Trude Sojka

Trude Sojka
Trude Sojka (1999)
Born	Gertrud Herta Sojka Baum (1909-12-09)9 December 1909 Berlin, German Empire
Died	18 March 2007(2007-03-18) (aged 97) Quito, Ecuador
Nationality	Czech-Ecuadorian
Education	Prussian Academy of Arts
Known for	Painting, Sculpture
Movement	Expressionism

Gertrud Sojka, better known as Trude Sojka (9 December 1909 – 18 March 2007), was a Czech - Ecuadorian painter and sculptor, creator of an original technique using Recycledmaterials and concrete. She was born in Berlin, Germany and died in Quito, Ecuador.

Biography

Early life

Gertrud Herta Sojka was born in December 9, 1909 in Berlin, German Empire of Czech parents, in the bosom of a wealthy Jewish family. Files from his father, Rudolf Sojka, an engineer, have been found, showing that he had done business with the Ecuadorian president Eloy Alfaro pertaining to the Ecuadorian Railway transport system . With his wife, Hedwig Baum, Rudolf Sojka had three children: Waltre, (born in 1907), Gertrud and Edith (the youngest one). Soon, the family moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia, near the train station, to Na Poříčí street.

Since childhood, Sojka was interested in art. At her high school she learned German, Czech, Greek, Latin and English. She also attended a boarding summer school in Lausanne, Switzerland, where she learned French, and exchanged drawings with her girl friends.

Upon graduation from high school, her father enrolled Sojka, against her wishes, at the Faculty of Economics, a "serious" career, different from art. Trude was so bored, she used to tell, that she spent her time drawing caricatures of her teacher. Thus, hiding from her father, entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin. Her talent as a painter lead her to exhibit her early works at the Märkisches Museum in Berlin. At age 27, in 1936, she graduated as top student. Her father died a couple of years later of a heart attack.

Holocaust Survival

Ever since Hitler's rise to power and the invaasion of Czechoslovakia by the Third Reich, Sojka's non-practicing Jewish family saw itself threatened. In 1938, Sojka married Dezider Schwartz, a civil servant. Trude became pregnant just before she was caught by the Nazis. She gave birth to her daughter, Gabriela, at Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. Given the dire circumstances of hunger and disease, Gabriela died shortly after birth. By that time, Sojka's older brother Waltre was invited to Ecuador to give chemistry lectures in the Central University of Ecuador. He went along with his wife Lidy Hutzler and decided it was safer to stay in that country, at least until the war finished. But Trude, Edith, their husbands, Edith's child Karl and the mother Hedwig end up being transferred by the Nazis into Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1944. Later on, they are deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Sojka never heard any more about the rest of her family, that is dead without doubt.

Sojka's experience in Auschwitz left her traumatized: she is forced to witness people die in front of her every day (including her daughter mentioned before), walk barefoot in the snow, and even dig her own grave. The only food she got to eat was a "soup" (with unknown things floating in it), very little hard stale bread, potato and other fruits and vegetable peels... What saves her survive for nearly a year in the Concentration campis mainly her ability to massage. In 1945, the URSS army finally frees her along with the other prisoners, and she immediately thinks about forgetting that terrifying episode she had to pass through. Now, a new life is about to come...

Later life

After her release from Auschwitz concentration camp, Sojka returned to her home in Prague, where she found all of her belongings had been taken by occupants. She only recovered a couple of pictures and other objects without any material value. She spent a whole year in Europe: in Nitra, Slovakia, where his husband came from, Prague and Berlin, working in small jobs, as a translator, secretary, masseuse and ceramist. From the Red Cross she received a message from her brother, Waltre, looking for her and the rest of the family. Learning that he is still in Ecuador and owns a big Ecuadorian handicrafts shop that's becoming famous, Sojka works harder than ever to earn enough money, to travel to Ecuador.

Arrival to Ecuador

"When I arrived to the port of Guayaquil, my brother was waiting for me with his arms wide open. Only that when I got out from the ship, I went running straight to hug a bunch of bananas", Sojka used to joke. In fact, arriving to Ecuador she is delighted by the number of exotic fruits and things one could find nowhere in Europe at that time or that where extremely expensive, as bananas, that Sojka loved so much, were. Sojka is fascinated by the culture, the indigenous people and the landscapes, as her brother leads her to the capital of the country: Quito. Little by little she learns the foreign language (Spanish) pronounced with curious accents. Also, she finds some resemblances between Quichua language and Czech. Another great thing she discovers is the autochthonous and aboriginal art, that she starts studying as soon as possible: a source of inspiration to her own works.

Fortunately, she gets to work making handycrafts for her brother's handycraft shop called AKIOS (Sojka or "Soika", as pronounced in Czech, written upside down), in the Historic Center of Quito, in a neighborhood called Loma Grande.

Second Marriage

When Sojka arrives to Guayaquil, she meets a good friend of her brother, who was also a Holocaust survivor, who managed to run away from Buchenwald concentration camp with the excuse he had been hired as a lawyer by a cotton company in Ecuador. He was helped out by President of Ecuador Manuel Muñoz Borrero, recognized as Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem for opening the door of his country to so many other Jews.

In 1948 Hans Steinitz and Sojka got marreid. Their first child, Eva Graciela Hedwika Steinitz was born in 1949. They have two other girls: Ruth Miriam Edith ^[1][2] and Anita Steinitz (now Director of the Trude Sojka Cultural House^[3] in Quito, Ecuador).

Life in Ecuador

The artist then dedicates almost completely to her art. She also likes to cook Czech, German and Jewish cuisine, that she sells in occasions. By these times, she gets to meet great Ecuadorian artists,^[4][5] such as Gilberto Almeida,^[6] Víctor Mideros,^[7] Manuel Rendón o, during the 90's, or Pilar Bustos. She even gets to teach sculpture to Oswaldo Guayasamín.

Thereafter, Sojka lived calmly with her husband Hans Steinitz, seeing her girls grow up. She has two granddaughters: Geetha Kannan (born in 1985), a Hindu girl adopted by Miriam Steinitz, and Gabriela F. Steinitz (born in 1995 from Anita Steinitz). Hans Steinitz dies on the 23rd of May, 1996, from an Oesophageal cancer.

Last years

On Sojka's 90th birthday, the Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana "Benjamín Carrión" (Ecuadorian House of Culture) pays her hommage, naming her "Emeritus artist" during a big reception, in which a retrospective exhibition of her artworks takes place. In that same event, the book "The two lives of Trude Sojka", written by Rodrigo Villacís Molina is launched. This is just one of the many tributes that are made for the artist in Ecuador, United States and France, including exhibitions in the Guaranda and Riobamba.

On 2001, Sojka suffered a brain stroke. She managed to overcome it with a minimum of memory loss. She continued to make heavy paintings and sculptures with cement and recycled materials up to the age of ninety-five. When her hands get too fragile, she ceased working with cement. However, she never stopped painting and drawing.

At the beginnings of 2007, Sojka was starting to suffer from a Respiratory failure. On February 18 that year, exactly a year after the death of her daughter "Chela" (Eva Steinitz^[8]), which was never told to her not to cause her pain, Sojka enter the Voz Andes,^[9] in which she stays a couple of days. She suffers there form a second brain stroke. Her daughters then take the decision to bring Sojka back home where she dies on March 18, from a respiratory failure, surrounded by her two daughters, Anita and Miriam, her granddaughter Gabriela and a nurse. Her remains rest in the Jewish cemetery^[10] in the city of Quito, along with those of her husband.

Work

Trude Sojka's work evolves according to the various experiences in her life. Sojka studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin (Akademie der Künste), where she became familiar with German (such as Die Brücke) and Jewish Expressionism. She became familiar with the works of Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and Georges Rouault. She deeply admired the sculptures of Ernst Barlach and is likely to have personally known the work of the expressionist-realist Käthe Kollwitz.

Moreover, in Europe, Sojka became interested in the primitive art of Africa, Oceania and America (which can also be considered somehow expressionist). This she had surely learned visiting ethnographic museums. Thus, when after the war, in 1946, she came to Ecuador, she was amazed to discover so closely the Pre-Columbian Andean symbolism. Her first paintings in Ecuador, created during the years 1950, depict her experiences in the concentration camp: the anguish and loneliness, the barbed wires, the sad procession of women walking perhaps to the gas chambers, but also her prayers that helped her survive the horror, as well as the hope of freedom and a new life.

References