The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 12

“HOW CAN THIS BARBARITY BE HAPPENING IN THE TWENTIETH century?!!!!!!” Antonina asked herself, an outcry of disbelief with no fewer than six exclamation points. “Not long ago the world looked on the dark ages with contempt for its brutality, yet here it is again, in full force, a lawless sadism unpolished by all the charms of religion and civilization.”

Sitting at the kitchen table, she prepared small packets of food for friends in the Ghetto, thankful that no one poked through Jan’s clothing or pails as he went about his regular rounds to collect kitchen scraps for the Weimar’s pig farm. No doubt he enjoyed the irony of carrying food from the pig farm into the Ghetto, and if it felt a little off-color giving Jews pork, a taboo food, dietary laws had long since been waived, and everyone was grateful for protein, a scarce gift on either side of the wall.

In the beginning, neither Jews nor Poles absorbed the full tirade of racist laws or believed the grisly rumors about Jew roundups and killings. “As long as we didn’t witness such events themselves, feel it with our own skin,” Antonina later recalled, “we could dismiss them as otherworldly and unheard-of, only cruel gossip, or maybe a sick joke. Even when a Department of Racial Purity opened a detailed census of the city’s Jewish population, it still seemed possible to attribute such madness to that famous German talent for being systematic and well organized,” the wheel-spinning of bureaucrats. However, Germans, Poles, and Jews stood in three separate lines to receive bread, and rationing was calculated down to the last calorie per day, with Germans receiving 2,613 calories, Poles 669 calories, and Jews only 184 calories. In case anyone missed the point, German Governor Frank declared: “I ask nothing of the Jews except that they disappear.”

Verboten! became a familiar new command, yelled by soldiers, or inked large with the wagged finger of an exclamation point on posters and in anti-Semitic newspapers like Der Stürmer. Ignoring those three syllables was punishable by death. Barked out, the word moved from fricative f to plosive b, from thin-lipped disgust to blown venom.

As warnings and humiliations increased day by day, Jews were forbidden restaurants, parks, public toilets, and even city benches. Branded with a blue star of David on a white arm-band, they were barred from railways and trams, and publicly stigmatized, brutalized, denigrated, raped, and murdered. Edicts forbade Jewish musicians from playing or singing music by non-Jewish composers, Jewish lawyers were disbarred, Jewish civil servants fired without warning or pension, Jewish teachers and travel agents dismissed. Jewish-Aryan marriages or sexual relations were illegal, Jews were forbidden to create art or attend cultural events, Jewish doctors were ordered to abandon their practices (except for a few in the Ghetto). Street names that sounded Jewish were rechristened, and Jews with Aryan-sounding first names had to replace them with “Israel” or “Sarah.” Marriage licenses issued to Poles required a “Fitness to marry” certificate. Jews couldn’t hire Aryans as servants. Cows couldn’t be inseminated by Jewish-owned bulls, and Jews weren’t allowed to raise passenger pigeons. A host of children’s books, like The Poison Mushroom, promoted Nazi ideology with anti-Semitic caricatures.

For sport, soldiers hoisted orthodox Jews onto barrels and scissored off their religious beards, or taunted old men and women, sometimes ordering them to dance or be shot. Archival footage shows strangers waltzing together in the street, holding each other awkwardly, faces sour with fear, as Nazi soldiers clapped and laughed. Any Jew passing a German without bowing and doffing his cap merited a savage beating. The Nazis seized all cash and savings, and stole furniture, jewelry, books, pianos, toys, clothing, medical supplies, radios, or anything else of value. Over 100,000 people, yanked from their homes, endured chronic days of physical labor without pay, and Jewish women, as further humiliation, were forced to use their underwear as cleaning rags on floors and in toilets.

Then, on October 12, 1940, the Nazis ordered all of Warsaw’s Jews from their homes and herded them into a district on the north side of town, which lay conveniently between the main railway station, Saxon Garden, and the Gdańsk railroad terminal. Typically, German soldiers would surround a block and give people half an hour to vacate their apartments, leaving everything behind but a few personal effects. Adding the Jews relocated from the countryside, that edict confined 400,000 people to only 5 percent of the city, about fifteen to twenty square blocks, an area about the size of Central Park, where the sheer racket alone, a “constant tense clamor” as one resident described it, frayed sanity.[33] That vortex of 27,000 apartments, where an average of fifteen people shared two and a half small rooms, served the Nazi goal of grinding down morale, enfeebling, humiliating, and softening up resistance.

Jewish Ghettos had flourished in Europe throughout history, and however remote or disdained, they tended to be vital and porous, allowing travelers, merchants, and culture to flow in both directions. The Warsaw Ghetto differed dramatically, as Michael Mazor, a Ghetto survivor, recalls: “In Warsaw the Ghetto was no longer anything but an organized form of death—a ‘little death chest’ (Todeskätschen), as it was called by one of the German sentries posted at its gates… a city which the Germans regarded as a cemetery.”[34] Only the crafty and vigilant survived, and no one ventured from home without first checking the danger forecast. Pedestrians updated one another as they passed, and “mere mention of a threat, the slightest gesture, could send a crowd of several thousand back inside, leaving the street empty and bare.”[35]

But life’s weedy tumult still flowered in the Ghetto, however and wherever it could. Norman Davies gives this snapshot of the early Ghetto’s vibrant features: “For two or three years, it was thronged with passers-by, with rickshaws and with its own trams mounted with a blue star of David. It had cafes and restaurants, at number 40 a ‘Soup Kitchen for Writers,’ and places of amusement. The Fotoplastikon at 27 Leszno Street offered a popular eye on the outside world by showing a series of still pictures of exotic places like Egypt, China, or California. A clown with a red nose stood on the pavement, cajoling people to buy a ticket for 6 groszy. At 2 Leszno Street, the Arts Coffee House laid on a daily cabaret and a stream of concerts featuring singers such as Vera G. or Marysdha A., the ‘Nightingale of the Ghetto,’ and musicians such as Ladislas S. and Arthur G. At 35 Leszno Street, the ‘Femina’ music hall mounted more ambitious productions from a wide Polish repertoire including the ‘Princess of the Czardas’ revue, and the aptly named comedy ‘Love Seeks an Apartment.’ It was all a desperate form of escapism. As someone remarked, ‘Humor is the Ghetto’s only form of defence.’” Many of the Ghetto’s best-known streets translated as visions of paradise, plenty, and adventure: Garden Street, Peacock Street, Cool Street, Wild Street, New Linden Street, Dragon Street, Salt Street, Goose Street, Brave Street, Warm Street, Cordials Street, Pleasant Street.

At first, while the Ghetto remained porous, the Żabińskis’ Jewish friends believed it a temporary lepers’ colony, or that Hitler’s regime would quickly collapse and justice prevail, or that they could weather out the maelstrom, or that the “final solution” meant ejecting Jews from Germany and Poland—anything but annihilation.

Choosing an unknown future over a violent present, most Jews moved as ordered, though some, contrary and beyond herding, opted for a chancy life hiding on the Aryan side of the city. According to Antonina, a bleak topic of conversation among her friends of mixed descent, or married couples one of whom was Jewish, were the racist Nuremberg laws of September 15, 1935, stipulating how much Jewish blood you could have without being tainted. The famous explorer of the Silk Road and Nazi apologist Sven Hedin, who stood beside Hitler on the podium at the 1936 Olympics, was exempt, though his great-grandfather had been a rabbi, something Hitler’s inner circle would surely have known.

Although few people foresaw the racist laws as a matter of life and death, some quickly converted to Christianity and others bought false documents. Afraid the Germans might discover Wanda’s part-Jewish heritage, their friends Adam and Wanda Englert arranged a fake divorce followed by a non-event known as “Wanda’s Disappearance.” But before Wanda vanished, she decided to throw a farewell party for family and close friends at the old armory downtown, and she chose summer solstice for the event.

On this holy eve, the armory was undoubtedly decorated with sprigs of mugwort, a tall plant in the wormwood family with purplish stems, gray-green leaves, and small yellow flowers. The ancient herb was used to break spells and repel male and female witches, especially on June 23, Midsummer’s Eve, a day associated with Saint John (according to legend, when Saint John was beheaded, his head tumbled into a patch of mugwort plants). Superstitious Polish farmers hung branches of the herb under barn eaves to keep witches from milking the cows dry during the night, Warsawian girls wore mugwort garlands in their hair, and housewives tied sprigs of mugwort to doorways and windowsills to dash evil. During occupation by perceived devils, a party held on Midsummer’s Eve couldn’t have been a coincidence.

On June 22, Jan and Antonina set out for the party, planning to cross Kierbedź Bridge, a pleasant stroll or trolley ride in good weather. In old photographs, the bridge’s enclosed metal trusses look like a long row of staples, and its basket-weave stencils the road with small squares of sunlight. Such bridges flute tunelessly when wind pipes through at changing speeds, and vibrate with felt music, a bone-buzzing bass also made by elephants, who speak and hear in subsonic, which zookeepers can feel if they stand where elephants talk.

Jan and Antonina usually took a shortcut through Praski Park, whose urban oasis once spread to seventy-four acres over old Napoleonic fortifications. In 1927, the new zoo absorbed about half of the park, leaving in place as many old trees as possible, so that people arriving by trolley first passed beneath the arbors to find the zoo unfolding with the same species of honey locusts, maple-leaved sycamores, maiden-hairs, and sweet chestnut trees as prologue and story. But on this afternoon, discovering they were out of cigarettes, Jan and Antonina chose a longer route, along Łukasiński Street, which skirted the park, and popped into a little shop full of the sweet smell of strong Polish tobacco. Just as they were leaving and lighting up, a great booming shock wave hurled them against a fence and rocks rained through a cloud of sandy soil. At once the air curdled and turned black, and a second later they heard an airplane engine and saw a thin pink line streaking across the sky. Their lips moved without sound as they staggered to their feet, deafened and confused by the blast. Then, when wolf-howl sirens blew an all-clear, they decided the plane wasn’t part of a wave but a lone bomber trying to destroy Kierbedź Bridge, which remained intact, as did Praski Park. But a spume of black smoke gusted and rose and gusted again from a blasted trolley.

“If we’d taken the shortcut, we might have been on it,” Jan said angrily.

A second fright gripped Antonina as she noticed the time. “But that is the trolley Ryś sometimes takes home from school!”

Sprinting down the street, they ran to the sparking, twitching trolley, tossed from its tracks and lying in front of the Catholic church like a steaming mammoth, its metal mangled and wire umbilicals lax, with fifty or so limp people scattered inside and out. “With tears rolling from my eyes, I looked into the faces of the dead, looking for Ryśio’s face,” Antonina recalled. Searching through smoke and hot debris for their son, and not finding him, they ran to the school, but the children had already left. Next they ran back past the trolley and swelling crowd, through Praski Park, rushing between the cages to the villa, racing up the back steps, bursting into the kitchen, and hunting the whole house, shouting Ryś’s name.

“He’s not here,” Jan said at last, sagging into a chair. After a while, they finally heard him on the back steps.

“Sit down,” Jan said sharply but quietly as he steered Ryś to a chair. “Where did you go, you bad boy? Did you forget that returning home from school at once is your chief responsibility?”

Ryś explained that school had just let out when a bomb hit, and then a worried stranger had herded the children inside his house until the all-clear siren blew.

Needless to say, Antonina and Jan missed Wanda’s party, but not her company, because soon afterward, as planned, she “disappeared” to the zoo, in the guise of Ryś’s non-Jewish tutor.