It were exciting hours at thrift store Het Goed in Eindhoven on Friday afternoon. A bag full of bullet casings was found there during sorting. And that wasn’t all. “There was a grenade in between that had not yet exploded.”
“It’s best to be scared.” For example, branch manager Rik van Bree looks back on the special find. “Fortunately, the employee who found the bag had the ingenuity to immediately call in someone from the management.”
Still, the seriousness of the situation was not immediately clear to Rik. “At first I only saw those empty shells. But then my colleague came, who has a little more view on it. He took out a grenade. He also told me that it had been fired, but had not exploded yet. the heat finally gone, it was still a hot day.”
At that point it was all hands on deck. “We immediately put that thing in a safe under a container and called the police, who then called in the Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service (EOD), who eventually secured the grenade.”
And so it turned out to be an instructive afternoon too. “That man from the EOD also explained what kind of explosive it was. A German 20 millimeter high-explosive grenade from the Second World War. Not a thing to hit with a hammer, in any case.”
“Probably someone cleaned up at Grandpa’s house.”
But how did the grenade end up at the thrift store? “There will be no ill intent behind that. Someone probably cleaned up at grandpa’s house and put that bag between the cups and saucers.”
After all, that’s how it often goes. “We made three such finds in the past year. I recently had a hand grenade in my possession. Anyway, the pin was still in it, so I could even have let it bounce.”
