Memoria [EN] No. 29 (2/2020) | Page 20

The Ravensbruck gallery chills to the bone: the pictures are drenched in white, the lines are like lashes of the whip. This room focuses on the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, where Ceija, her mother Sidi and her sister Kathi were deported shortly before the terrible liquidation of the ‘gypsy camp’ at Auschwitz (August 2nd). This was in May or June 1944 - Mitzi had arrived just before them, in April. Someone is always watching you, at Ravensbrück. The views could be those from the guards' towers. A huge bloodshot eye watches over Ravensbrück 1944. This is more than just an ‘evil eye’: it is a sad sun, the eye of the dead who watch the living, the ever-open eye that must bear witness and imprint on its retina that which must never be forgotten. At Ravensbrück, as elsewhere in Ceija’s work, strips and rectangles structure the composition: something martial, something highly inflexible has made its mark, even on the landscapes. Sinister figures reign over them, such as the Oberaufseherin Dorothea Binz who appears to be standing in the middle of the path in Untitled, 28.01.2001. Little Ceija was fascinated by this epitome of cruelty and perversity, with her impeccable turnout and perfect blond ringlets. Alongside these figures, the bodies of the deported are featureless brushstrokes, beginning their journey to a ghostly future. Yet life seems to reside with the deported in their colourful clothes, such as in the astonishing chorus of figures in Ravensbrück Women, 1944, in the borderland between figurative and abstract.

In January 1945, Sidonie and Ceija were taken by lorry, then on foot, to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; Kathi was deported to the Rechlin-Retzow forced labour camp and Mitzi to Büchenwald. Ceija survived among the dead whom she saw as her friends and allies. She kept warm by hiding under the piled-up bodies; she kept herself alive by eating leather from belts, scraps of fabric, shoelaces – it was a long time since the deported had been given food. In Untitled, I'm starving, the person sinking into the snow stares at us, calls out to us: we who are, yet again, on the other side of the barbed wire. Ceija would tell of finding a tiny branch and feasting on its sap. She believed it saved her life and, in recognition, went on to sign all her works with a branch. Just as the artist’s creative process takes in both ‘light works’ and ‘dark works’, so hope lives on. And yet Untitled, 21.11.2009 tells us that "there was great fear behind the barbed wire". Two animals haunt Ceija’s imagination. They are crows, present from the very start to the very end of the exhibition, and dogs - the torturers’ ferocious companion. There are other, scarcely bearable images in this section as Bergen-Belsen, 1945, liberated by British troops on April 15th then set alight so as to prevent any further spread of the epidemics that were killing those who had managed to survive thus far. Yet even here, amidst this truly apocalyptic scene, stands a tree, magnificent and full of life.

BACK TO LIFE, WITH MARY

Following the liberation of the camps, it took Ceija and her mother almost four months to reach Vienna from Bergen-Belsen. In this last section, their exhaustion and their battle with the elements emerge in some of the landscapes. The composition and the movement of the trees in several paintings formally echo Vienna-Auschwitz (shown earlier). Pink, orange and violet skies recall landscapes in the first gallery, emphasising the extent to which past, present and future mix and mingle: for Ceija, time is cyclical – a happy time where life can begin again, and another unspoken time steeped in the fear that such horror might repeat itself. In its attempt to give meaning to the madness, Ceija’s art is never unequivocal.

Having returned to Vienna, it took Ceija and her mother several months to trace the other family members who had survived, and years to find work and a place to live. Ceija sold fabrics door-to-door until 1959 when she was given a licence to sell rugs on a market stall – which she continued to do until 1984. She had three children: Hojda (born in 1949), Silvia (born in 1951) and Jano (1955-1979). Life began again and mother earth - along with fruit and vegetables - became the main subject of her paintings, after years of hunger in the camps. “Sunflowers are the flower of the Roma,” wrote Ceija and here they are, omnipresent in her work once again (Travels Through a Field of Sunflowers in Summer among others).