No ordinary caption. The words are paradoxical, the combination of the first-person pronoun (‘we’), the present tense (‘are’) and the adverbial phrase (‘in the gas chambers’) shocking. The letters themselves, upper case, spiky, thrown graphically across the entire width of the foreground, look striking, confrontational. In the middle ground we see two trees, their branches bare of leaves, a wagon, a lamp-post. Far away in the distance the tiny spire of a church and the roofs of buildings are silhouetted against the horizon. No ordinary painting.

‘We Sinti are in the gas chambers of Auschwitz’, painted by Austrian Romany Auschwitz-survivor Karl Stojka (1931–2003), encapsulates the two sides of the inherently disproportional representation of Romanies in European art. On the one hand, images of Romanies in European art are few and far between, their totality disproportional to the presence of Romanies in Europe. The group is marginalized or conjured up for the viewer by means of stereotypical images. On the other hand, the lack of proportion in the depiction of Romanies may be a deliberate, perhaps alienating, device on the part of the artist, a method of attracting attention in order to emphasize the individuality and ethnicity of the Romanies. Although the first category is linked more to works by non-Romanies, there are works by Romanies that reproduce stereotypical images; equally, there are works by non-Romanies that fall into the second category.

At first glance Stojka's painting is an example of the first type of disproportional representation. There is a traditional wagon, perhaps the most familiar of all stereotypical images, and there are no Romanies actually in sight. Yet the Romanies are absent because they have been gassed in Auschwitz. Stojka's artistic attempt to depict the fate of the Romanies is symptomatic of the huge task he has set himself. He is not depicting the actual historical reality, but using the absence of the Gypsies to (re-)instate them in public memory. Their absence is thus in inverse proportion to the importance that Stojka attaches to them.