How I Got My Guns

My uncle Stanley, mentioned already repeatedly, during the war in the context of his work for the AK outfit occupied himself also with buying weapons and ammunition from German soldiers, used later by the armed underground. My uncle taught me to arrange a diverse array of purposefully camouflaged hiding spots.

At my house I had two, both impossible to find. 

One was in the area of the ceiling, the second also purposefully created, using a fragment of the stairs leading up to my front room. 

Almost all the money was in five-hundred banknotes, the highest denomination at the time. 

I packed them into two metal box-containers, coming as part of a German kit for a manual machine carabine MG-42, contemporarily called then a Spandau, normally belts of ammo were held in them. 

In the hiding spots that my uncle always staked, at the top lay a loaded pistol, which, should the need arise, allowed for the quick elimination of someone who in some manner wanted to compel me to divulge its contents. Some time ago, during one of our actions we codenamed “searching underground for former German banks,” my attention was called by a certain torn open empty armor case. 

I noticed that in relation to its sizeable exterior it was on the inside suspiciously thin. None of my colleagues wanted to listen to me and we moved on. This did not rest the matter for me and after a few days I returned with a very strong flashlight and burglar tools appropriate to an amateur. Indeed I was not mistaken. 

The back wall of the interior of the case, which was relatively easy to unmount, uncovered a second, relatively thin interior It contained no less, no more than nine hundred sixty stamped decks of cards by the firm Piatnik, packed in twelves in eighty carton cases, as well as two very handy, factory new pistols, twins, as if a set, seven shooter Sauer und Sohn 38 H caliber 7.65 mm. 

Each of them was wrapped in a thick yellow flannel handkerchief and had a spare magazine and five boxes of ammunition, fifty pieces in each box. Nervously with trouble I packed everything in a giant sports bag, which just in case I had taken with me. 

The cards for very good money I had long ago liquidated, but the pistols stood now to secure my hiding spots. I did not even recount this with my co-exploiters of underground banks. 

Owning firearms threatened a long prison sentence, and I preferred not to risk it and so about my wonderful find, with which, because I loved guns a lot, in no way was I able to part, no one, and that’s absolutely no one had any clue.

This particular weapon I happened to know very well.