Every bomb creates a different scent, depending on where it hits, what it boils into aerosol and the nose detects slipping apart, as molecules mix with air and float free. Then the nose can pick up ten thousand distinctive scents, from cucumber to violin resin. When a bakery was hit, the rising dirt cloud smelled of yeast sours, eggs, molasses, and rye. The mingled odors of cloves, vinegar, and burning flesh spelled the butcher's. Charred flesh and pine meant an incendiary bomb that blasted houses with a hot, fast fire, and that the people inside had died quickly.
"We've got to turn back," Jan said, and they ran past the walls of Old Town and across the whistling metal bridge. At the zoo once more, Antonina noted: "I was so depressed that I couldn't do anything. I could only hear Jan's voice directing his staff: 'Bring a cart with horses, load it with food and coal, pack warm clothes, and go immediately. . ..'"
FOR JAN, THE PUZZLE of finding a town of no military interest posed an equation littered with unknowns he wasn't prepared for, since neither he nor Antonina had thought the Germans would invade Poland. They'd worried, but agreed "it was only fear speaking": a private siege, not signs of an impending war. Antonina wondered how they could have guessed so wrong, and Jan concentrated on hiding his family somewhere safe while he remained at the zoo to tend the animals as long as possible and await orders.
"Warsaw will soon be closed," he reasoned, "and the German army is advancing from the east, so I think it's best if you return to the cottage in Rejentówka."
She pondered this, then decided, despite misgivings: "Yes, at least it's a place we know, one Ryś associates with good times." Really, she had no idea, but persisted in packing, relying on Jan's hunch, then climbed into a cart loaded for what might be a long absence, and set out quickly before the roads grew too crowded.
The resort village of Rejentówka lay only about twenty-five miles away, but Antonina and a cart driver spent seven hours en route, sharing the dirt road with thousands of people, mainly on foot, since cars, trucks, and most horses had been confiscated by the military. Women, children, and old men hurried along in a worried trance, escaping the city with whatever they could carry, some pushing baby buggies, wagons, and hand trolleys, some hauling suitcases and small children, but most wearing several layers of clothing, with knapsacks, bags, and shoes slung across their bodies or swinging from their necks.
Flanking the road, tall poplars, pine, and spruce juggled large brown balls of mistletoe in their limbs; and black-and-white storks nested atop the telephone poles, still fattening up for their arduous flight to Africa. Soon farm fields quilted both sides of the road, grain glistening and tassels pointing skyward. Antonina wrote of sweat pouring in rivulets and breath bunching, the air clotted with dust.
A storm's distant rumble became a cloud of gnats on the horizon, then grew to German aircraft looming near in seconds, chewing up the skies, flying low overhead, panicking people and horses alike. Pelted by bullets, everyone hurried through clouds of flying dirt, the unlucky fell, and the relatively lucky fled beneath splattering machine-gun fire. Dead storks, redwings, and rooks littered the road along with tree branches and dropped satchels. Catching a bullet was sheer chance and for seven hours Antonina beat the odds, but not without scenes of the dead and dying etched into memory.
At least her son, in Rejentówka, was spared these images, so hard to erase, especially for a small child whose brain, busily sampling the world, was learning what to expect and stitching those truths in place at a trillion connections. Stay prepared for this world the rest of your life, a child's brain tells itself, a world of mayhem and uncertainty. "That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," Nietzsche wrote in The Twilight of the Idols, as if the will could be annealed like a Samurai sword that is heated and pounded, bent and reforged, until it becomes indestructible. But the metal of a little boy, what does the pounding do to him? Mixed with Antonina's worry about her son was moral outrage that the Germans "in this modern war, so different from wars we knew, allowed the killing of women, children, and civilians."
As the dust settled, blue sky returned and she noticed two Polish fighters attacking a heavy German bomber above a field. From afar, the geometry of the scene looked homely, like fierce wrens driving off a hawk, and people cheered whenever the fighters stung the bomber with tufts of smoke. Surely an air force that agile could repel the Luftwaffe? Threads of tinsel flashed in the waning sunlight, and suddenly the bomber gushed a fountain of blood-red flames and fell to earth in a sharp curve. Then a white jellyfish floated above the peaks of the pine trees: a German pilot swaying under his parachute, slowly descending through a cornflower-blue sky.
Like many Poles, Antonina didn't realize the magnitude of danger, relying instead on a Polish air force that boasted superbly trained and famously courageous pilots (especially those of the Pursuit Brigade defending Warsaw), whose outnumbered, obsolete PZL P.11 fighters posed no match for Germany's fast, swervy Junkers JU-87 Stukas. Polish Karas bombers swooped low over German tanks at such a slow speed, while flying level, that they fell easy prey to antiaircraft fire. She didn't know that Germany was testing out a new form of combined-arms warfare which would come to be called Blitzkrieg (lightning war), a charge-in-with-everything-you've-got—tanks, planes, cavalry, artillery, infantry—to surprise and terrify the enemy.
When she finally arrived in Rejentówka, she found a ghost town with summer guests gone, shops shuttered for the season, and even the post office closed. Exhausted, rattled, and dirty, she rode to the cottage hemmed in by tall trees and luminous quiet, in a setting that smelled familiar and safe, full of the mingled aromas of loam, meadow herbs and wild grasses, decaying wood and pine oil. One can picture her hugging Ryś hard and greeting his nanny; eating a dinner of buckwheat, potatoes, and soup; unpacking; bathing; longing for the habitual routines of just another summer, but unable to calm her nerves or quell her sense of foreboding.
Over the next few days, they often stood on the porch watching waves of German planes, en route to Warsaw, blacken the sky in lines neat as hedgerows. The regularity addled her: each day planes swarmed above at 5 A.M. and again after sunset, without her knowing whom exactly they had bombed.
The local landscape looked strange, too, since Rejentówka wasn't a spot they visited in autumn, without vacationers and pets. Tall lindens had begun turning bronze and oaks the burnt maroon of stale blood, while some green survived on the maples, where yellow-bellied evening grosbeaks fed on winged seeds. Along the sandy roads, staghorn sumac shrubs raised antler-velvet twigs and cone-shaped clusters of hairy red fruits. Blue chicory, brown cat-o'-nine-tails, white dame's rocket, pink thistle, orange hawkweed, and goldenrod tuned the meadows to fall, in a tableau that changed whenever a breeze bent the stems like a hand gliding over a plush carpet.
On September 5, Jan arrived by train, his face somber, to find Antonina "very depressed and confused."
"I've heard rumors that a wing of the German army, invading from East Prussia, will soon reach Rejentówka," he told her. "But the front hasn't arrived in Warsaw yet, and people are slowly getting used to the air raids. Our army is bound to protect the capital at all costs, so we may as well return home."
Even if he didn't sound altogether convinced, Antonina agreed, in part because Jan was a good strategist whose hunches usually panned out, but she also thought how much easier life would be if they could stay together, sharing comforts, worries, and fears. Traveling the main road again was out of the question.
At night, they boarded a slow train with blackened windows and arrived in civil morning twilight, the hour of brightening before the sun spills over the horizon, in a lull between the night and dawn raids. According to Antonina, horses awaited them at the station and they rode home bewitched by the everyday—windless calm, damp air, aster hedges, colorful leaves, squeaky axles, clopping hooves on cobblestone—and, for a short spell, they slipped into the premechanized past, sinking deep into a pristine stillness where the war seemed to her muffled and unreal, only a remote
glow like the moon.
At the main gate in Praga, the toll smacked her wide awake again as she dismounted. Bombs had ripped up the asphalt, shells had bitten large chunks out of the wooden buildings, cannon wheels had furrowed the lawns, old willows and lindens dangled unplugged limbs. Antonina held Ryś tight, as if the desolation before her were communicable. Unfortunately, the zoo edged a river with busy bridges, prime German targets, and with a Polish battalion stationed there, it had made a superb target, repeatedly, over several days. Picking their way through debris, they walked to the villa and its bomb-cratered yard. Antonina's eyes fell to the flower beds crushed from the hooves of horses, and she fixed on the small delicate calyxes of flowers stomped into the ground "like colorful teardrops."
Just after dawn, the day and battle started heating up. Standing on the front porch, they were surprised by the canyon echoing of hoarse explosions and snapping iron girders. Suddenly the ground trembled and walked under their feet, and they hurried indoors, only to find the roof beams, floors, and walls all shaking. The moaning of lions and yowling of tigers spiraled from the big cat house, where she knew cat mothers, "crazy with fear, were grabbing their young by the scruff of the neck and pacing their cages, anxiously looking for a safe place to hide them." The elephants trumpeted wildly, the hyenas sobbed in a frightened sort of giggle interrupted by hiccups, the African hunting dogs howled, and the rhesus monkeys, agitated beyond sanity, battled one another, their hysterical shrieks clawing the air. Despite the uproar, workers continued to carry water and food to the animals and check their cage bars and locks.
In this Luftwaffe attack, a half-ton bomb destroyed the polar bears' mountain, smashing the walls, moats, and barriers and freeing the terrified animals. When a platoon of Polish soldiers found the panicky bears, ribboned with blood and circling round their old haunt, they quickly shot them. Then, fearing lions, tigers, and other dangerous animals might escape, too, the soldiers decided to kill the most aggressive ones, including the male elephant, Jaś, Tuzinka's father.
Watching from the front porch, Antonina had a good view across the grounds to where Polish soldiers gathered beside a well, with several zoo workers crowding around them, one crying, the others grim and silent.
"How many animals have they already killed?" she asked herself.
Events were unfolding without time to protest or grieve, and the surviving animals needed help, so she and Jan joined the keepers in feeding, doctoring, and calming animals as best they could.
"At least humans can pack their essentials, keep moving, keep improvising," Antonina thought. "If Germany occupies Poland, what will become of the delicate life-form of the zoo?. . .The zoo animals are in a much worse situation than we are," she lamented, "because they're totally dependent on us. Moving the zoo to a different location is unimaginable; it's too complex an organism." Even if war should erupt and end fast, the aftermath would be costly, she told herself. Where would they find food and money to keep the zoo afloat? Trying not to picture the worst scenario, she and Jan nonetheless bought extra supplies of hay, barley, dried fruits, flour, dried bread, coal, and wood.
On September 7, a Polish officer knocked at the front door and formally ordered all able-bodied men to join the army fighting on a northwestern front—which included forty-two-year-old Jan—and all civilians to vacate the zoo at once. Antonina packed quickly and traveled with Ryś back across the river, this time to stay with her sister-in-law in the west part of the city, in a fourth-floor apartment at No. 3 Kapucyńska Street.
CHAPTER 5
AT NIGHT, IN THE SMALL FLAT ON KAPUCYŃSKA STREET, SHE learned a new noise: the anvil blows of German artillery. Somewhere else, women her age were slinking into nightclubs and dancing to the music of Glenn Miller, bouncy tunes with names like "String of Pearls" and "Little Brown Jug." Others were dancing to the newly invented jukebox at roadside joints. Couples were hiring babysitters and going to the cinema to see 1939's new releases: Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. Families were driving through the countryside to view the fall leaves and eat apple cake and corn fritters at harvest festivals. For many Poles, life had become residue, what remains after evaporation drains the juice from the original. During occupation, everyone lost the many seasonings of daily life, trapped in a reality where only the basics mattered and those bled most of one's energy, time, money, and thoughts.
Like other animal mothers, she grew desperate to find a safe hiding place for her young, "but unlike them," she wrote in her diary, "I can't carry Ryś in my jaws to a safe nest." Nor could she remain in her sister-in-law's fourth-floor apartment—"What if the building collapses and we can't escape?" Maybe it was best, she decided, to resettle downstairs, where a small store sold lampshades—that is, if she could persuade the owners to take her in.
Gathering up Ryś, she climbed down the four flights of dark stairs and knocked on a door which opened to reveal two elderly women, Mrs. Caderska and Mrs. Stokowska.
"Come in, come in." They glanced around the hallway after her and quickly fastened the door.
A strange new continent, half coral reef, half planetarium, veered into view as she entered a cluttered shop redolent with the odors of fabric, glue, paint, sweat, and cooking oatmeal. A bazaar of lampshades hung from the ceiling, nested together in ziggurats or huddled like exotic kites. Wooden shelves held strudel-like bolts of fabric, brass frames, hand tools, screws, rivets, and gleaming trays of finials separated by substance: glass, plastic, wood, metal. In such shops of the era, women sewed new fabric shades by hand, repaired old shades, and sold some made by others.
As Antonina's eyes traveled the room, she would have seen fixtures popular during the 1930s, a time when Baltic decor ran from Victorian to Art Deco and modernist, and included shades such as these: tulip-shaped rose silk decorated with chrysanthemum brocade; green chiffon with lace inset panels of white sateen; geometrically shaped pleated ivory; bright yellow panels in the shape of Napoleon's hat; eight-sided perforated metal with faceted faux jewels inserted around the skirt; dark amber mica crowning a plaster globe embossed with Art Nouveau archers pursuing a stag; a dome of orange-red glass bumpy as gooseflesh, skirted with crystal pendants, below which hung a brass gondola embossed with ivy scrolling. That fashionable red glass, known as gorge-de-pigeon, and often used in European wine goblets in Antonina's time, shone sour-cherry red when dark, and when lit, cast a glow the color of freshly peeled blood oranges. It was dyed with pigeon blood, an elixir also used to grade high-quality rubies (with the best stones resembling the freshest blood).
Ryś drew her attention to the far side of the room where, to her surprise, disheveled women and children from the neighborhood sat hedged in by shades.
"Dzień dobry, dzień dobry, dzień dobry," Antonina greeted each woman in turn.
Something about the cozy atmosphere of the lampshade store drew the displaced and bone-chilled to this shop run by grandmotherly ladies willing to share their pantry, coal, and bedding. As Antonina noted,
This lampshade store and workshop was like a magnet to so many people. Thanks to these two tiny lovely old ladies, who were extremely warmhearted, full of love and kindness, we survived this terrible time. They were like the warm light during the summer night, and people from upstairs, homeless people from other locations, from destroyed buildings, even from other streets, were gathering like moths attracted by the warmth around these two ladies.
Antonina marveled as their wrinkled hands passed out food (mainly oatmeal), sweets, a postcard album, and little games. Every night when people chose their spot to sleep, she lay a mattress under a sturdy doorframe and sheltered Ryś with her body, snatching sleep as though falling down a well, as her past grew more idyllic and floated farther away. She had had so many plans for the coming year; now she wondered if she and Ryś would survive the night, if she'd live to see Jan again, if her son would celebrate another birthday. "Every day of our life was full of thoughts of the horr
ible present, and even our own death," she wrote in her memoirs, adding:
Our allies were not here, not helping us—we Poles were all alone [when] one English attack on the Germans could stop the constant bombing of Warsaw. . .. We were receiving very depressing news about our Polish government—our Marshal Śmigly and members of the government had escaped to Romania and were captured and arrested. We felt betrayed, shocked, we were grieving.
When Britain and France declared war on Germany, Poles rejoiced and radio stations played the French and British national anthems endlessly for days, but mid-September brought no relief from the relentless bombing and heavy artillery. "Living in a city under siege," Antonina wrote disbelievingly in her memoirs, a city full of whistling bombs, jarring explosions, the dry thunder of collapse, and hungry people. First routine comforts like water and gas disappeared, then radio and newspapers. Whoever dared the streets only did so at a run, and people risked their lives to stand in line for a little horsemeat or bread. For three weeks she heard shells zinging over rooftops by day and bombs pounding on walls of darkness at night. Chilling whistles preceded horrible booms, and Antonina found herself listening for each whistle to end, fearing the worst, then letting her breath out when she heard someone else's life exploding. Without trying, she gauged the distance and felt relief that she wasn't the bomb's target, then almost at once came the next whistle, the next blast.
On the rare occasions she ventured out, she entered a film-like war, with yellow smoke, pyramids of rubble, jagged stone cliffs where buildings once stood, wind-chased letters and medicine vials, wounded people, and dead horses with oddly angled legs. But nothing more unreal than this: hovering overhead, what looked at first like snow but didn't move like snowflakes, something delicately rising and falling without landing. Eerier than a blizzard, a bizarre soft cloud of down feathers from the city's pillows and comforters gently swirled above the buildings. Once, long ago, a Polish king repelled invading Turks by attaching large feathered hoops to each soldier's back. As they galloped into battle, the wind coursed through the false wings with a loud tornadic whirring that spooked the enemy's horses, which dug in their hooves and refused to advance. For many Warsawians, this feather storm may have conjured up the slaughter of those knights, the city's guardian angels.
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story Page 4