Miroslav Randa

“Self-ignition was a bit of a problem, because later we got hold of phosphorus, which had to be kept submerged in water all the time, otherwise it would ignite. Just like a regular match or something like that, but in that case it was the auto-ignition that mattered. Well, the way we prepared it was that we used regular ink bottles. That way it would not look conspicuous that I, a school boy, carried something in case they accidentally caught me, because I cannot say whether I would have been able to withstand the interrogations. Well, in order not to reveal anything, we put baby’s dummies on the ink bottles and made holes in them. But you pierced the dummy only when you were already setting the device in place. You turned it upside down, and some of the liquid thus flew out. Sometimes we used acid. We tried all kinds of things in order to make it as simple as possible.”

“Well, the hatred! When we had to leave the border region, my father was basically… He was at work at the station from which all the signal devices like semaphores and crossing-gates were being controlled, and there was a small space, and my father had to crawl through this space because the NSDAP soldiers were already there, and he had to crawl out through this opening and he ran away. Basically, all the other Czechs who were there were later sent to concentration camps. Father thus stayed there perhaps two or three weeks after we children had left, and our parents would always put us in some of the military transport trains when they were coming back and when the eviction agreement was basically already signed.”