Rudolf Sojka and his wife, Hedwig Baum, had three children: Waltre, (born in 1907), Gertrud and Edith, who was the youngest.

With Hitler's rise to power and the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Third Reich, Sojka's non-practicing Jewish family was threatened.

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.

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 first, she spent a whole year travelling, trying still to find her family, and to recover her paintings, while working in all kinds of jobs to earn enough money for the big trip to the New Continent.

Sojka's experience in Auschwitz left her traumatized: she witnessed people die in front of her every day (including her daughter), walk barefoot in the snow, and even dig their own graves.

The only food she got to eat was a "soup" (with unknown things floating in it), a little hard stale bread, potatoes and fruit and vegetable peels.

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.

When Sojka arrived in Guayaquil, she met a good friend of her brother, who was also a Holocaust survivor, who managed to run away from Sachsenhausen concentration camp with the excuse he had been hired as a lawyer by a cotton company in Ecuador.

He was helped out by honorary consul of Ecuador in Bremen José Ignacio Burbano Rosales, recognized for opening the door of his country to so many Jews.

They had two other girls: Ruth Miriam Edith[2][3] and Anita Steinitz, now the director of the Trude Sojka Cultural House in Quito.

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 '90s, or Pilar Bustos.

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.

Walter and Liddy Sojka had employed a number of locals who were reproducing all kinds of useful and traditional objects to sell and even export to other countries in America and Europe.

Meanwhile, her paintings developed to be more gay: nature, the universe, prayers, nostalgic memories of her beloved Czechoslovakia... became her main subjects.

To fix the cement to the wooden or cardboard surface, she used a glue that her brother Walter Sojka, a chemist, invented just for her.

Moreover, she was a pioneer in Ecuador, and probably in Latin America as well, to use recycled materials within her artworks, such as broken glass, pieces of metal, wheel structures, tiles, dustbin covers... Because she believed on the value of each little object, in the aftermath of the tremendous experience in the concentration camps, back in Europe.

Many temporary exhibits, concerts, projections and lectures and many other cultural activities were held, using the adaptable spaces of the house.

The Yad Vashem has named the Trude Sojka House Museum a Holocaust memorial and a Freedom Station by the Ohio community, as the life of Sojka and her family constitutes a renowned example of survival and renewal, fighting against antisemitism, xenophobia, and other types of intolerance.