Olga Šišková

“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.”