Unexploded Bomb

Our last full day of the holiday approached, we needed to get back to Budapest to drop of all kiddie related stuff and pack (again). One of our rellies rang and as we were signing off they checked that we were not about to head upto the city. We replied yes. They laughed and said that they wished us luck as the district that we lived in had a massive bomb alert. We assumed they meant the airport, thought no more about it and decided to go home.

Wrong decision. It was at least 35 degrees and upon arriving in our district we found it to be full of police. It turns out that the bomb was a German WW2 bomb and had about 2 tonnes of explosives primed and ready to wreak havoc. It was capable of killing everyone within a 500 meter radius. Some 15000 people were told to leave their homes, we were not allowed to park near the house (handy when you have an estate car full of stuff you need for the kids, eg travel cots, high chair blah blah). At one stage we did not even want to go into the house as we were told we may have to leave.



Decided to go for lunch at a beer keller to cool off. At 5pm things were still not resolved so we decided to go into the house and get the kids ready for bed.

It turns out that the bomb was actually located at a disused mill, my granny and her friends used to get their bread from until the 1980’s. Ironically, my grannies best friend used to get up at 4:30 am to get the first batch of bread from the mill twice a week. My granny always told her friend to stop rushing there as it would kill her one day!

The bomb was encased in concrete, with only 60cm’s protruding, proving rather difficult for the bomb disposal experts to work with.

As an aside, the block where our flat is has two internal courtyards. I was always sent down to one of the courtyards to play, when I got cabin fever. A few years ago, they found an unexploded mine in the very courtyard where I skipped and kicked a ball around! My hubby sometimes refers to me as a cockroach (able to survive anything).

By 9pm, it turned out that the bomb has actually been made safe after the war, but the Budapest authorities had lost the paperwork……. The police were then entrusted with stopping looting from the empty properties.