Thursday, December 18, 2008

The Zookeeper's Wife

Somerville, Mass - Jan and Antonina leapt at the chance to shape a new zoo and spend their lives among animals. In 1931, they married and moved across the river to Praga, a rough industrial district with its own street slang, on the wrong side of the tracks, but only fifteen minutes by trolley from downtown.

When I started reading The Zookeeper's Wife, by Diane Ackerman, I thought it was going to be about a woman's adventures with animals. Given, the subtitle is A War Story, but still, I thought that the book would be about the way the animals at the Warsaw Zoo survived WWII.

I even suggested that Jerry should read the book, which combines history and animals, two of his passions. "No way," he said. "I know enough history to know that those animals are coming to a bad end."

And of course he was right. Within the first 100 pages of The Zookeeper's Wife, the zoo animals are either shipped off to Germany for Nazi breeding programs or savagely slaughtered, victims of a private hunting party for Gestapo officers. Brutal.

It's a rough beginning. But Ackerman's story is ultimately an uplifting one, as the empty animal cages and extra bedrooms are turned into safe havens for Jewish refugees. Jan and Antonina Zabinski - the zookeeper and his wife - become active in the Polish Underground, risking their own lives to shepherd hundreds of people to safety. This history is retold largely based on Antonina's journals, which explains the title.

In 1940, the Nazis ordered all Jews to relocate to the Warsaw Ghetto - that's more than 400,000 people restricted to a tiny enclosed portion of the city. I had read about ghetto, but The Zookeeper's Wife provides incredible, intriguing descriptions of life in this neighborhood. Ackerman does not overlook the squalor and starvation and disease that the ghetto-residents endured. But she also informs us of the ways that they sustained themselves —organizing illicit schools, publications and cultural performances, all of which was illegal.

Once the Nazis started evacuating the Jews from the ghetto to concentration camps in massive numbers, the Warsaw Zoo became an important way station for individuals trying to escape. The Zabinskis set up an elaborate code language, naming their guests after animals so they would not be recognized. They built a series of tunnels between their villa and the cages to allow for undetected movement around the grounds. Antonina was the caretaker of the household, and despite the immense danger of the situation, she always strived to maintain a cheerful and comfortable atmosphere for the guests around the villa. In all, some 300 people passed through the Warsaw Zoo on their way to safety.

The Zabinskis' story - Ackerman argues - is just one example of thousands of such heroic feats. She writes of printers who provided false documents for escaping Jews, beauty salons where they could get "Aryan" makeovers, schools that would teach them Christian customs– all so they could pass as non-Jews in a Nazi world. Poles could be killed not only for aiding and abetting Jews, but also for their failure to inform on their neighbors. Ackerman estimates that "70-000–90,000 people in Warsaw and the suburbs, or about one-twelfth of the city's population, risked their lives to help neighbors escape. Besides the rescuers and Underground helpers, there were maids, postmen, milkmen and many others who didn't inquire about extra faces or extra mouths to feed."

When the Nazis began the final phase of their plan to exterminate the Jewish residents, the Underground rose up in armed resistance. They put up a heroic battle which lasted more than two months, but to no avail… After the uprising some 7000 Jews were shot, while tens of thousands were shipped to concentration camps at Treblinka or Majdanek.

"Then, one terrible day, a gray rainfall settled on the zoo, a long, slow rain of ash carried on a westerly wind from the burning Jewish Quarter across the river. " The ghetto was destroyed, block by block, building by building, along with any remaining residents.

When we were in Warsaw in 2000, we paid our respects at this moving monument which remembers the residents who lived and died in the ghetto. Now there is also an Uprising Museum, which opened in more recent years. But not surprisingly, nothing really remains of the Warsaw Ghetto.

The camp at Treblinka was also destroyed by the retreating Nazis, but I visited the camp in southeastern Poland, Majdanek, which had seen the extermination of some 235,000 people.

After reading The Zookeeper's Wife, I am disappointed that I didn't visit the Warsaw Zoo when I was there. At the time I was not aware that it was such a historic place! Just out of curiosity, I looked it up in my guidebook, which describes Praga very much like Ackerman did: "a large working-class district… just across the Vistula from the Old Town."

For some reason, it warmed my heart to see that the zoo is listed amongst Warsaw's sights:"Just beyond the Slasko-Dabrowski Bridge are the Zoological Gardens. Established in 1928, the zoo has some 3000 animals representing 280 species from around the world." Antonina Zabinski always acted as the matriarch of the zoo, taking great pains to ensure the comfort of her guests, no matter what species they were. I imagine that her protective spirit continues to inhabit this place, still a peaceful haven for the creatures that she loved so dearly.

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