in my experience for someone who hasn't had formal academic training.

But she had an aptitude for it certainly and she had an inquiring -- an inquiring mind, a great deal of visual sophistication and a real purpose.

Jeffrey Brown:

That purpose, to tell the stories of her people and advocate on their behalf.

Documentary films by Karin Berger showing at the exhibition capture Stojka's personality and drive to bring Romani history and culture, including music, to a larger public. She did it first through writing, including a 1988 memoir, "We Live in Secrecy," next through art, some of it recalling a prewar life, as in this untitled painting from 1995.

Ethel Brooks:

This idea of a Romani encampment and of making home wherever you are in the world is something that is really central to who we are and what we do, because so often home has been denied to Romani people because of the ways in which we have been treated by the majority society.

Jeffrey Brown:

And then the end of that life, when the Nazis rounded up Romani people and brought them by trains to the concentration camps, Dachau, where Stojka's father was first taken. He, one of Stojka's brothers and nearly 200 members of her extended family, were killed.

Stojka, her mother and four of her siblings barely survived.

Lynne Cooke:

One of the most powerful paintings I think is an early one, where she's mapped the central space in the Ravensbruck forced labor camp for women. And you see the barracks to the side and this large zone where roll call of thousands of women took place every day, several times a day sometimes, where they were made to stand for hours in freezing cold weather.

And it's the way she's painted the ground and the kind of liquidity and the kind of the cold palette that speak very effectively to our emotions.

Jeffrey Brown:

They Devoured Us, she titled this 1995 watercolor, referencing a Romani term for the Holocaust, the Devouring. She portrayed what she called the beautiful women of Auschwitz and later made abstract blotch-like images with ink on paper, including one titled The Destitution, the Suffering, I Feel It Still.

In fact, Stojka was also speaking very directly to new developments she feared in the 1980s and beyond, the election of Kurt Waldheim as president of Austria, despite revelations of his Nazi past, the rise in far right nationalism, including anti-Roma rhetoric in Austria and elsewhere in Europe.

Stojka painted works such as this titled Victory to Our Fuhrer.

Ethel Brooks:

When we talk about Holocaust denial, there was never -- there was a denial. There were no Roma who were invited to testify at Nuremberg, for example, right? There was no -- no one was asking Romani people, what was your experience in the war? Because it was seen as something that wasn't important.

And that was becoming kind of a larger issue for Roma, but also the kind of racism and nationalism that was resurgent in Europe was something that she was watching very carefully and speaking out against.

Jeffrey Brown:

Today, that resurgence continues, even grows in many places.

In the works of Ceija Stojka, says curator Lynne Cooke, viewers can experience the thrill of discovery of an artist they might never have previously encountered and also a warning that what has happened could once again.

Lynne Cooke:

For many people, the Holocaust and the Second World War are so distanced as to be a very little part of their sense of history. And I think that Stojka's work can very eloquently speak to the audiences of many kinds, including those who really don't know about that earlier history and, through that history, make us more vigilant and make us more aware.

Jeffrey Brown:

Ceija Stojka herself put it more bluntly, saying: "Auschwitz is only sleeping."

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Geoff Bennett at The Drawing Center in New York.