Jaromír Dolanský

"Well, speaking about '45, of course the people from the zoo, because they were on the side where the German troops came from, they came from Bohnice and were on the right bank of the Vltava... and Prague was defending itself on the other side. It's in Jan Drda's book, Němá barikáda, the Troja Bridge and so on. But there wasn't just one bridge. There is yet another bridge not far from the Troja Bridge that leads to the Troja Island. The river could be forded when the water was really low, and a big ferry used to go there, and it could be crossed by boats without any problems. Then there was another bridge over a channel where boats used to go. Well, my grandfather was involved in the events around that bridge. He was one of those decorated for defending Prague. If you go there today, you'll see a little memorial there, and it is a memorial to the man who was lying next to my grandfather. Death whizzed past really close to my grandfather. But of course none of that mattered after '48 because of course those zoo people were, are, and certainly will be singular in a way. When the general strike came in '48, the Prague zoo people, or most of them, said that the animals must eat and they weren't going on strike. Now, you can imagine the consequences. Of course, no one was executed, hanged or imprisoned up for a long time, but they certainly had their share of interrogations. My grandfather told me about that too, or rather my grandmother because my grandfather died when I was about six years old."

"The war brought not only suffering but also a lower standard of life for everyone and everything. The Prague Zoo too began facing problems with funding to pay for animal feeds. They came up with a great idea. My grandfather together with a few people who had worked at a circus before the war set up a circus. Sometime in the middle of or in the early part of the war, there was a circus in the zoo that actually collected its own admission fees. You could go there separately; there were two admission fees to pay, to the zoo and then to the circus. Now, of course, don't think of it as Barnum & Bailey or Humberto. My grandmother trained a few little dogs, my grandfather did ground acrobatics and my mother, who was about four years old at the time, used to ride a horse with a sign saying 'Welcome' or 'Wilkommen'. That was the beginning. It helped the zoo a lot, and I didn't get any amazing moments from my mother or my grandmother, for that matter, who I actually grew up with. The German soldiers who of course also came there and the Czech visitors all came to see the animals, so there were no problems, no excesses until May 1945. Or I don't remember any in the sense that nobody told me, or I've forgotten. It's true that there was an air-raid shelter, which was actually built in an old tunnel not far from the Beast Pavilion, and that was originally an adit where iron ore was mined. Then it was modified and that's really where people hid. I remember it was closed from the 1960's on, but me and the boys broke a hole in there and used to crawl in there, but then they found out and we were in big trouble. The shelter is now restored; it's largely thanks to Mr Bobek that the shelter is now refurbished the way it looked, let's say, in '44 or '45."