The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 10

THE LUTZ HECK THAT EMERGES FROM HIS WRITINGS AND actions drifted like a weather vane: charming when need be, cold-blooded when need be, tigerish or endearing, depending on his goal. Still, it is surprising that Heck the zoologist chose to ignore the accepted theory of hybrid vigor: that interbreeding strengthens a bloodline. He must have known that mongrels enjoy better immune systems and have more tricks up their genetic sleeves, while in a closely knit species, however “perfect,” any illness that kills one animal threatens to wipe out all the others, which is why zoos keep careful studbooks of endangered animals such as cheetahs and forest bison and try to mate them advantageously.[25] In any case, in the distant past, long before anyone was recognizably Aryan, our ancestors shared the world with other flavors of hominids, and interbreeding among neighbors often took place, producing hardier, nastier offspring who thrived. All present-day humans descend from that robust, talkative mix, specifically from a genetic bottleneck of only about one hundred individuals. A 2006 study of mitochondrial DNA tracks Ashkenazi Jews (about 92 percent of the world’s Jews in 1931) back to four women, who migrated from the Near East to Italy in the second and third centuries.[26] All of humanity can be traced back to the gene pool of one person, some say to a man, some a woman.[27] It’s hard to imagine our fate being as iffy as that, but we are natural wonders.

Maybe, after decades of observing wild animals, Heck regarded ethnic cleansing as hygienic and inevitable, an engine of reform, replacing one genetic line with an even fitter one, resembling a drama that unfolds throughout the animal kingdom. The usual scenario—using lions as an example—is that an aggressor invades a neighboring pride, kills the lead male and slaughters its young, forcibly mates with the females, thereby establishing his own bloodline, and grabs the previous male’s territory. Human beings, gifted at subterfuge and denial yet disquieted by morals, disguise such instincts in terms like self-defense, necessity, loyalty, group welfare, etc. Such was the case in 1915, for example, when Turks massacred Armenians during World War I; in the mid-1990s, when Christian Serbs in Bosnia began exterminating the country’s Muslims; and in 1994, in Rwanda, when hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered (and women raped) in warfare between the Hutus and the Tutsis.

The Holocaust was different, far more premeditated, high-tech, and methodical, and, at the same time, more primitive, as biologist Lecomte du Noüy argues in La dignite humaine (1944): “Germany’s crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of evolution.”[28] That’s not to say humans haven’t tampered with evolution in the past—we know we’ve driven many animals to extinction, and we may well have done the same to other lines of humans. Even so, what’s instinctive isn’t inevitable, we sometimes bridle unruly instincts, we don’t always play by nature’s rules. No doubt Hitler’s twin imperatives of purifying the bloodline while grabbing territory felt right along an ancient nerve in people like Heck, to whom it may even have seemed a diabolical necessity.

Heck was also a pragmatist, and Polish lands would soon be re-formed by Germans, zoos included. So when Heck visited the bombed-out Warsaw Zoo, he hid a bleak agenda: his visits were an excuse to loot the finest animals for German zoos and preserves, along with priceless breeding records. Together with his brother Heinz, he hoped to benefit the new German empire and restore the natural environment’s lost zest, just as Hitler hoped to reinvigorate the human race.

Repeatedly, Heck swore to the Żabińskis that he had nothing to do with closing their zoo and that his flagging influence with high command wasn’t enough to sway generals. Yet Antonina suspected he was lying, that he wielded enormous influence with higher-ups, and might even be personally responsible for their fate. The future of their doomed zoo tortured the Żabińskis, who feared that if it were torn down, plowed up, built on, it would vanish among the casualties of war. Regardless, Jan had to stay at the zoo, whatever that might entail, because it served the Underground, whose foothold in the Praga district in time reached 90 platoons with 6,000 soldiers, the largest pool of saboteurs in the city.[29]

The Home Army, a clandestine branch of the Polish military that took orders from the Polish government-in-exile based in London, fielded a strong hierarchy with a network of scattered cells and many arms dumps, grenade factories, schools, safe houses, messengers, and labs for making weapons, explosives, and radio receivers. As a Home Army lieutenant, Jan sought to disguise the zoo as something the Third Reich might wish to keep intact. The Germans had troops to feed and they loved pork, so he approached Lutz Heck about starting a large pig farm using the ramshackle zoo buildings, knowing that raising pigs in a harsh climate would ensure well-kept buildings and grounds, and even a little income for some of the old staff. According to testimony he gave to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, by using the ruse of gathering scraps for feeding pigs, he hoped to “bring notes, bacon, and butter and carry messages for friends” in the Ghetto.[30] Antonina wrote:

She was right, for although Heck consented to the pig farm, the welfare of the animals not “important” enough for his breeding trials was another matter. First, a noisy caravan of arriving and departing trucks continued for days, hauling the orphan elephant Tuzinka off to Königsberg; shipping the camels and llamas to Hanover; sending the hippopotamuses to Nuremberg; dispatching the Przywalski horses to his brother Heinz, in Munich; and claiming the lynxes, zebras, and bison for the Berlin Zoo. Antonina worried how the upheaval might confuse the animals, which, at journey’s end, faced new enclosures, new staff, cajoling or yelling in a new language, new routines, new micro-climates, new mealtimes. Everything would take getting used to, especially new cage-mates and keepers and the sudden loss of herd or family members. All that tumult after the shock of recently being bombed and nearly incinerated. Writing of it, she experienced their suffering twice, as human friend and baffled victim.

After Heck swiped all the animals he wanted for breeding, he decided to host a New Year’s Eve shooting party, an old northern European holiday custom based on the pagan belief that noise scares away evil spirits. Traditionally, young men rode from farm to farm, shooting and whooping, banishing the demons, until they were invited indoors for drinks. Sometimes boys circled trees while shooting rifles, ringing bells, and banging on pots and pans, taking part in a timeless ritual designed to rouse nature from her slumber and fill the trees with fruit, the land with a rich harvest.

Warping the tradition, Heck invited his SS friends to a rare treat: a private hunting party right on the zoo grounds, a spree that combined privilege with the pell-mell of exotic animals even a novice or soused gunman could bag. The big-game hunter in Heck coexisted with the naturalist, and paradoxical as it seems, he was a zookeeper who didn’t mind killing animals in someone else’s zoo if it meant ingratiating himself with powerful friends. Heck and a cadre of fellow hunters arrived on a sunny day, full of drink and hilarity, elated by army victories, laughing as they roamed the grounds, shooting penned and caged animals for sport. Only Göring and his medieval boar spear were missing.

“As a convalescent is hit by a returning fever,” Antonina wrote in her diary, “we were hit by the killing of the zoo animals, in cold blood and deliberately on this pretty winter day.” Fearing the worst when she saw Heck’s friends arrive drunk, jovial, and armed, she decided to keep Ryś indoors.

“Please let me go sledding on the little hill in the llama habitat,” he begged. Cooped up all day and cranky, he whined: “I’m bored, and I don’t have any playmates.”

“How about if we sit in your room and read Robinson Crusoe?” she suggested. Reluctantly, he climbed the stairs with her, they curled up on his bed, and she read one of his favorite books by lamplight. But, sensing his mother’s gloom, Ryś fidgeted anxiously and couldn’t pay attention, even when she reached exciting passages. Suddenly gunshots broke the winter silence, each one followed by its echo, as rifle fire crackled across the grounds, loud enough to hear through shuttered windows.

“Mom, what does it mean?” the frightened boy asked, pulling at her sleeve. “Who is shooting?”

Antonina stared down into the book until its letters began jumping before her eyes, unable to speak or move, hands frozen in place, holding the book’s open wings. Dizzying and mutant as the past months were, somehow she had endured, but this moment, “beyond politics or war, of sheer gratuitous slaughter,” harrowed her. The savagery didn’t serve hunger or necessity, it wasn’t a political gambit, the doomed animals weren’t being culled because they’d become too abundant in the wild. Not only was the SS ignoring their value as notable creatures with unique personalities, the men didn’t even credit animals with basic fear or pain. It was a kind of pornography, in which the brief frisson of killing outweighed the animals’ lives. “How many humans will die like this in the coming months?” Antonina asked herself. Seeing and smelling the butchery would have been worse, she wrote, but she found it agonizing to hear shots and imagine the scared animals running, dropping. Her shock, Heck’s betrayal, her helplessness dazed her, and she sat paralyzed as her son tugged at her sleeve. If she couldn’t protect the animals in her keeping, how could she protect her own son? Or even explain to him what was happening, when the truth would horrify him beyond remedy? Sporadic gunfire continued until late evening, its randomness playing havoc with her nerves, since she couldn’t brace herself, only shudder with each shot.

“A very bright, light amaranth sunset was predicting wind for the next day,” she wrote later. “Trails, avenues, and frosted yard were covered by thickening layers of snow, which was falling in big chaotic flakes and clusters. In the cold-blue evening light, sunset was playing funeral bells for our just-buried animals. We could see our two hawks and one eagle circling above the garden. When their cage was split open by bullets, they’d flown free, but they didn’t want to leave the only home they knew. Gliding down, they landed on our porch and waited for a meal of some horsemeat. Soon even they became trophies, part of the Gestapo officers’ New Year’s hunting party.”