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One puzzle of daily life at the villa was this: How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society? On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany, emboldened by the recently-signed Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Stalin's Soviet Union, invaded Poland. Warsaw was pummeled, then occupied. With the Nazis' bizarre fixation on racial purity (which extended to animals) and hatred for Jews, it became an existential crisis merely to be Jewish in the city. Amid the carnage and daily horror, heroes emerged. One of them was Antonina Żabiński.


Antonina and Jan Żabiński - from PBS

She and her husband, Jan, were in charge of the Warsaw Zoo. It was a labor of love. Both were smitten with animals and sought not only to offer an educational experience to the people, primarily the children of Warsaw, but to take the best possible care of their charges. Jan once said of Antonina "Her confidence could disarm even the most hostile," he told an anonymous reporter, adding that her strength stemmed from her love of animals. "It wasn't just that she identified with them," he explained, "but from time to time she seemed to shed her own human traits and become a panther or a hyena. Then, able to adopt their fighting instinct, she arose as a fearless defender of her kind." It was frequently the case that this or that animal required special care, patching up from an injury, recuperation from an illness. Antonina and Jan would take them into their zoo-residence, a villa, creating a very Doctor-Doolittle-like atmosphere.


Diane Ackerman

But sustaining a full zoo in the middle of a blitzkrieg, and then a brutal occupation was impossible. Many of the animals were taken by a Nazi officer who happened to be in charge of a zoo in Germany. What was possible, though, was for Antonina and Jan to use the zoo as a refuge for those targeted by the Nazis, for Jews. The complexity of the operation was significant. It takes a village to save lives. Antonina and Jan were not in this alone. Not only did people need documentation, they needed to learn how to pass as Christian, how to behave in church, for example. Some made adjustments to their appearance to appear more "Aryan," some by bleaching their hair. And some men went to the extreme length of having a medical procedure to reverse their circumcisions. Don't ask.

The zoo functioned as a way-station where Jews fleeing the ghetto could stay until more permanent shelter could be identified by other people and organizations in the widespread Polish resistance. Through this ordeal over three hundred people were saved with the help of Antonina and others at the Warsaw Zoo and widespread popular support in the city. Many of the people who sheltered there hid out in the now empty animal enclosures. The zoo became a Noah's Ark for endangered humans. Maintaining secrecy, however, was always a challenge. A single sneeze, cough or whimper at the wrong moment might be heard by Nazi inspectors, and could spell doom for hundreds.


Jessica Chastain plays Antonina in the film - from moviefactsinc.com

Diane Ackerman is a poet and naturalist and she brings both sensibilities to this work, offering frequent observations about the natural environment in which the horrors depicted were being experienced. She relied on Antonina's private journals for much of the story, on her published work and on Jan's books. She interviewed the survivors she could find and conducted considerable research to make sure she got the details right. Although this is a non-fiction account, it would be easy to forget that fact, and experience reading it as if one were reading a novel.

The structure of the book is mostly chronologically linear, with each of the thirty six chapters telling a small part of the overall whole. What is amazing here is how, in such a dark time, there can also have been so many experiences of joy, however fleeting. There is a considerable cast of memorable characters, both human and non, both good and evil. One of the features of the Warsaw zoo during the Nazi occupation was that the "Guests" sheltering there were referred to by animal names. This was so that those operating the zoo could speak of them without giving away what was going on. As a counterpoint, the animals that remained, or found their way to the Zabinskis care, were given human names. One spring day, Jan brought home [from a pig farm that had been set up at the zoo] a newborn piglet whose mother was just butchered, thinking that [their son] Rys might like it as a pet…they named him Morys, and at two and a half weeks, Morys looked like "piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh…very clean, pink and smooth…Morys lived in the so-called attic of the villa, really a long narrow closet that shared a terrace with the upstairs bedrooms, and each morning Antonina found him waiting outside Rys's bedroom door. When she opened it, Morys "ran into his room, oinking, and started jostling Rys's hand or foot until Rys woke, stretched out a hand, and scratched Morys's back. Then the pig arched, catlike, until he looked like the letter C, and grunted with great contentment,' uttering a quiet noise between a snort and a creaking door. There are plenty other four-footed characters here, including a particularly cunning, carnivorous rabbit who learned to kiss people.


Johan Heldenbergh as Jan Żabiński - from Focus Features

The Zabinskis' tale also gives us a look at details of how Warsaw coped with the occupation, finding ways into and out of the ghetto once it was shut in, the subterfuges they engaged in to get fake identification papers, how they got information on what was happening in the ghetto, finding sources for food for the animals remaining at the zoo. The details Ackerman presents of survival in such a place and time give it a visceral reality. There is a fascinating description of Żegota, a resistance organization that was all about rescuing people, not killing the enemy. It reminded me of the White Helmets in Syria.

Ackerman gives us a look at another of Warsaw's many heroes. In 1940 when Jews were ordered into the Ghetto, [a progressive orphanage, started by a well known author and pediatrician Henryk Goldszmit (pen name Janusz Korczak)] moved to an abandoned businessmen's club in the "district of the damned," as he described it in a diary written on blue rice paper that he filled with details of daily life in the orphanage, imaginative forays, philosophical contemplations, and soul-searching. It's the reliquary of an impossible predicament, revealing how a spiritual and moral man struggled to shield innocent children from the atrocities of the adult world during one of history's darkest times." Reportedly shy and awkward with adults, he created an ideal democracy with the orphans, who called him "Pan Doctor." There, with wit, imagination, and self-deprecating humor, he devoted himself to a "children's republic" complete with its own parliament, newspaper and court system. Instead of punching one another, children learned to yell "I'll sue you!" One might see Poland in a different light having read this. There was much more heroism and self-sacrifice than one might have realized previously. The effort to save those targeted by the Nazis involved far more than a few heroic individuals. It required the knowing cooperation of tens of thousands of individuals who knew that they would be killed if discovered.

It seems a shame, really, to note quibbles in such a book, overpowering as the story and message are, but there are a couple. While there is no doubt of Antonina's heroism, she is presented without the warts that we know all people possess. And not all of the chapters are all that informative. Otherwise, OMG, what a story!

You will be reminded of other heroes of this and other wars. Oskar Schindler will certainly come to mind, Corrie Ten Boom, Paul Rusesabagina of the Hotel Rwanda, and others. The Zookeeper's Wife is a tale that is both radiant and uplifting, about a time and a place that epitomized the depths of human depravity. The cruelties of the past remain with us in diverse forms. One needs look no further than Syria and the psychotic horrors of ISIS for examples. It is worth knowing that the human spirit survived the Third Reich. It will survive the darkness that rests over much of the world today. But it will take courage, and heroism of large and small kinds to keep those flames burning. Antonina Zabinski's actions are a testament to the potential for the good and decent in us all. Hopefully her example will offer an inspiration to others facing dire circumstances. On September 21, 1965, Antonina and Jan Zaminski were recognized at Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations.

Published - January 1, 2007

Review posted - March 31, 2017

Film released - March 31, 2017

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author's personal, Twitter and FB pages

There is a TV series, Colony, that uses a science-fiction presentation to look at occupation in a near future world. The inspiration is unmistakable. One of the issues it addresses is that of save-versus-battle, late in season two. Worth checking out.

Michling, an outstanding 2016 novel about twins in Aushwitz, includes a section where the characters arrive in Warsaw and learn how the zoo had been used.

A link to today's Warsaw Zoo