Sofia Taikon was a Polish woman of Roma origin who was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943 during the Second World War by the Nazi forces. She was deported with her family because of their ethnic origin.
One year later, she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp where she spent another year as a prisoner. Thanks to being moved to Ravensbrück she avoided being in Auschwitz on the night of the 3rd August 1944 in which the prisoners from Roma origin in Auschwitz were killed in the gas chamber.
In 1945, the Swedish Red Cross launched an evacuation program for prisoners in the concentration camps and Sofia Taikon benefited from that and was sent to Sweden, a neutral country. More than 15,000 people were moved from the concentration camps to Sweden through this program.
Sofia started slowly adapting to the Swedish lifestyle and started looking for her family members who were also deported to the concentration camps together with her but never knew what happened to them.
Sofia’s life was taken into a comic when her grandchildren asked her about a tattoo on her arm. The tattoo said Sofia Z-4515 and she explained what she had suffered to her grandchildren. The Comic was published in 2005 and it explains all the struggles Sofia went through when being a prisoner in the Concentration Camps.
Sofia died a few months after the comic was published in 2005 but lived long enough to see her life put into a comic with the objective to raise awareness about the Roma Genocide committed by the Nazis during WWII.