Carl Stojka was born into a family of Roma Roman Catholics in the village of Vampersdorf in eastern Austria. The Stojka family belonged to the Roma community who lived as horse traders. They lived in a traveling family wagon and spent their winters in the Austrian capital, Vienna. Carl's ancestors lived in Austria for more than 200 years. In 1933, the Nazi regime, building on long-standing prejudices, launched a rigorous campaign against the Roma. They were targeted as racially "undesirable" and people labeled "criminal."
Carl grew up in freedom, travel and hard work. But in March 1938, just before his seventh birthday, Germany annexed Austria. Their wagon was parked for the winter in a camp in Vienna. Instead of prolonging their lives in travel, they were forced to stay put.
By 1943, Karl's family, as well as thousands of other Roma, were deported to the so-called ′ ′ Gypsy Family Camp ′ ′ in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Transportation of more than 900 Roma was sent to Buchenwald for forced labor. Although Carl was fourteen years old, his family convinced the SS guards that he was much younger. So Carl avoided being sent to Birkenau's gas chambers.
On the night of August 2, 1944, between 4,200 and 4,300 Roma were killed in the camp that night.
Carl was later deported to the Flossenberg concentration camp. He was liberated by US troops near Roetz, Germany in April 1945. After the war, he returned to Vienna with his surviving family. Of the 23,000 Roma men, women and children imprisoned in the so-called "Gypsy family camp" in Auschwitz, about 19,000 dead.

The first Roma arrived in the Balkans in the middle of the 11th century, when they left Armenia and went to Anatolia, then to Greece and further north.
Later in the 14th century, towards the middle of the 14th century, archival materials for the Roma were found in both Zagreb and Ljubljana. A larger group of Roma arrived in the territory of present-day Serbia during the reign of King Stefan Decanski, while his son Stefan Dusan (1348) passed a special tax law for Roma who were engaged in blacksmithing. The Roma before the Ottomans were in large numbers on the territory of the Balkan Peninsula, and this is confirmed by the fact that there was a mass appearance of Slavic names among the Roma in the first half of the 16th century. During the Ottoman Empire, the Roma had their own territory - Sandzak, better known as the Roma Sandzak, first in Anadolia, and then in the Balkans. At the time of their arrival in the Balkans, the Roma belonged to the group of the Christian religion, and with the arrival of the Turks, they converted to Islam en masse. At the beginning of the 16th century (1522) the first census was made where the Roma in Rumelia concluded that in that period the Roma lived on the territory of present-day Serbia in the region of Resava, Pirot, Novo Brdo, Novi Pazar, Smederevo, Vranje and Kosovo (Pristina, Prizren and Pec) In Belgrade the first census of Roma was made in 1536.