Olga Sippl

“My husband was unemployed for seven years even though he was a trained leather merchant and even a specialist in his field. He wasn’t simply a vendor but really a specialist. My mother in law was a porcelain factory worker and she had to feed the whole family. Then my father in law became so desperate that he went to work to Germany. It was not until he had tried everything possible and my husband as well. Out of desperation, he then went to Germany to find a job there. He was a machine operator. But he said to his wife: “but I’ll not join anywhere, I promise to you”. Because the mother in law was a functionary of the general trade unions. And he kept his word. But he earned as much in one week as the mother in the whole month. But it was simply the unemployment that wore people down. There was a ruined shaft, brown coal mines, where the people tried to get out some coal. The Czech police knocked over their carts, because it was forbidden. They only cared about the fact that it was forbidden, not about the people. This naturally also developed the hatred among the people more and more.”

“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.“