František Šúlek

"We were collecting the ammunition and making a pile by the Obecná Mountain. And now it was a bigger pile than this table, bigger, definitely. So what to do with it? So we make an explosion. Well, we set it off. If we'd known what it was going to do, we'd never have... I was eight years old at the time, I could do all sorts of things, but I couldn't know what it was going to do. I knew it would be a terrible blow. There was a main state road about 150 yards from that Obecná Mountain, from the projection where we had the ammunition, and there was a bridge where the hay wagons could pass. So we'd run through there and hide on the other side behind the earthwork. And we made... we had detonators, flash line, incendiary line at home. And then we stacked these anti-tank mines, flat, artillery shells that we carried. The ones we couldn't carry, we rolled. Because some of them were packed in such a way that it was a metal box, and when you opened it, you could see exactly that the grenade was stacked full length in a larger caliber. It was a calibre of, I don't know, 150 millimetres, the grenade was that long and weighed maybe seventy kilos. We couldn't carry that. And we set it off... we made it explode. It was quite safe in relation to the road, because the bus went there in the morning and in the evening, and this was around noon. And in Látky, where we went to school, they said it was falling like hail on the roofs, these little shards. That was a terrible explosion... A clearing in the woods, fifty meters cut down."

"Of course, as a kid I got in everywhere. When they were filling a magazine, for example, I got in. And he, if I wanted to shoot. Yeah. So he went out with me and there was this bank a little bit, so he put the machine gun in my hand and stood behind me. But he already knew what it was going to do, because as I shot at that bank, and as I squeezed, the machine gun went up, and I would have fallen on my back, but he held it from behind. It was giving terribly fast bangs. There were 72 cartridges in there, and they could go off in a couple of dozen seconds. I did about three or four shots when I hit it, when I hit the trigger. And in the snow they were kind of dimples, you could see it, but then I didn't want to go on, it wasn't fun, to shoot. With the Russians, you could... You could understand them a little bit, so you could have fun with them."