The Zookeeper's Wife

A review I read of Diane Ackerman's account of Polish Christians hiding Jews during WWII was very provocative, making much of the fact that Jan and Antonina Zabinski hid their "guests" in empty animal cages, but reality doesn't offer quite so literal and tidy a metaphor.

That's not to make any less of the really horrifying existence of Polish Jews and others deemed unacceptable by the Nazis. Jan and Antonina are what you would call animal people. Yes, they're in charge of the Warsaw Zoo, but they are so into their animals and their jobs that it's a little hard to see where their home ends and the grounds of the zoo begin. Their house is full of "pets" and assorted sick zoo animals. They live and breathe for their animals. Oh, and their son, Zys (which, by the way, means lynx). And when the Nazis attack Warsaw, they watch in horror as their zoo (unfortunately rather strategically placed for both the defenders and the attackers) is decimated. What animals aren't killed outright, are carted off by the victors to enhance their own zoos (the Nazis are strangely into conservation and nature). The left over few--the inappropriately exotic, the dull, the overly cumbersome--are used for an organized hunt.

Jan and Antonina and the other zoo employees listen in horror as the animals are killed for sport just outside their door, but this is still only the beginning of their story. Ackerman rather casually drops in that they are members of the underground and soon their semi-defunct zoo turned Nazi pig farm (there's some irony for you), turned Nazi fur farm, soon becomes a center of an underground railroad system of safe houses. Their proximity and somewhat easy access to the infamous Warsaw ghetto allows them to, in the end, save over 500 people from certain death.

The book is full of the sorts of subterfuge many Poles became adept at during the occupation. Ackerman makes much of the Zabinskis knowledge of animal camouflage to explain how well they played their roles in the underground. But in Warsaw, life was all about camouflage. Everyone was hiding something, even if it was just a way of keeping themselves alive. There was even a beauty salon secretly teaching Jewish women how to "pass", that is, how to camouflage their Jewish looks and ways. The subtleties of this are completely lost on a modern American, living in a liberal town, but the descriptions drive home the hazards of living in Poland at that time.

The risks that Antonina and Jan and many others faced defies belief, but this is a story with a more or less happy ending (if you can ignore that Poland got swallowed behind the iron curtain for so long). You root for the Poles, even those in the Ghetto, while fully knowing the annihilation that awaits Warsaw. As a reader, you keep your head down and hope that at least your main characters come out okay. You still hope for young Rys' pets to help save him from the horror of war even while, one after another, they meet unhappy ends. (Their ends are not always due to the war either since the drunk hamster is just as sad as the piglet shot by soldiers.) You still want all the guests to live, you want the teacher in the Ghetto to escape from the train taking him "East". Not all of the small stories are happy so you have to look at the big picture.

Interestingly, Antonina explains their own survival away as "luck" on her part but feels her husband was "brave." I suppose that every Pole must have felt some version of that as well. One of the most horrifying moments for me was when Antonina is forced to watch as her young son is led away by soldiers. It is hard to know how one would react in similar circumstances and this scene is towards the end of the war when, presumably, they're fairly worn down, but I was shocked by the lack of emotion the author allowed for. Ackerman is culling from the woman's diaries, but still. I felt this lacked a certain amount of drama, but I guess that's non-fiction for you. The other thought that I returned to often was that the elder Zabinskis carred cyanide pills with them at all times. This made sense from their position as underground workers with knowledge that would endanger hundreds of others, but all I kept thinking was: Who would take care of their son Zys if they killed themselves? I guess that's the selfish question of an outsider.

The Zookeeper's Wife was a perfect follow-up to my book group's read last month of The Madonnas of Leningrad. The fiction of that book was glaring when compared to the reality in this book. This is not a depressing book because, I suppose, Ackerman focused on nature, and the return of life each year. I don't want to say this was a "gentle" war story, but it was easier to find hope in the pages than in many other books about Warsaw at that time.