International Travelling Exhibition

NAMES INSTEAD
OF NUMBERS

Remembrance Book for the prisoners
of Dachau concentration camp

Karl Wacker Horvath 13.4.1908 – 28.11.1942

• * 13.4.1908 in Graz (A)
• Horse trader
• Member of the Roma
• Traveled throughout Austria, forced to establish permanent residency in Vienna following orders from the National Socialists in 1939
• Wife Sidi and children (in 1939) Mitzi (14), Kathi (12), Hansi (11), Karli (8), Ceija (6) und Ossi (7)

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• 1941 – 1942 Dachau, Neuengamme, and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps
• † 28.11.1942 »Invalids' transport« to Schloss Hartheim/Linz and murdered

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• Remembrance Book Biography Author (2003):
  Vera Habicht (* 1945), German studies specialist, Munich (D)

»We were often in Wiener Neustadt, where the horse market was. The Roma from near and far gathered there... Our parents parked our trailers behind Wiener Neustadt. We tied the horses to a nut tree or cherry tree and picked up hay from the farmers. We would spend five, six days there, until the horse market took place. We children enjoyed going there with our fathers - they would trade and sell horses with the farmers there.«

Ceija Stojka: We Live in Secrecy. Memoirs of a Roma Gypsy, Vienna 1988

»One day the Gestapo arrested our father, Karl Wacker Horvath, at our home. They came in a small car and pushed him inside. We children stood there, crying for our father. He winked once more and then they drove him away. That was 1941 and it's my last memory of him. We never saw him again.«

Ceija Stojka, Vienna 1988

»It couldn't have been much different for him than it was for us in Auschwitz… I think death was a release for them - to leave the pain behind. Yes, death is a release… My poor father, he didn't have a chance. Sadly.«

Interview with Ceija Stojka, Vienna 2002

 

Ceija on her mother's lap in Auschwitz
(Ceija Stojka)