The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

by Diane Ackerman

  Pointing at Antonina, a soldier asked Mikołaj: "Why isn't this woman registered here?"

  "She's my niece, the zookeeper's wife," he explained in fluent German. "She's just spending the night here because their bathroom is broken; she came to take a bath and spend the night—that's all. It's dark and slippery out, not a good time for a pregnant woman to be on the street alone."

  As the soldiers continued inspecting the house, they moved slowly from one elegantly furnished room to another, exchanging smiles of pleasure.

  "So gemütlich," one said, a word conveying a pleasant cheerfulness. "Back home bombing raids have destroyed our houses."

  Antonina noted later that she could well imagine his sorrow. In March, American bombers had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on Berlin, and in April thousands of planes had jousted over Germany's once-beautiful cities. The soldiers had much gemütlichkeit to long for, though the worst still awaited them. By the end of the war, the Allies would blanket-bomb German cities, including Dresden, historic seat of humanism and architectural splendor.

  Antonina stood to one side and quietly watched their faces for signs of trouble as they entered the dining room, where a soldier spied the pageant of German commemorative spoons on the wall. He paused, edged closer, and then his face flashed surprised delight as he drew his friend's attention to the rows of perfectly arranged spoons, each celebrating a different city. The soldier said politely: "Thank you, everything is fine here, we're finished with our inspection. Goodbye!" And they left.

  Thinking over events later, Antonina figured all that saved her were sentimental memories and the idea that someone in the house had German roots. Marysia's whim of buying German souvenirs, and displaying them in the folk-art way, had spared them arrest, interrogation, perhaps death. Despite all she chose not to see, Antonina still hid valuable secrets (people, locations, contacts), and so did Mikołaj, a Catholic engineer who, with Zegota's help, sometimes hid Jews.

  At last all went to bed, and the next morning Antonina returned home, where the Guests assured her that if she and Jan could escape narrowly so often, they must live "under the influence of a lucky star," not just a crazy one.

  By the time spring came, the hibernating zoo began churning with life, trees unfurled new leaves, the ground softened, and many city dwellers arrived, gardening tools in hand, to work their small vegetable plots. The Żabíńskis gave refuge to even more desperate Guests, who joined the villa, underfoot and in closets, or crept into small sheds and cages. Their lack of comforts, photographs, and family relics greatly saddened Antonina, who described them in her diary as "people stripped of everything but their lives."

  In June, Antonina affirmed life's relentless optimism by giving birth to a little girl named Teresa, who stole center stage despite the global tug-of-war. Ryś was fascinated by the newborn, and Antonina wrote that she fancied herself back in a fairy tale about a baby princess (Jabłonowski Princess Teresa had been born in 1910), for whom gifts arrived each day. A shiny golden wicker crib, a handmade baby quilt, knitted hats and sweaters and socks at a time when wool was hard to find—these seemed "priceless treasures laden with magic spells of protection." One very poor friend had even embroidered cloth diapers with tiny pearl designs. Antonina doted on the tokens, removing them from tissue paper, touching them, admiring them, arranging them on her comforter like icons. Couples were trying not to give birth during the war, given life's uncertainties, and this healthy baby posed a good omen in one of the most superstitious of cultures, especially about child-bearing.

  According to Polish folklore, for example, a pregnant woman dared not gaze at a cripple or the baby could become crippled, too. Looking into a fire while pregnant supposedly caused red birthmarks, and looking through a keyhole doomed the baby to crossed eyes. If an expectant mother stepped over a rope on the ground or under a clothesline, the umbilical cord would tangle during childbirth. Mothers-to-be should only stare at beautiful vistas, objects, and people, and could produce a happy, sociable child by singing and talking a lot. Craving sour foods foretold a boy, craving sweets a girl. If possible, one should give birth on a lucky day of the week at a lucky hour to guarantee the baby's lifelong good fortune, whereas a sinister day doled out hexes. Although the Virgin Mary blessed Saturdays, when any newborn automatically evaded evil, Sunday's children could blossom into mystics and seers. Superstitious rituals accompanied the saving and drying of the umbilical cord, the first bath, first haircut, first breast-feeding, and so on. Since it marked the end of infancy, weaning held special significance:

  The country women had particular times when they thought weaning was to occur. First, it was not done during the time when birds were flying away for the winter, for fear the child would grow up to be wild and take to the forest and woods. If weaning took place during the time when leaves were falling, the child would go bald early on in life. A child was not weaned during harvest time when the grains were being carefully hidden away, or it would become a very secretive individual.

  —Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore

  Also, pregnancy should stay hidden as long as possible, and not be divulged, even by the husband, lest a jealous neighbor cast the evil eye on the baby. In Antonina's day, the evil eye, born of envy to sour and begrudge good fortune, worried many Poles, who believed a happy event invited evil and that praising a newborn cast a vicious spell. "What a beautiful baby" became so poisonous that, as antidote, the mother had to counter with: "Oh, it's an ugly child," and then spit in disgust. Following similar logic, when a girl got her first period it was customary for her mother to slap her. The dehexing fell mainly to mothers, who saved offspring by forgoing shows of happiness and pride, thus sacrificing what they prized dearly for what they valued most, because the moment one loved something it became eligible for loss. While to Catholics, Satan and his minions always hovered, Jews also ran a daily gauntlet of demons, the best known of which is perhaps the zombie-like dybbuk, the spirit of someone who died and has returned to haunt the body of a living person.

  On July 10, Antonina finally emerged from bed, to celebrate Teresa's birth at a small christening party. Traditionally one served braided bread and cheese on such an occasion, to dispel evil forces. Out came bacon-stuffed meat preserves, made from the carcasses of crows shot by Germans the previous winter. Fox Man cooked waffles, and Maurycy made a traditional liqueur of honeyed vodka, called pępkowa (navel). Of course, in Maurycy's eyes, the occasion required the presence of his hamster, so Piotr joined the table and began collecting crumbs as usual, carefully checking each plate and cup, perking up his head, sniffing around, whiskers twitching, at last discovering the source of a new aroma which spirited sweetly from the empty liqueur glasses. Lifting a honey-scented glass in his tiny paws, he licked with pleasure, then went to the other glasses and imbibed until he grew drunk, as the partiers laughed. He paid dearly for the spree: the next morning, Maurycy found his companion lying stiff and lifeless on the floor of his cage.

  CHAPTER 31

  1944

  NOTHING HAD CHANGED IN THE VILLA'S ROSTER OR ROUTINES, but a new malaise hung in the air, Antonina thought, as everyone went about their chores with a friendly smile, while trying to hide scorched nerves. People seemed "distracted," and "conversations stumbled, sentences fell apart mid-word." On July 20, a bomb planted by Count von Stauffenberg exploded at Hitler's Wolfschanze (Wolf 's Lair) headquarters in the Prussian forest, though Hitler escaped with only minor injuries. After that, panic grew in the local German population, and columns of retreating soldiers began streaming through Warsaw, blowing up buildings as they fled westward. Gestapo members burned their files, purged warehouses, and shipped personal belongings back to Germany. The German governor, mayor, and other administrators bolted away in any handy truck or cart, leaving only a garrison of 2,000 soldiers behind. As the Germans rushed out, creating a void, many Poles hurried in from nearby villages, afraid the coming soldiers might ransack their houses or farms.

  Convinced the Upri
sing would start any minute, Jan felt sure it would cost only a few days at most for the 350,000 men of the Home Army to overwhelm the remaining Germans. In theory, once the bridges were captured by the Poles, battalions from both sides of the Vistula River could join ranks and create one single powerful army to liberate the city.

  On July 27, when Russian troops reached the Vistula sixty-five miles south of Warsaw (Antonina said she could hear the gunfire), German Governor Hans Frank summoned 100,000 Polish men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to work nine hours a day building fortifications around the city, or be shot. The Home Army urged everyone to ignore Frank's order and start preparing for battle, a call to arms echoed the next day by the Russians, pushing closer, who broadcast in Polish: "The hour for action has arrived!" By August 3, as the Red Army bivouacked ten miles from the right-bank district that included the zoo, life grew even tenser in the villa and people kept asking: "When will the Uprising start?"

  The dramatis personae at the zoo changed abruptly. Most Guests had already left to join the army or escaped to safer melinas: Fox Man planned to move to a farm near Grójec; Maurycy joined Magdalena in Saska Kępa; and although the lawyer and his wife fled to the other side of Warsaw, their two daughters, Nunia and Ewa, decided to stay at the villa, because if something were to happen to Antonina, they insisted, then newborn Teresa, Ryś, Jan's seventy-year-old mother, and the housekeeper would have to manage all alone, which wasn't feasible. Although soldiers started evacuating civilians from the lands closest to the river, Jan hoped his family could remain in the zoo, since Polish soldiers were bound to win the Uprising soon, and the strain of traveling might kill the baby or Jan's infirm mother. In his testimony to the Jewish Institute, he recalled that at 7 A.M. on August 1, a girl came to summon him for battle. This would have been someone like the Home Army messenger Halina Dobrowolska (during the war, Halina Korabiowska), whom I met one sunny summer afternoon in Warsaw. Now a lively woman in her eighties, she was a teenager during the war, and she remembers the day she was dispatched by bicycle and tram on a long, dangerous journey into the suburbs to summon fighters and warn families that the Uprising was due to start. She needed to take a trolley and finally found one, though the conductor was packing up, since most Warsawians had already abandoned their jobs and raced home to prepare for battle. Anticipating just such a problem, the Underground had supplied Halina with American dollars, which the conductor accepted, and he nervously drove her to her destination.

  Jan raced upstairs to where Antonina slept with Teresa, and told her the news.

  "Yesterday, you had different information!" she said anxiously.

  "I don't understand what's happening either, but I have to go and find out."

  Their friend Stefan Korboński, who was also surprised by the timing of the Uprising and not given warning, captures some of the fervor and haste on the downtown streets that day:

  The tram-cars were crowded with young boys. . .. On-the sidewalks, women in twos and threes were walking along briskly, with obvious haste, carrying heavy bags and bundles. "They are transporting arms to the assembly points," I muttered to myself. A stream of bicycles flowed along the roadway. Boys in top boots and wind-jackets were pedalling as hard as their legs could go. . .. Here and there was a German in uniform, or a German patrol, proceeding on its way without seeing anything, and without knowing what was happening around it. . .. I passed numerous men scurrying, grave and purposeful, in all directions, and exchanging glances with me full of tacit understanding.

  Four hours later, Jan returned home to say goodbye to Antonina and his mother, explaining that the Uprising would be starting any moment. He handed Antonina a metal mess tin and said:

  "There's a loaded revolver in here, just in case German soldiers show up. . .."

  Antonina froze. "I was paralyzed in place," she wrote, and said to Jan: "German soldiers? What are you thinking? Did you forget what we believed only a few days ago, that the Underground army was supposed to win?. . .You don't believe anymore!"

  Jan replied grimly: "Look, a week ago we had a good chance of winning this battle. It's too late now. The timing isn't right for the Uprising. We should wait. Twenty-four hours ago, our leaders thought the same. But last night they suddenly changed their minds. This kind of indecisiveness can lead to very bad consequences."

  Jan didn't know that the Russians, supposed allies, had their own voracious agenda, and that Stalin, who had been promised a chunk of Poland after the war, wanted both the Germans and the Poles to be defeated. Meanwhile, he refused to allow Allied planes headed for Poland to land on Russian airfields.

  "I hugged Jan tight, my face pressed hard against his cheek," Antonina recalled. "He kissed my hair, looked at the baby, and then ran downstairs. My heart was pounding like crazy!" She hid the tin with the revolver under her bed and went to check on Jan's mother, whom she found sitting in an armchair, saying her rosary beads, "her face wet with tears."

  Jan's mother would have abided by the custom of making a quick cross on her forehead and inviting Mary to bless Jan's journey. Our Lady of the Home Army (the Virgin Mary) was patron saint for the soldiers during the Uprising, when one found hastily built altars to her in the city and shrines along the roadways (Poland still has many today). Soldiers and their families also prayed to Jesus Christ, and often carried in their wallet a small portrait of Christ with the inscription Jezu, ufam tobie (In Jesus we trust).

  We don't know what Antonina did to ease the pincers of uncertainty, but Jan once informed a journalist that she had been raised a strict Catholic, and since she'd had both children baptized, and always wore a medallion around her neck, she most likely prayed. During the war, when all hope had evaporated and only miracles remained, even unreligious people often turned to prayer. Some of the Guests used fortune-telling to help shore up morale, but as a self-proclaimed man of reason, and the son of a frankly atheist father, Jan frowned on superstition and religion, which means Antonina and Jan's devoutly Catholic mother may have kept some house secrets of their own.

  As airplanes flew low strafing runs over the city, Antonina tried to guess what was happening on the other side of the Vistula, and finally went up to the terrace, from which she searched the bright sizzle of gunfire across the river, reading every snap as a clue. The shots sounded "separate, personal," she noted, not like the streaming echoes of a big military battle.

  The leadership of the zoo's little fiefdom fell to her, she realized, including Ryś, four-week-old Teresa, the girls Nunia and Ewa, her mother-in-law, the housekeeper, Fox Man and his two helpers. The "heavy ballast of being responsible for the lives of others" slid around her body and stole through her mind as obsession:

  The seriousness of the situation didn't let me relax for a moment. No matter if I wanted to or not, I had to take a leadership of our household. . .be on alert all the time like I was taught in my Girl Scout years. And I knew that Jan had much more difficult duties. I had a powerful feeling of being responsible for taking care of everything at home; I carried those thoughts obsessively. . .. I just knew I had to do it.

  Sleep surrendered to war, and for twenty-three nights she forced herself to stay awake, terrified that she might doze off and not hear a noise, however tiny, that signaled danger. In some ways, this guardian spirit wasn't new to Antonina, who remembered how, during the shellings of 1939, she had shielded her young son with her body. It sprang from the ferocity of motherhood, she decided, the instinct to battle if need be to protect one's family.

  Even though the battlefield lay across the river, she smelled death, sulfur, rot on westerly breezes, and heard the relentless clash of guns, artillery shells, and bombs. Without news or contact with the rest of the city, Antonina imagined the villa transformed "from an ark to a tiny ship on a vast ocean, hopelessly adrift without compass or rudder," and she expected a bomb at any moment.

  Stationed on the terrace, she and Ryś craned to see the fires across the river and divine events. At night, they watched bright
sparks of gunfire—single shots, not the rapid echoes of a field battle—and airplanes whining and whistling above the city until early morning.

  "Dad is fighting in the worst part of the city," Ryś kept repeating as he pointed toward the Old City. For hours he stood sentry's watch, scouting the battle through binoculars, searching for his father's shape, ducking down whenever he heard a bomb growling toward him.

  Just outside the door to Antonina's bedroom, a metal train ladder led up to the flat roof, and Ryś often climbed it, binoculars in hand. Germans stationed in Praski Park had taken over a small amusement park near the bridge that included a tower for parachute-jump rides, from which they spotted Ryś atop the roof, spying on them. One day, a soldier stopped by to threaten Antonina that if he ever caught Ryś up there again he'd shoot him.

  Despite the skittish, sleepless nights and the daily alarms, Antonina confessed to feeling "chills of excitement" about the Uprising, "having imagined this day through the long ghastly years of occupation," though she could only guess at events. Across the river, in the heart of the city, food and water were scarce, but there was plenty of lump sugar and vodka (filched from German supplies) to fuel the Home Army as they built antitank barricades from paving stones. Of the 38,000 soldiers (4,000 were women), only one in fifteen had adequate weapons; the rest used sticks, hunting rifles, knives, and swords, hoping to capture enemy weapons.

  Because the Germans still held the telephone exchange, a corps of brave girl couriers carried messages around the city, just as they had been doing secretly during occupation. When Halina Korabiowska returned to Warsaw, she headed downtown to help relay messages, set up field kitchens and hospitals, and supply the fighters.