Olga Sippl

* 1920

  • “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.“

  • „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.”

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    München, 24.07.2014

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    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Not to disappear from history
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I have spent my life in the Seliger Community

Olga Sippl 2014
Olga Sippl 2014
zdroj: Miloslav Man

Olga Sippl, née Stohwasser, was born on September 19, 1920, in Altrohlau near Karlovy Vary. She comes from a social-democratic, working-class family and already as a child, she grew up in the children and youth organizations of the Sudeten-German labor movement such as the Hawks, the Socialist Youth and the gymnastics and sports clubs. Here she experienced the solidarity with the Czech Social Democrats. Her father was a janitor at the elementary and town school and her parents were active as politicians in culture. Sippl attended the German-speaking girls‘ elementary school and for half a year also the Czech-language town school. After graduating, she took up a job in the Karlovy Vary Urania, working in its Prague office since 1938. After the Munich Agreement, her parents fled Altrohlau, which was annexed to the German Reich, and moved to Prague. However, Sippl could not follow her parents in the emigration to England because she was not present in the Sudetenland at the time of the annexation. Shortly before the occupation of Prague by the German Wehrmacht, she went with her boyfriend and later husband Ernst Sippl to Altrohlau. There they married. However, her husband was conscripted to the Wehrmacht and fell in March 1945. In 1943, their son Herbert was born. After the war, Sippl worked in the Antifa office in Karlovy Vary that organized the emigration of the Sudeten Germans recognized as anti-fascists. She herself, her son and her parents left Czechoslovakia with the last Antifa transport. After living in a refugee camp, in Königsdorf and with her parents in Birmingham, England, she was finally employed by the Bavarian SPD in Munich in 1949. In 1951, she co-founded the Seliger Community and was on the editorial board of the publishing house “The Bridge”. She was also a member of the Federal Board of the Seliger Community, a representative of the Seliger Community in the refugee advisory board of the SPD and was later appointed honorary chairman.