The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 11

LIFE IN THE ZOO STOPPED COLD FOR WEEKS, AND LOSS ECHOED around the cages once filled with familiar snorts and jabbers. Antonina’s brain refused to accept the sad new reality, as everywhere a funereal silence hushed the grounds and she tried telling herself that “it wasn’t a death sleep but hibernation,” the lull of bats and polar bears, after which they would wake refreshed in springtime, stretch their scruffy limbs, and search for food and mates. It was only a rest cure during the icequake and frostbite days of winter when food hid and it was better to sleep in one’s burrow, warmed by a storehouse of summer fat. Hibernation time wasn’t only for sleep, it was also when bears typically gave birth to cubs they suckled and nuzzled until spring, a time of ripeness. Antonina wondered if humans might use the same metaphor and picture the war days as “a sort of hibernation of the spirit, when ideas, knowledge, science, enthusiasm for work, understanding, and love—all accumulate inside, [where] nobody can take them from us.”

Of course, her family’s Underground was no sleepy restorative shelter but a policy of hazards, and Antonina found the Underground state of mind a shared “brain-dead reaction” conjured up by the psyche. There was no alternative, really. One needed it to face the stultifying fear and sadness aroused by such daily horrors as people beaten and arrested in the streets, deportations to Germany, torture in Gestapo quads or Pawiak Prison, mass executions. For Antonina, at least, that flight, stoicism, or dissociation—whatever one labels it—never quite dispelled the undertow of “fear, rebellion, and extreme sadness.”

As Germans systematically reclaimed Polish towns and streets, even speaking Polish in public became forbidden; in Gdańsk it was punishable by death. The Nazi goal of more “living space” (Lebensraum) applied pointedly to Poland, where Hitler had ordered his troops to “kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the Lebensraum we need.”[31] Those children thought to show the strongest Nordic features (and thus genes) were destined for Germany to be renamed and raised by Germans. Like the Hecks, Nazi biologists believed in appearances, that anyone who strongly resembled a target species could be bred back to a pure ancestor.

The racial logic went like this: A biologically superior Aryan race had spread across the world, and though various empires collapsed, traces of Aryans remained among the nobility, whose features could be identified and harvested from descendants in Iceland, Tibet, Amazonia, and other regions. Working on this theory, in January 1939, Reichsführer Himmler launched a German Tibet Expedition to locate the roots of the Aryan race, led by twenty-six-year-old naturalist, hunter, and explorer Ernst Schäfer.

“Himmler shared at least one passion with Ernst Schäfer,” Christopher Hale writes in Himmler’s Crusade: he “was fascinated by the East and its religions,” going so far as to carry a notebook “in which he had collected homilies from the Hindu Bhagavadgita (‘Song of the Lord’). To the unimpressive little man [Himmler] who sat inside the poisonous spider’s web of the SS, Ernst Schäfer was an emissary from another mysterious and thrilling world.” Himmler also brewed a deep hatred for Christianity, and since most of Poland was devoutly Catholic, all Poles drew punishment.[32]

Antonina wrote that her world felt gutted, collapsing in slow motion, and that for a Blitzkrieg, a lightning-fast war, “it had many long-drawn-out phases.” Food stamps entered their lives and costly black-market food, though luckily Antonina could still bake bread from the grain she had bought from her sister-in-law in the fall.

At winter’s end, she and Jan started receiving the first shipments of sows, and by March of 1940 the pig farm began, mainly fed on scraps donated from restaurants and hospitals, as well as garbage Jan collected in the Ghetto. Grossly overqualified, the old keepers looked after the pigs and the animals thrived, producing several hundred piglets during the summer, which provided the household with meat and served Jan’s main objective of using the zoo as an Underground depot.

One spring day, Jan brought home a newborn piglet whose mother was just butchered, thinking that Ryś might like it as a pet, and Antonina found him a bristly scramble of energy, hard to bottle-feed, especially when he started gaining weight. They named him Moryś, and at two and a half weeks, Moryś looked like “a piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh… very clean, pink and smooth, with a marzipan beauty,” she wrote. (In Poland, children usually received little pink marzipan pigs for Easter.)

Moryś 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 Ryś’s bedroom door. When she opened it, Moryś “ran into his room, oinking, and started jostling Ryś’s hand or foot until Ryś woke, stretched out a hand, and scratched Moryś’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.

On rare occasions Moryś risked going downstairs into a stew of smells and voices, a maze of strange human and furniture legs. The clinking of a dinner table being set usually lured him to the top of the staircase, where he parked himself and “blinked his buttery blue eyes with long white eyelashes, looking and listening,” Antonina wrote. If someone called him, he edged down the polished wooden stairs, carefully, hooves slipping now and then, skittered into the dining room, and circled the table, hoping for a handout, though scraps were few.

After dinner each evening, Moryś and Ryś repaired to the garden to gather grass and weeds to feed the rabbits living in the old Pheasant House, which gave Moryś a chance to hunt for tubers and greens. That scene incandesced in Antonina’s memory, the icon of her little boy and his pig playing in the lavender twilight: “Ryś and Moryś on a field of green, which captivated everyone. Watching them, we could forget the war’s tragic events for long moments.” Her son had lost so much childhood, so many pets, including a dog, a hyena pup, a pony, a chimpanzee, and a badger, that Antonina cherished his daily flights with Moryś into the vegetable garden’s vest-pocket Eden.

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? Killers passed them daily on zoo grounds, death shadowed homely and Underground activities alike, and also stalked people at random in the streets. The idea of safety had shrunk to particles—one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heighten the senses. Trusting one’s hunches only seems a gamble if one has time for seem; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks.