The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

by Diane Ackerman

  And with that he revealed his own Parks Department pass to the Ghetto, a yellow permit given only to German citizens, ethnic Germans, and non-Jewish Poles. Since Jan's bona fides weren't in question, he didn't need to produce two cards. The surprised guard fell silent in embarrassment. Then Jan shook the guard's hand good-naturedly, smiled, and said solemnly: "Don't worry, I never break the law."

  From then on, Jan had no problem escorting Aryan-looking Jews to freedom, but unfortunately, the guard didn't pose the only threat. Any clerk from the Labor Bureau might chance by when Jan and a so-called colleague passed and give them away. Sneaking fugitives past the German troops stationed on zoo grounds created another problem, but the Żabíńskis devised two schemes that worked throughout the war—hiding Guests either in the hollows of the villa or in the old animal cages, sheds, and enclosures.

  Blending into the kitchen's glossy white woodwork, a door with a lever handle led downstairs to a long basement of rudimentary rooms. At the far end of one, Jan built an emergency exit in 1939—a ten-foot corridor tunneling directly to the Pheasant House (an aviary with a small central building) that adjoined the kitchen garden—which became an entryway for those sheltering in the villa and a handy route for delivering meals. Jan installed running water and a toilet in the basement, and pipes from the upstairs furnace kept the basement relatively warm. Sounds traveled easily between floorboards, so although the Guests heard voices from above, they lived in whispers.

  Another tunnel, this one crouchably low and enclosed by rusty iron ribs, led into the Lions House, and some Guests hid in the attached shed, even though it lay within shouting distance of the German armaments warehouse. Looking like part of a whale skeleton, the tunnel used to protect handlers squiring big cats to and from their cages.

  Ziegler visited the zoo several more times to behold the remarkable museum of insects and socialize with the Żabíńskis.

  Sometimes he even brought Tenenbaum along with him, on the pretext that the collection occasionally needed direct supervision from its collector, and then Tenenbaum spent hours in his own private paradise, on his knees in the garden, collecting more insects.

  Ziegler appeared at the zoo one day with the Tenenbaums' golden dachshund, Żarka, tucked under his arm.

  "Poor dog," he said. "She would have a much better life here in the zoo."

  "Of course, she's welcome to stay," Antonina offered.

  Dipping a hand into his pocket, Ziegler produced little pieces of sausage for Żarka, then set her down and left, though Żarka ran after him and scratched at the door, finally lying down beside it in the lingering scent of the last human she knew.

  In the following days, Antonina often found her there, waiting for her family to reappear and whisk her back to a tournament of familiar shapes and scents. This hurly-burly villa had too many rooms for Żarka, Antonina decided, dark corners, steps, mazes, bustle; despite short curvy legs, Żarka kept pacing, unable to settle, nosing around through a forest of furniture and strangers. After a while, she settled into villa life, but always startled easily. If someone's footsteps or a banging door broke the silence, the dachshund's shiny skin would shake nervously all along its thin body, as if trying to creep away.

  When winter charged in with skyscraper snows and fewer smells for dogs to read like newsprint, Ziegler visited once more. Still rosy-cheeked and roly-poly, wearing the same old glasses, he greeted Żarka fondly and she remembered him at once, jumping onto his lap and nosing around in his pockets for ham or sausage. This time Ziegler had no treats for Żarka, and he didn't play with her either, just patted her absent-mindedly.

  "Tenenbaum died," he said sadly. "Imagine, I was just talking with him two days ago. He told me so many interesting stories. . .. Yesterday he had internal bleeding. . .and that was the end. An ulcer broke in his stomach. . .. Did you know he was very ill?"

  They didn't. There was little else to say after that shocking news and the sorrow they shared. Overcome by emotion, Ziegler stood up so fast that Żarka fell off his lap, and he abruptly left.

  After Szymon's death, the villa went into prolonged mourning, and Antonina worried if his wife could survive the Ghetto much longer. Jan devised an escape plan, but where would they hide her? Much as they wished the villa to sail safely through the war with human cargo, it could only provide temporary shelter for most people, even the wives of boyhood friends.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE ANIMAL WORLD THRIVES ON PLOY AND COUNTERPLOY, from chameleons and lion-fish blending in with their backdrop to the majestic cons of mammals. A rhesus monkey who decides not to tell his troop-mates about the melon he just found doesn't need a "theory of mind" to deceive them, only a history of that lie yielding benefits. If his troop-mates find out, he'll be pummeled, and that lesson may alter his selfish ways. But many animals have little choice about sharing food and instinctively call others to the meal. The great apes (including us) have been staging clever deceits, lying on purpose, sometimes just athletically—as practice or sport—for at least 12 million years. Trained interrogators can read the clues of a higher voice, swollen pupils, less eye contact, more complaining, and also learn what "tells" to try and hide.

  As a zoologist, Jan had spent years studying the minutiae of animal behavior—all the fineries of courtship, bluff, threat, appeasement gestures, status displays, and many dialects of love, loyalty, and affection. Extrapolating from their behaviors to those of humans came naturally to such a diligent zoologist, especially strategies of deceit. He could adopt new personas fast, a gift that served his shadow life in the Underground army and also suited his temperament and training.

  Not only the Żabíńskis, but all Guests and visitors had to cultivate paranoia and abide by the strict rules of their little fiefdom, which meant Ryś and any other children in the house inhaled varieties of truth. Along with languages, they absorbed the lessons of facade-building, tribal loyalty, self-sacrifice, persuasive lying, and creative deception. How do you concoct apparent normalcy? Everything had to appear unremarkable in the household, even if that meant wholly fictitious routines. Pretend to be normal. From whose perspective? Would the prewar routines of a Polish zoo director's family seem normal to a patrolling German soldier? The Germans knew the Poles as a deeply sociable people, often with several generations living in one household, plus visiting relatives and friends. So a certain amount of hubbub made sense, but too many lodgers might arouse suspicion.

  The current director of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan Maciej Rembiszewski, who, as a boy, volunteered at Jan's zoo (and told him he planned to be a zookeeper himself when he grew up), remembers Jan as a strict boss, a perfectionist, and Antonina depicts him as a demanding paterfamilias, who couldn't tolerate sloppy work or loose ends. From her, we learn that Jan's motto was: "A good strategy should dictate the right actions. Any action mustn't be impulsive, but analyzed along with all its possible outcomes. A solid plan always includes many backups and alternatives."

  After Szymon's death, Jan visited his wife, Lonia, with details of an escape plan, and news that friends in the Underground were aligning the right stepping-stones so that, after her brief zoo stay, she could vanish to a safer place in the country, maybe even work again as a dentist.

  When Jan and Lonia reached the front gate of the Labor Bureau, he intended to use the same ruse he always did and say she was an Aryan colleague who had accompanied him to see Ziegler, since by now the guard was used to his comings and goings, alone or with colleagues. Just as they arrived at the door and he prepared to shepherd Lonia through, he stopped, dismayed to find the guard missing and a woman—the guard's wife, as it turned out—standing in his place. The offices above bustled with Germans only a yell away. She seemed to recognize him, either because she used to watch from the window of a nearby flat or because her husband had described him and his loutish ways, but Lonia's presence troubled her and she became flustered. Not prepared for exceptions, she refused to open the gate.

  "We have been visiting Mr. Ziegler," J
an explained firmly.

  She said: "Fine, I will open the gate if Mr. Ziegler comes down and personally authorizes your departure."

  Her husband had responded well to browbeating, but Jan hesitated—how would verbal abuse work on this woman? Not well, he decided. Staying in character as the arrogant loud-mouth her husband knew, he insisted:

  "What are you doing? I come here every day, and your husband knows me very well. Now you're ordering me to go back upstairs and pester Mr. Ziegler! It will cost you. . .!"

  Wavering a little, still unsure, she watched Jan's face grow hot with anger as he snarled like a man fully capable of retaliation, and at last she quietly opened the gate to let them pass. What happened next jarred both Jan and Lonia: right across the street stood two German policemen, smoking and talking while staring their way.

  According to Antonina, Lonia described the scene later in words filled with "terror and racing thoughts":

  I wanted to tell Jan—"Let's run." I wanted to get away from that place. I was hoping they wouldn't stop us! But Jan didn't know how I felt, and instead of running, he stopped and picked up a cigarette butt, perhaps left on the sidewalk by these two policemen. Then very slowly he moved his hand under my arm and we started to go toward Wolska Street. This moment felt as long as a century!

  That night, passing by the upstairs bedroom, Antonina happened to see Lonia quietly crying into her pillow, with Żarka's wet nose pressed sympathetically against her cheek. Lonia had watched Szymon die; her daughter had been discovered by the Gestapo in Kraków and shot; only the dachshund survived as family.

  After a few weeks, the Underground found her safer lodgings in the country, and as Lonia was saying goodbye, Żarka ran up carrying a leash in her mouth. "You have to stay behind; we don't have a home yet," Lonia told her.

  Antonina noted in her memoirs that she found this scene wincingly sad, and that Lonia survived the war, but not Żarka. One day the dachshund, nosing around the German warehouse, ate some rat poison, and after dragging herself back to the villa, died in Antonina's lap.

  Three weeks before the Warsaw Uprising, Jan moved Szymon's insect collection to the safety of the Natural History Museum, and after the war Lonia donated it to the State Zoological Museum, in one of whose satellite buildings 250,000 of the original specimens reside today, in a village about an hour north of Warsaw.

  To view Tenenbaum's collection, one turns down a narrow macadam road, past an animal hotel (a new concept borrowed from America), past a Christmas tree farm full of pert rows of spruce, to a wooded dead end occupied by two single-story buildings owned by the Polish Academy of Science. The smaller one contains offices, the other miscellaneous overflow from the Zoological Museum.

  Entering that huge attic of a building, one finds a divine clutter of millions of specimens where many oddities scream for attention, from stuffed jaguars, lynxes, and native birds to shelves of glass jars crammed with snakes, frogs, and reptiles. Long wooden cabinets and drawers divide one part of the room into narrow alleys of garaged treasures. Tenenbaum's boxed insects occupy two lockers—twenty boxes per shelf, stored upright like books, five shelves per locker. This represents about half of the full collection, which Jan told a journalist ran to four hundred boxes, and Antonina recalled as eight hundred. According to museum records, "Szymon Tenenbaum's wife donated. . .c. 250,000 specimens after the war." At the moment, the boxes remain intact but the archival plan is to remove the insects and file them with many others according to order, suborder, family, genus, and species—all the bombardier beetles in one locker, all the featherwings in another. What a sad dismantling that would be. Certainly the insects would be easier to study, but not the unique vision and artistry of the collectors, who belong to an exotic suborder of Homo sapiens sapiens (the animal that knows and knows it knows).

  An insect collection is a silent oasis in the noisy clamor of the world, isolating phenomena so that they can be seen undistractedly. In that sense, what is being collected are not the bugs themselves but the deep attention of the collector. That is also a rarity, a sort of gallery that ripples through the mind and whose real holdings are the perpetuation of wonder in a maelstrom of social and personal distractions. "Collection" is a good word for what happens, because one becomes collected for a spell, gathering up one's curiosity the way rainwater collects. Every glass-faced box holds a sample of a unique collector's high regard, and that's partly why people relish studying them, even if they know all the bug parts by heart.

  So it doesn't really matter where the boxes sit, but Szymon would have enjoyed this end-of-the-lane, out-of-the-way place, surrounded by farm fields and dense foliage askitter with insects, tiny beetles abounding, where his golden Żarka could chase birds and moles, a dachshund's prerogative. One often recognizes only in hindsight a coincidence or unlikely object that altered fate. Who would have imagined that a zealous professor's cavalcade of pinned beetles would open the gate from the Ghetto for so many people?

  CHAPTER 17

  ZIEGLER'S INFATUATION WITH INSECTS DIFFERED STRIKINGLY from Nazi doctrine. Obsessed with pest control, the Third Reich funded many research projects before and during the war that focused on insecticides, rat poisons, and clever ways to foil wood-eating beetles, clothes moths, termites, and other banes. Himmler had studied agriculture in Munich, and favored such entomologists as Karl Friederichs, who sought ways to stop the spruce sawfly and similar insect pests, while justifying Nazi racist ideology as a form of ecology, a "doctrine of blood and soil." From this perspective, killing people in occupied countries and replacing them with Germans served both political and ecological goals, especially if one first planted forests to change the climate, as suggested by Nazi biologist Eugene Fischer.

  Seen through an electron microscope (invented in Germany in 1939), a louse looks like a pudgy long-horned devil with bulging eyes and six snaring arms. A military scourge in 1812, the bug vanquished Napoleon's Grande Armee en route to Moscow, a legend only recently confirmed by scientists. "We believe that louse-borne diseases caused much of the death of Napoleon's army," Didier Raoult, of the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille, reported in the January 2005 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, based on an analysis of tooth pulp from soldiers' remains discovered in 2001 by construction workers in a mass grave near Vilnius, Lithuania. As body lice transmitted the agents of relapsing fever, trench fever, and epidemic typhus, Napoleon's Grand Army dropped from 500,000 to 3,000, mainly through pestilence. Friedrich Prinzing's Epidemics Resulting from Wars, published in 1916, tells the same tale, and also points out that more men died from lice-borne diseases in the American Civil War than on its battlefields. By 1944, the Germans had medicine to reduce the severity of typhus, but not a reliable vaccine. Nor did the U.S. military, which could only offer its troops repeated typhus inoculations that lasted just a few months.

  Inside the Ghetto, crowded apartment buildings quickly became hovels ravaged by tuberculosis, dysentery, and famine, and typhus plagued the Ghetto with high fever, chills, weakness, pain, headaches, and hallucinations. Typhus, a catchall name given to similar diseases caused by Rickettsiae bacteria, derives from the Greek word typhos, "smoky" or "hazy," limning the mental blur of the sufferer, who, after a few days, develops a rash that gradually covers the whole body. Since lice spread the disease, jamming people into a Ghetto made epidemic inevitable, and in time typhus grew so rife that, passing on the street, people kept their distance for fear of lice jumping onto them. The few doctors, doling out sympathy and care in the absence of medicine and nutrition, knew recovery depended solely on age and overall health.

  This led naturally to the image of virulent, lice-ridden Jews. "Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing," Himmler told his SS officers on April 24, 1943. "Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology. It is a matter of cleanliness. . .. We shall soon be deloused. We have only 20,000 lice left and then the matter is finished within the whole of Germany."

  As early as January 1941, Warsaw's
German Governor Ludwig Fischer reported that he chose the slogan "JEWS—LICE—TYPHUS" to emblazon 3,000 large posters, 7,000 small posters, and 500,000 pamphlets, adding that "the Polish press [under German patronage] and the radio have shared in the distribution of this information. In addition, the children in Polish schools have been warned of the danger every single day."

  Once the Nazis recategorized Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs as nonhuman species, the image of themselves as hunters naturally followed, with shooting parties at country manors and mountain resorts that prepared the Nazi elite, through blood sport, for the grander hunt. They had other models to choose from, of course, including knights and doctors, but hunter offered the manly metaphors of angling, hounding, baiting, trapping, gutting, ratting, and so on.

  The specter of contagion clearly unnerved the Nazis. Posters often caricatured Jews with ratlike faces (rat fleas being the primary carriers of plagues), and this imagery insinuated itself even into the psyche of some Jews, like Marek Edelman, a leader of the Ghetto Uprising, who recalled being en route to an Underground meeting when he was "seized by the wish not to have a face," lest someone recognize and denounce him as a Jew. What's more, he saw himself with

  a repugnant, sinister face. The face from the poster "JEWS—LICE—TYPHUS." Whereas everybody else. . .had fair faces. They were handsome, relaxed. They could be relaxed because they were aware of their fairness and beauty.

  In the bell-jar politics of Ghetto society, rife with social contrasts, criminals and collaborators thrived while others starved, and an underworld of bribery and racketeering arose. German soldiers regularly dished out violence, stole possessions, and grabbed people for backbreaking and humiliating jobs, until, as one resident of the Ghetto wrote, "when the three horsemen of the Apocalypse summoned by the invader—pestilence, famine, and cold—proved no match for the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto, the knights of the SS were called to complete the task." According to German figures, they shipped 316,822 people from Warsaw to concentration camps between early 1942 and January 1943. Since they also shot many people in the Ghetto, the real death count rose much higher.