Olga Sippl

“And one day a friend of mine from my youth and my mom were standing at the door. I lived in a sub tenancy and my mom, brother and my father stood at my door and said: ‘We thought we’d go to Prague to Olga, she’ll find some place for us”. And that was the beginning. I went to the party office with them and they were the first ones to be sent to Beroun and then to the camp. My dad was not allowed to leave, right, as he was a government official and at the time responsible for the school. Although he was constantly thrown stones at. Because during the speeches of Hitler, the radios were ordered to be removed and stored at our school and my father was responsible for ensuring that nobody would be listening to the radio. This was an order by the Czech gendarmes. They told him: ‘Mr. Stohwasser, you have the responsibility’. Now you can imagine how the Germans were ever since enraged by that and that they were throwing stones inside the windows and they were just eager for a chance to beat him up. But it was obvious, that in the long run, it was not possible to stay there. So a Czech policeman came and said ‘Mr. Stohwasser, now you put something in your pocket, but no suitcase, and I will bring you to the train station, it is the last train to Prague, or they’ll beat you to death’. And he added: ‘I’ll go as well’. And then he went with my father to the station and I remember that my father told me that they went through the gym and the public baths to the back door, so as to avoid the main entrance, where they waited for him. And then my father showed up with a razor in his pocket at my flat in Prague. But he didn’t come to my apartment, because in the meantime, a dormitory had been seized, and in this dormitory, an office was set up... we were constantly at the Masaryk train station spotting the transports. We German employees worked in shifts. And we were from different regions, one was from western Bohemia, one from northern Bohemia and we saw to it that the people were transported. And then came my father, in the dormitory, and then we got the mom and since I had a friend of a friend who had a motorcycle and he took me to Beroun and we picked up my mom with her suitcase and my brother, the four of us drove on the motorcycle to Prague to the camp. But then the family was together again.“

„My parents, as was the case in industrial areas, were from the beginning in the labor movement and thus my future was predestined since the very beginning. For it was obvious that working-class children were integrated into the children's labor organizations, the Kinderfreunde, the Hawks, the Socialist Youth, the workers’ gym and sports movements. So you gradually kind of grew into the labor movement since your very childhood. My parents were both dedicated people, especially active as politicians in culture. They not only took care of the Kinderfreunde movement, which provides continual education, music and games and the little history of art, but above all they were very committed to the working-class singers. They were both actively involved and contributed to the organization of the song festivals and so on. They were also active in the Bühnenfreunde (theater friends) – that’s what it was called, it was the theater section. Thanks God we had a very large workers’ home in our place with two rooms and club rooms, so that it was a center for the whole population, back then when television had not been in place at all and radio broadcast only very sparsely. The whole life of the organization was thus lived in the workers’ home.”