Trude Sojka

Since 2020, the institution has become the Trude Sojka House Museum. Her more than 300 works of art are shown in a series of turning exhibitions.

On 12 March 2009, one week before the second anniversary of Sojka's death, her daughter Anita Steintz opened to the public the house of the artist turned into the Trude Sojka Cultural House. The house remained almost untouched. Only some rooms were adapted in order to improve the exhibition conditions. Visitors can also appreciate the sculpture garden, with the original plants of the house. Besides, the huge collection of Trude's husband, Hans Steinitz, was turned into a library. Many temporary exhibits, concerts, projections and lectures and many other cultural activities were held, using the adaptable spaces of the house. It is in this place that the Czech inhabitants of Ecuador reunited from time to time.

At the beginnings of 2007, Sojka suffered a Respiratory failure. On 18 February that year, exactly a year after the death of her daughter "Chela" (Eva Steinitz), which was not told to her, Sojka entered hospital where she had a second stroke. She died, at home, on 18 March, from a respiratory failure. Her remains rest in the Jewish cemetery in the city of Quito, along with those of her husband.

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

Thereafter, Sojka lived calmly with her husband Hans Steinitz. She had two granddaughters: Geetha Kannan (born in 1985), daughter of Miriam, and Gabriela F. Steinitz (born in 1995 to Anita). Hans Steinitz died on 23 May 1996, from an oesophageal cancer.

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

In 1948 Hans Steinitz and Sojka were married. Their first child, Eva Graciela Hedvika Steinitz was born in 1949. They had two other girls: Ruth Miriam Edith and Anita Steinitz, now the Director of the Trude Sojka Cultural House in Quito.

In Europe, Sojka became already 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 World War II, in 1946, she came to Ecuador, she was amazed to discover so closely the Pre-Columbian art. Her first paintings in Ecuador, created in 1950, depict her experiences in Auschwitz. She also worked a lot around the meaning of her last name: Sojka, a bird that wanders around the woods of eastern Europe.

In November, Trude is transferred to Gross-Rosen concentration camp, sub camp: Kudowa-Sąkisch. And in March 1945, as her pregnancy was beginning perhaps to be noticeable, she was put in Zittwerke-Kleinshönau concentration camp, where other Jewish pregnant women were held as well. She gave birth on 4 May 1945. Seven days later the camp was liberated by the Russians. On 29 May, her daughter, Gabriele Evelin Schwartz died.

With Hitler's rise to power and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Third Reich, Sojka's non-practicing Jewish family was threatened. In 1938, Sojka married Dezider Schwartz, a Slovak civil servant. They moved to live in Nitra, Slovakia, at Priehradná 6 street. In 1942, the couple was apparently transported to Majdanek concentration camp. This information remains unclear. Perhaps they managed to escape or hid, because in 1944 they were living in the same place, in Nitra. After the National Uprising, they werd sent first to Sered' labour camp, then, in October 1944, to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

She could never find Dezider Schwartz again. Edith, Trude's sister, along with her husband and child had died in Terezin, and her mother, Hedwig, had been shot in a forest near Maly Trostinec. But she found in the Red-Cross a paper from her older brother, Waltre, looking for his family. He was living in Ecuador since 1938. Waltre had been invited to Ecuador to give chemistry lectures in the Central University of Ecuador and, with his wife Lidy Hutzler, decided it was safer to stay there, at least until the war finished. Trude decided to join them.

Upon graduation from high school, her father enrolled Sojka, against her wishes, at the Faculty of Economics. Trude was so bored that she spent her time drawing caricatures of her teacher. Without her fathers' knowledge she enrolled in the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. Her talent as a painter lead her to exhibit at the Märkisches Museum in Berlin. Aged 27, in 1936, she graduated as top student. Her father died a couple of years later of a heart attack.

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

Gertrud Herta Sojková Baum was born on 9 December 1909 in Berlin to Czech Jewish parents. Her father, Rudolf Sojka, was an engineer, who had business dealings with the Ecuadorian president Eloy Alfaro pertaining to the Ecuadorian Railway system. Rudolf Sojka and his wife, Hedwig Baum, had three children: Waltre, (born in 1907), Gertrud and Edith, who was the youngest. Soon, the family moved to Prague, Czechoslovakia to Na Poříčí Street.