That was when I got my accident. My rifle blew up, and took some of my hand away. And I got home. Steve was in the front of me, it was lucky I didn't shot him. And, after that, there was a little bit of peace. I got nearly into a little bit of trouble because the bloke, there was a licensed hunter, he caught us, me and Steve; and the woman was given us away, she said she saw two men with guns down the bottom of the valley. And he turned up. We knew, we saw him coming from a distance so we hid our rifles. And he just came up and said "Where are the rifles?" and we said "We haven't got any". He said "Come on, give it to me!" We said "We haven't got any!" But he was walking on the sharp <end> and the damn thing he stepped onto it. Because there wasn't enough cover on it. So he got that rifle, and he took it into town to the mayor. And then he told them it was from me, so I had to go into town. Luckily my father was a friend of that mayor, and he called me in, and he showed me the rifle standing there in his room, and he said "Do you know what this is?", and I said "Yes". And he showed me the bullets I had in, and he said, "This bullet can kill two kilometers away!" And I didn't say nothing. And I thought, if he is going to report me to the authorities, then I am in the knast what they call it, in the jail. But because he knew my father he said he wouldn't like to catch me again with anything like that. So anyhow, that was the end of it.

But on the other hand, we were lucky, me and Steve as well that we were still alive, because we used to pick up hand grenades and take them home, and when there was a bit of quiet we used to throw them, they exploded. Pulled the safety pin out, and throw it. And there was one that didn't explode. So what did we do? We went down and we picked it up, again. We shouldn't muck around once the pin is out, the safety pin. And I was going to pick it up, I was going to throw it. And Steve said to me, "Hang on a minute, I'm going to hold that with you, so if it blows it blows both of us, not just you." <chuckle>

Crazy things, crazy things kids do. Anyhow, we threw it again, and it exploded the second time. But it wasn't in our hands, thank god.

And after that anyhow I grew up until the school age, and started to go to school when I was about eight years old, we started, I was a bit late. It was about one kilometer to school to walk from living on the hills and walking down into town because the church and the school and the shops and the taverns that was all down in the bottom in the valley. So I had to walk down into school and coming back home again. School started at eight o'clock in the morning and coming home at three o'clock, that was it. So, I don't know, as that was going on, apparently the first year I remember we had a teacher, his name was Andy. I was his favorite boy in the school, the best marks for the first and the second year. And he used to get a paper, newspaper, every week once. He was the only person in town that got a paper. And the following week, when he read the paper he told me to come up to his place where he lived with his mother. He was from Hungary. And he gave me the paper to take home to my father to read it. And when his birthday came around and his mother was make, baked a lot of cookies, and she would make a brown paper bag, and she would fill it up half full, and gave me the cookies as well. So I was going home with the cookies, and there was another young fella, also in the same class, Steve was his name, and he was waiting for me at the creek bridge, so we went home together always. Anyhow, we were eating the cookies on the way home. We were quite nice I have never got anything like that at our house at home, never. Anyhow I was eating the cookies, I was full, and there was some cookies with chocolates on it, over the top. I used to ate the chocolates off the top and I gave the rest to Steve to eat, for him to eat to finish it off. He was glad to get anything. <chuckle>

Anyhow, that was about our thing and that was a school went from the first, yes, six, that was six years old, no, that was six class, and then, the seventh and eighth we had to go to school eight years. But that was towards the end, when the wars started and we used to, when the Germans started to come into Austria first, and then came into Hungary, and they would've, in the town people would make a party, they used to call it Volksbund, that means a people's party, and that was Hitlers movement you know, to gather the peoples so they would come towards him or like him. And they did. So, my father was also one of them. And the neighbors and everybody, they sort of joined the party. And you had to put a V on the wall of your house, like a V about eight inches diameter and two dots on the end. And our father didn't want to go, and I said, "I will put that V on, don't worry". Anyhow, and I put it on, and they used to go for a meeting once every week. And after when Hitler started to round up all the Jews, and taking them away, and my father had a very good friend in Szentgotthárd, that was the nearest big town to us, fourteen kilometers away. He had a very good mate there, and that was a Jew. And when my father wanted some money to buy something he would've asked him if he could borrow some money. And that Jew would always give him the money. And he said to him "You'll pay me back when you can". That was it, just, no receipts or nothing. And he was so close to that man. And then when the Germans picked up the Jews, the Nazis collected all the Jews, he went to Szentgotthárd and the bloke disappeared, and he asked what happened, the people, the neighbors they said well, they took him away and from that moment on my father never went to that meeting anymore. He said, “That man has never hurt anybody in his life. He was only, he was a real good man”, he said. “Anybody that takes somebody away like him, that is not going to have a good end, that's going to be a bad omen.” And that was the end of the membership of that party for my father. He didn't want to know anything after that anymore.

So, anyhow, as the war kept coming on, the Russians were coming always closer and closer. They were coming into our town. There was a lot of Hungarian soldiers there. They laid down their arms in town. And, of course I was about fifteen years old. And guns, that was one of the great priorities. When, in the night, when it got dark, we used to go into town with another Steven, the one went to Canada. We used to collect the arms when the Russians were watching the heaps of rifles were down there. And old, other sort of military hardware. We used to collect them and take them home and hide them away. So, anyhow, I got some of the guns, and bullets and ammunition and everything and hid them. And after the war, we used to go poaching, shooting over the border to Austrian area, for reindeers, or hares, or foxes, or whatever was moving. But it was not allowed to have any guns as a civilian. And there were also Hungarian border patrols, so we had to hide them, before we, we couldn't go away from the house because you could see if you carried a gun. So we used to hid them in the shrubs, in the forest and we would pick them up again.