“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.”
“Only later, when I was already doing my vocational training, I began to understand that I had to act as a man and as a Czech. Well, and so I joined in, or rather, they got me involved in it as a messenger and I was carrying messages as well as some destructive material. There was not much of it, because it was hard to get hold of it, as there was scarcity of this destructive material. We thus tried various kinds of flammable substances, and explosive substances as well, but there was very little of it; we only had about six dynamites. They acquired it somewhere and I was transporting it.”
Miroslav Randa was born in Velký Osek on January 8, 1929. His father got a job in the border region during the time of the economic crisis. He became a railwayman and the family received a small house from the railway company. In 1938, the Czechoslovak border regions became part of Germany as a result of the Munich Agreement. The Randa family was evicted from the house and they fled to a house in a secluded area not far from Německý Brod (present-day Havlíčkův Brod). Miroslav‘s father formed a resistance group which was part of the Brigade of John Huss. Miroslav gradually became involved in the group‘s activities as well. After the war he worked as a driver in a kaolin factory. Miroslav Randa died on December 27, 2020.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
