The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

by Diane Ackerman

  In that flux, where people appeared and disappeared, unnamed and unexpected, it proved hard to spot the Guests, even harder to tell which people were not there, and when. However this crypto-innocence meant living on the edge and silently glossing every noise, tracking every shadow. Did a sound fit into the ever-changing concordance of villa life? Inevitably, a vital paranoia reigned in the house as the only sane response to perpetual danger, while its inhabitants mastered the martial arts of stealth: tiptoe, freeze, camouflage, distract, pantomime. Some villa Guests hid while others hovered, emerging only after dark to roam the house at liberty.

  So many people also meant added chores for Antonina, who had a large family to oversee; livestock, poultry, and rabbits to manage; a busy garden with tomatoes and pole beans to stake; bread to bake daily; preserves, pickled vegetables, and compotes to jar.

  Poles were growing used to occupation's unexpected frights, finding the pulse calm one moment and sprinting the next as war reset their metabolism, especially the resting level of attention. Each morning, they awoke in darkness, not knowing the day's fate, maybe sorrowful, maybe ending in arrest. Would she be one of those people, Antonina wondered, who vanished because they happened to be on a tram or in a church when Germans chose it at random, sealed off the exits, and killed everyone inside as revenge for some real or imaginary insult?

  Household chores, however humdrum and repetitious, lulled with motions familiar, harmless, and automatic. Constant vigilance had become exhausting, the senses never quite relaxed, the brain's watchmen kept patrolling the wharves of possibility, peering into shadows, listening for danger, until the mind became its own penitent and prisoner. In a country under a death sentence, with seasonal cues like morning light or drifting constellations hidden behind shutters, time changed shape, lost some of its elasticity, and Antonina wrote that her days grew even more ephemeral and "brittle, like soap bubbles breaking."

  Soon Finland and Romania sided with Germany, and Yugoslavia and Greece surrendered. Germany's attack on its former ally, the Soviet Union, triggered rounds of rumors and forecasts, and Antonina found the Battle of Leningrad especially depressing, since she'd hoped the war might be winding down, not flaming anew. At times, she heard that Berlin had been bombarded, that a Carpathian brigade had overwhelmed the Germans, that the German army had surrendered, but for the most part she and Jan monitored clashes in the secret dailies, weeklies, and news sheets printed throughout the war to keep partisans informed. The editors also sent copies to the Gestapo HQ "just to facilitate your research, [and] to let you know what we think of you. . .."

  German soldiers often came to shoot the flocks of crows that filled the sky like ash before settling in trees. When the soldiers left, Antonina stole out and gathered up the corpses, cleaned and cooked them, making a pâte diners assumed to be pheasant, a Polish delicacy. Once, when ladies praised the rich preserves, Antonina laughed to herself: "Why spoil their appetite with mere details of zoological naming?"

  The villa's emotional climate ran to extremes, waves of relaxation followed by a froth of anxiety as people juggled the pastoral pleasantries of one moment with the depressing news of the next. When life sparkled with conversation and piano music, Antonina dodged the war for a spell and even felt delight, especially on foggy mornings when the downtown vanished and she could fancy herself in another land or era. For that, Antonina told her diary, she was grateful, since life in the lampshade store on Kapucyńska Street had held a steady drizzle of sadness.

  Members of the Underground frequently passed through, and sometimes twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds from the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Prominent before the war, youth groups were outlawed during Nazi occupation, but under the aegis of the Home Army they aided the Resistance as soldiers, couriers, social workers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, and saboteurs. Younger scouts enacted minor sabotage like scrawling "Poland will win!" or "Hitler is a Dogcatcher!" (a play on his name) on the walls, a shootable offense, and they became secret letter carriers, while older ones went as far as assassinating Nazi officials and rescuing prisoners from the Gestapo. All helped around the villa by splitting wood, hauling coal, and keeping a fire in the furnace. Some delivered the garden's potatoes and other vegetables to Underground hideouts, using bicycle rickshaws, a popular vehicle during occupation when taxicabs disappeared and all the cars belonged to Germans.

  Inevitably, Ryś overheard scouts whispering alluring secrets and found it frustrating not to join in, when everyone else had exciting, cloak-and-dagger jobs to do. Almost from birth, he'd been schooled in the ambient dangers and told they were real, not pretend or story. Warned not to breathe a word of the Guests to anyone, ever, no matter whom, he knew that if he slipped up, he, his parents, and everyone in the house would be murdered. What a heavy burden for a small child! Full of intrigue and exciting as his world became, with a hodgepodge of eccentric people and dramas, he dared not tell a soul. Small wonder he grew more anxious and worried each day, a fate Antonina lamented in her memoirs, but what could she do when all the adults were anxious and worried, too? Inevitably, Ryś became his own worst nightmare. If a Guest's name or an Underground secret tumbled out while playing, his mother and father would be shot, and even if he survived, he'd be all alone, and it would be his fault. Since he couldn't trust himself, avoiding strangers, especially other children, made the most sense. Antonina noted that he didn't even try to make friends at school, but hurried home instead to play with Moryś the pig, whom he could talk with as much as he pleased, and who would never betray him.

  Moryś liked to play what they called his "scaredy game," in which he pretended to be scared by some little sound—Ryś closing a book or moving something on a table—and bolted away, hooves skidding on the wooden floor. A few seconds later he would grunt happily next to Ryś's chair, ready for another pretend fright and escape.

  Much as Antonina might have wished a normal childhood for Ryś, events had already rusted that possibility and daily life kept corroding. One evening, German soldiers noticed Ryś and Moryś playing in the garden and strolled over to investigate; not fearing humans, Moryś trotted right up to them for a snort and a scratch. Then, as Ryś watched in horror, they dragged Moryś off squealing to be butchered. Shattered, Ryś cried inconsolably for days, and for months he refused to enter the garden, even to pick greens for the rabbits, chickens, and turkeys. In time, he risked the garden world again, but never with the same jubilant nonchalance.

  CHAPTER 15

  1941

  THE PIG FARM SURVIVED ONLY UNTIL MIDWINTER, BECAUSE even in the centrally heated zoo buildings that once housed elephants and hippopotamuses, animals still needed warm bedding. Perversely, it seemed, the "director of slaughterhouses," who funded the zoo, met amiably with Jan and listened to his appeals, but denied him the money to purchase straw.

  "This makes no sense at all," he told Antonina afterward. "I cannot believe his idiocy!" Antonina was surprised, because with food scarce, pigs became trotting gold, and how much did straw cost?

  "I tried everything I could think of to change his mind," Jan told her. "I don't get it. He has always been our friend."

  Antonina declared: "He's a lazy, stubborn fool!"

  As the nights crackled with cold and frost feathered the windowpanes, winds knifed through the rinds of wooden buildings and slit life from the piglets. Then an epidemic of dysentery followed, killing much of the remaining herd, and the director of slaughterhouses shut down the pig farm. Infuriating in principle, and depriving the villa of meat, this also thwarted Jan's trips to the Ghetto, supposedly for scraps. Months passed before he learned the truth: in cahoots with another low-level official, the director of slaughterhouses had conspired to rent the zoo to a German herbal plant company.

  One day in March, a gang of workmen arrived at the zoo with saws and axes and began dismembering trees, hacking down flower beds, decorative shrubs, and cherished rosebushes at the entrance gate. The Żabíńskis tried screaming, pleading, bribing, threat
ening, but it was no use. Apparently Nazi orders demanded the uprooting of the zoo, flower and weed alike, because after all, these were only Slav plants, best used as fertilizer for healthy German botanicals. Immigrants usually do try to re-create some of their homeland (especially the cuisine) when they resettle, however this Lebensraum didn't only apply to people, Antonina realized, but also to German animals and plants, and through eugenics the Nazis meant to erase Poland's genes from the planet, rip out its roots, crush its hips and tubers, replace its seeds with their own, just as she had feared a year earlier after Warsaw's surrender. Perhaps they felt that superior soldiers needed superior food, which Nazi biology argued could grow only from "pure" seeds. If Nazism hungered for a private mythology, its own botany and biology, in which plants and animals displayed an ancient lineage undiluted by Asiatic or Mideastern blood, that meant starting clean, replacing thousands of Polish farmers and so-called Polish or Jewish crops and livestock with their German equivalents.

  At the weekend, by chance, Danglu Leist, the German president of Warsaw and a devotee of zoos, arrived with his wife and daughter, asking for the old zoo director to give them a tour of the grounds and help them imagine the zoo before the war. As Jan strolled with them he compared the Warsaw Zoo's microclimates to those of zoos in Berlin, Monaheim, Hamburg, Hagenbeck, and other cities, much to Leist's pleasure. Then Jan led his guests to the destroyed rose garden near the main gate where large beautiful bushes, carelessly dug up, lay broken-caned in a pile as casualties of war. Leist's wife and daughter decried the waste of beauty, and that fueled Leist's anger.

  "What is this?" he demanded.

  "It's not my doing," Jan said calmly, with just the right mix of anguish and outrage. He told them about the ruined pig farm and the German herb company renting the zoo from the director of slaughterhouses.

  "How could you let that happen?!" Leist raged at Jan.

  "What a horrible pity," his wife lamented. "I love roses so much!"

  "Nobody asked me." Jan quietly apologized to Leist's wife, implying that, since it wasn't his fault, it must be her husband's feckless doings.

  She smacked Leist with a hard stare, and he protested angrily: "I didn't know anything about it!"

  Before leaving the zoo, he ordered Jan to appear in his office at 10 A.M. the next morning to meet with Warsaw's Polish vice president, Julian Kulski, who would be forced to explain the scandal. When the three men gathered the following day, it transpired that Kulski knew nothing about the scheme, and President Leist promptly canceled the rental agreement, promised to punish the wrongdoers, and asked Kulski for advice on how best to use the zoo without destroying it. Unlike Leist, Jan knew of Kulski's link to the Underground, and as Kulski proposed a public vegetable garden with individual plots, Jan smiled, impressed by a scheme that served the double purpose of cheaply feeding locals and portraying the Nazis as compassionate rulers. Small plots wouldn't destroy the heart of the zoo, but would increase Kulski's influence. Leist approved, and once more Jan changed his career—from zoo director to ruler of a pig farm to magistrate of garden plots. The job bound Jan to the Warsaw Parks and Gardens Department, and that allowed him a new pass into the Ghetto, this time to inspect its flora and gardens. In truth, precious little vegetation grew in the Ghetto, only a few trees by the church on Leszno Street, and certainly no parks or gardens, but he grabbed any excuse to visit friends "to keep up their spirits and smuggle in food and news."

  Early on, Antonina had sometimes joined Jan to visit the famous entomologist Dr. Szymon Tenenbaum, his dentist wife Lonia, and their daughter Irena. As boys, Jan and Szymon attended the same school and became friends who loved crawling around in ditches and peering under rocks, Szymon a bug zealot even then. The scarab-like beetle became his sun god, speciality, and mania. As an adult, he started traveling the world and collecting in his spare time, and by publishing a five-volume study of the beetles of the Balearic Islands, he joined the ranks of leading entomologists. During the school year, he served as principal of a Jewish high school, but he collected many rare specimens in Białowieża during the summer, when bugs thronged and any hollow log might hide a tiny Pompeii. Jan, too, liked beetles, and once conducted a large cockroach study of his own.

  Even in the Ghetto, Szymon continued to write articles and collect insects, pinning his quarry in sap-brown wooden display boxes with glass fronts. But when Jews were first ordered into the Ghetto, Szymon worried how to protect his large, valuable collection and asked Jan if he'd hide it in the villa. Luckily, in 1939 when the SS raided the zoo and stole over two hundred valuable books, many of the microscopes, and other equipment, they somehow overlooked Tenenbaum's collection of half a million specimens.

  The Żabíńskis and Tenenbaums became closer friends during the war, as the catastrophe of everyday life drew them tightly together. War didn't only sunder people, Antonina mused in her memoirs, it could also intensify friendships and spark romances; every handshake opened a door or steered fate. By chance, because of this friendship with the Tenenbaums, they met a man who, unknowingly, helped solidify Jan's link with the Ghetto.

  One Sunday morning during the summer of 1941, Antonina watched a limousine stop in front of the villa and a heavyset German civilian emerge. Before he could ring the doorbell, she ran to the piano in the living room and started pounding out the loud, skipping chords of Jacques Offenbach's "Go, go, go to Crete!" from La Belle Helène, as the signal for Guests to slip into their hiding places and be silent. Antonina's choice of composer says much about her personality and the atmosphere in the villa.

  A German-French Jew, Jacques Hoffmann was the seventh child of a cantor, Isaac Judah Eberst, who, for some reason, decided one day to assume the name of his birthplace, Offenbach. Isaac had six daughters and two sons, and music animated the whole family's life, with Jacques becoming a cello virtuoso and composer who played in cafes and fashionable salons. Fun-loving and satiric, Jacques couldn't resist a prank, personally or musically, and chafing authority was his favorite pastime—he was so often fined for shenanigans at the solemn Paris Conservatory that some weeks he didn't receive any salary at all. He loved composing popular dances, including a waltz based on a synagogue melody, which scandalized his father. In 1855, he opened his own musical theater "because of the continued impossibility of getting my work produced by anybody else," he said wryly, adding that "the idea of really gay, cheerful, witty music—in short, the idea of music with life in it—was gradually being forgotten."

  He wrote enormously popular farces, satires, and operettas which captivated the elite and were sung in the streets of Paris, saucy and rollicking music that mocked pretensions, authority, and the idealizing of antiquity. And he cut a colorful figure himself in pince-nez, side-whiskers, and flamboyant clothes. Part of the reason his music besotted so many is that, as music critic Milton Cross observes, it came during "a period of political repression, censorship, and infringement on personal liberties." As "the secret police penetrated into the private lives of citizens. . .the theater went in for gaiety, levity, tongue-in-cheek mockery."

  Bubbling with farce and beautiful melodies, La Belle Helène is a comic opera full of wit and vivacity that tells the tale of beautiful Helen, whose boring husband Menelaus wages war with the Trojans to avenge Helen's abduction. The drama caricatures the rulers, bent on war, questions morality, and celebrates the love of Helen and Paris, who want desperately to escape to a better world. Act I ends with the Pythian Oracle telling Menelaus he must go to Greece, and then the chorus, Helen, Paris, and most of the cast shooing him away in a madcap, galloping "Go, go, go to Crete!" Its message is subversive, ridiculing the overlords and championing peace and love—the perfect signal for the villa's Helens and Parises. Even better, it was by a Jewish composer at a time when playing Jewish music was a punishable offense.

  Jan answered the door.

  "Does the ex-director of the zoo live here?" a stranger asked.

  Moments later, the man entered the house.

&
nbsp; "My name is Ziegler," he said, and introduced himself as director of the Warsaw Ghetto's Labor Bureau, the office which, in theory, found work for the unemployed inside and outside the Ghetto, but in practice organized workgangs, deporting the most skillful to serve in armaments factories like the Krupps steelworks in Essen, but did little to help the vast numbers of hungry, semi-employed, often ill workers created by Nazi rule.

  "I am hoping to see the zoo's remarkable insect collection, the one donated by Dr. Szymon Tenenbaum," Ziegler said. Hearing Antonina's buoyant piano-playing, he smiled broadly and added: "What a cheerful atmosphere!"

  Jan led him into the living room. "Yes, our home is very musical," Jan said. "We like Offenbach very much."

  Grudgingly, it seemed, Ziegler conceded, "Oh, well, Offenbach was a shallow composer. But one has to admit that, on the whole, Jews are a talented people."

  Jan and Antonina exchanged anxious glances. How did Ziegler know about the insect collection? Jan later recalled thinking: "Okay, I guess this is it, doomsday."

  Seeing their confusion, Ziegler said, "You are surprised. Let me explain. I was authorized by Dr. Tenenbaum to view his insect collection, which apparently you are keeping for him in your house."

  Jan and Antonina listened warily. Diagnosing danger had become a craft like defusing live bombs—one tremble of the voice, one error in judgment, and the world would explode. What was Ziegler planning? If he wanted, he could just take the insect collection, no one would stop him, so it was pointless to lie about keeping it for Szymon. They knew they had to answer fast to avoid arousing suspicion.