Olga Sippl

„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.”

“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.”