František Chlup

“We, the boys, were wondering what it might be… Somebody said ‘it’s a kind of a rocket,’ or ‘they are flares for guns,’ and what not… Of course, I took one of the boxes home and I immediately started working on it in the workshop. I put down my backpack and bag and I reached for matches… I ignited it and it started doing ‘psssssss’ nicely. That’s a rocket, a rocket for sure, that’s great, I will go tell the boys right away… We always met in the evenings under the chestnut tree in the centre of the village. I decided I would try one more. But meanwhile it had rained, and the stuff was wet.,. I tried a second one, and I set it on fire, and nothing happened. I peeked inside – it was about that long – and it was only about half full. I thus took a pair of nippers, the type you use to pull out nails, I broke it in the middle to open it, and I grabbed a match and I held it close to it… And then I didn’t remember anything else, for a while. The blast was so strong that the steel nippers had scratches from the inside. When I came to myself, I had my nose soaked in a basin with Lysol, because the blast shattered the house and dad probably knew immediately what was going on. They ran there, and they found me lying there in blood.”

“Inside the room there was light like in the day. Red blaze… I remember that dad shook my mom to wake her up and he told her: ‘Don’t be afraid, there is a fire somewhere, and it’s close.’ The door from the room led to the kitchen, and the kitchen window opened into the yard. He jumped out of the bed, and he opened the door and there was so much light in the kitchen that it looked like during the day. The barn was already on fire. The fire was huge. I remember that we had a cleaning machine which we used when we made hay, and it had an iron framework; the gate already sizzled in fire, ‘ssssss,’ and the machine that stood behind the gate looked like a burning frame. Everything was already crumbling down.”