Jan Darsa

“Then I was in the village of Vidovle. German soldiers accompanied the whole procession. It was back in 1945 just before the Red Army arrived. Those prisoners you know, they just could not go on. Germans had nothing to give them. And they were all so weak anyway. Just bones and skin and I was them coming to a German farmer begging for potatoes or a piece of bread. I saw the farmer woman saying: ‚Here in the yard you got a whole heap of potatoes. They have been cooked already, you can eat those.‘ They saw it, about ten of the prisoners. They jumped at it eating straight from the ground. They must have been really hungry.”

“So we actually collected the bombs and along the roads there were such bordering stones. (Back then there were plenty, but nowadays you can hardly see any.) So we took the bomb and in a certain distance we threw it to the stone and as it hit the stone, of course it exploded. It was a blast. No explosive, but only the kind of initial igniter and then it started to spring out (what was it?) sulphur or some kind of chemicals, which burnt. So we also didn’t know, if that was a bomb or an explosive. So we picked up stones and threw them there too. And as they run into it, all became to spring out even more. And then the fire ended. We managed to have this kind of fun several times; of course without our parents being aware of anything at all.”