Olga Šišková

* 1929

  • “One of my relatives, an officer, had an idea that he would provide a rifle for all his relatives. He gave us one, too. Then the terror after Heydrich’s assassination began and we had this rifle at home in the closet. Germans in their army boots came in and began banging on the door. My Dad nearly suffered a stroke and his face turned almost green, he was so sick, and my mom too. Because we had the rifle there. They came in, opened the closet and they were stabbing into the clothes with their bayonets. Now one of them reached his hand inside and with a victorious look he began pulling something out. Dad was about to faint. So were we. But do you know what the soldier pulled out? A photography tripod - my father was an avid photographer. The rifle was just next to it. Do you realize that we would have been all dead?”

  • “Mr. Deitch arrived here in 1959, and we began working on his orders. At first it was the Madlenka, this was very simple, but the following films were getting more and more difficult. And we did all this by hand, there were no computers.”

  • “Everyone had to start from the very beginning, just like in the Baťa factory. I spent half a year doing only colouring work. I could chose between colouring or contour drawing. Then I began with drawing individual frames. The animated film production was a large factory in those times…”

  • “Luboš Beneš, the one who made the film A je to!, worked with us, too. He later went to work in the puppet film department. He was a real prankster. For instance, he would sit on a big tin box from the film roll and ride on it down the marble staircase from the highest floor. What a noise he made! Or there was a party… People believed that aloe was good for your health, and so the girls grew aloe in a flower pot there. He gnawed on it and ate all of their aloe.”

  • “We were knitting little braids from straw and then making bags from them. Later they had us clean some rings for V2. When we received the boxes with the rings, we did this: we applied ash on them so that they would jam.”

  • Celé nahrávky
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    Praha, 29.12.2013

    (audio)
    délka: 03:22:05
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Stories of 20th Century
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

It is great to do a work you like with people you like

As a young woman
As a young woman
zdroj: soukromý archiv pamětníka

  Olga Šišková was born February 6, 1929 in Prague. She grew up in the family of Ing. Josef Andrs, who was the general manager of the Czechoslovak State Airlines during the First Republic era. She studied the Jan Neruda Grammar School, but she did not complete her studies as she transferred to the State School of Graphic Design, where she studied drawing. She was doing forced labour in 1944-45. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts after the war. After the completion of her studies she worked in ÚMEZ (Centre for mechanization in agriculture) for one year. In 1952 she began working for the Short Films Studio (Krátký film), where she worked as an animator on production of cartoon films. She collaborated with famous Czech directors like Zdeněk Miller, Zdeněk Smetana, or Václav Bedřich. She also took part in the film production for the American director Gene Deitch who worked in Prague. She retired in 1998.