Mozes Heinschink: You were the first [Romani] person in Austria – and even worldwide one of the few – to talk and write in public about the concentration camps and similar issues. But why did no other Roma dare? Why did you decide to go public?

Ceija Stojka: Why did I go public? Because the gadje said, “Auschwitz is a lie, just fiction, there were no gas chambers, as there are so many people still alive who all were in the camps.” This hurt me, because my Auschwitz number is tattooed on my arm! And where is my little brother, my father? They all died there! My father in Dachau, my little brother in Auschwitz. Both my grandmothers, my mother’s mother and my father’s mother, were arrested together with many other people from Burgenland and deported to somewhere near Litzmannstadt. I think they dug a ditch somewhere in the woods, kicked them in there and buried them. Their bones will probably be found in 200 or 300 years!

I wrote my book because I could not bear the statement that all this was not true and that we were liars. Auschwitz – everyone knows the name and whoever is interested in Nazi history knows what it means and that it is true. We cannot allow this knowledge to be forgotten, nor can we accept that something like this will ever happen to us again. I think I was the youngest kid to survive and grow old and to be still alive. God gave me a second life, and I have lived through it. I have children, a husband, my family. If only someone had come at that time and warned us: “Roma, we must do something about it, the gadje are terrorising us and telling lies about us!” And I am sure, if anything like that ever happened to us again, not even one single person would speak out! And I decided: “I have to write it all down”, so that my children – no, their children, not my own, but my children’s children and grandchildren – that they, too, know what we had to suffer and what happened. I wrote it down for them, for the grandchildren of my grandchildren, for them to know what had happened.

Well, there may be people who are older and wiser than I, but none of them grabbed a pencil to write anything down. And afterwards they had a go at me. ‘She wanted to write a bestseller’ – a book which is sold many, many times. But I did not intend to write a bestseller. I only wrote that small book to express my thoughts and feelings.