The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 14

IN THE SUMMER OF 1940, A PHONE CALL, A NOTE, OR A WHISPER might alert the Żabińskis to expect secret “Guests” placed by the Underground. Jews in hiding and in transit, nomads, not settlers, they stopped briefly to rest and refuel en route to unnamed destinations. German-speaking Jews who looked Aryan received false identity papers and sailed smoothly through, and those who couldn’t pass spent years at the zoo, some in the villa and as many as fifty at a time in empty cages. Many Guests, like Wanda Englert, were longtime friends or acquaintances, and Antonina regarded them as one amphibious family. Hiding them posed problems, but who better than zookeepers to devise fitting camouflage?

In the wild, animals inherit clever tricks of blending into their surroundings; for instance, penguins are black on top and white on the bottom so that the patroling skuas will assume they’re a twist of ocean and leopard seals dismiss them as clouds. The best camouflage for people is more people, so the Żabińskis invited a stream of legal visitors—uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends for varying stays—and established a regular unpredictability, a routine of changing faces, physiques, and accents, with Jan’s mother a frequent guest.

“Everybody loved Jan’s mother,” Antonina noted in her memoirs. “She had a kind, graceful nature, and she was very smart, a fast thinker with an excellent memory, very polite and sensitive. She had a big full-bodied laugh and a great sense of humor.” But Antonina did worry about her, because “she’s like a delicate greenhouse flower, and our duty was to protect her from any fear or pain that might damage her spirit or trigger a depression.”

Jan left those intangibles to Antonina, who always handled the “difficult animals” and for whom the chance to amuse, impress, and, ultimately, rescue a parent surely appealed in visceral ways. Jan preferred the role of general, spy, and tactician, especially if it meant bamboozling or humiliating the enemy.

Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer’s family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed “collective responsibility.” Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city’s underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist’s dummies.

The zoo wasn’t always a first stop for Guests, especially ones escaping the Ghetto, who might spend a night or two downtown with Ewa Brzuska, a short, ruddy, squarish woman in her sixties whom people called “Babcia” (Granny). She owned a tiny grocery (sixteen feet by three feet) on Sędziowske Street, which extended out onto the sidewalk where Ewa arranged barrels of sauerkraut and pickles beside baskets of tomatoes and greens. Neighbors crowded to shop and socialize, despite the German military’s car repair depot right across the road. Every day, a group of Jewish men would be escorted from the Ghetto to work on the cars, and Granny would secretly post their letters or keep watch while they spoke with family members. Tall sacks of potatoes stood around for young smugglers from the Ghetto to hide behind. In 1942, her back rooms became a branch office of an Underground cell, and she stored ID cards, spare birth certificates, money, and bread coupons under barrels of pickled cucumbers and sauerkraut, stashed subversive publications in the stockroom, and often hid escaping Jews for a night, some surely bound for the zoo.

Antonina rarely knew when to expect Guests, or where they came from; Jan handled the plotting and liaised with the Underground, and as a result, no one hiding in the villa guessed the full measure of his Underground activities. They didn’t know, for example, what was hidden inside the Nestle or Ovaltine boxes which would appear from time to time on the shelf above a radiator in the kitchen.

Antonina reports Jan saying casually one day: “I put some small springs for my research instruments into this box. Please don’t touch or move it. I may need it at any time.”

No one raised an eyebrow. Jan had always been a collector of small metal findings—screws, washers, and gizmos—though he usually stored them in his workshop. Those who knew him found his hobby quaint, a hardware junkie’s pastime. Not even Antonina realized that he was collecting fuses for making bombs.

When a young researcher from the Zoological Institute arrived with a big barrel of fertilizer, Jan stashed it in the animal hospital next to the villa, and every now and then he’d mention in passing that so-and-so might come to fetch some fertilizer for his garden. Antonina only learned after the war that the barrel actually contained C13F, a water-soluble explosive, and that Jan was the leader of an Underground cell that specialized in sabotaging German trains by jamming explosives into wheel bearings, so that when the train started to move, the powder would ignite. (During one month in 1943, they derailed seventeen trains and damaged one hundred locomotives.) She didn’t know during the war that he also infected some pigs with worms, butchered them, then shaped the poisoned meat into balls which, with the help of an eighteen-year-old working in a German army canteen, he slipped into the soldiers’ sandwiches.

He also helped to build bunkers, vital underground dens. In wartime Poland, the word bunker didn’t conjure up the simple trench it might today, but a damp underground shelter with camouflaged shafts and air vents, usually located at the edge of a garden or public park. Emanuel Ringelblum’s bunker at 81 Grójecka Street, lying under a market gardener’s greenhouse, ran ninety-two feet square and housed thirty-eight people on fourteen crowded beds. One of his bunker-mates, Orna Jagur, who, unlike Ringelblum, left the bunker before it was discovered in 1944, recalls the moment she first inhaled bunker life:

That was considered a well-built bunker tended by a caring family who provided decent food, an unusually good hideout.

By comparison, life at the zoo seemed roomy and bucolic, if zany, and people in the Underground referred to it by cryptonym, as “The House Under a Crazy Star,” more an oversized curiosity cabinet than a villa, where the lucky escaped notice among a hodgepodge of eccentric people and animals. Urban visitors relished the futuristic villa with the large park embracing it, offering forty or so acres of green vistas where they could forget the war and pretend to be vacationing in the country. Since paradise only exists as a comparison, Guests in flight from the Ghetto found villa life a small Eden, complete with garden, animals, and motherly bread-maker (the etymological origin of the word paradise).

After dark, by official order, the Żabińskis hung black paper over the windows, but by day the two-story, supposedly one-family, villa pulsed like a beehive behind glass. With all the legal residents on board—housekeeper, nanny, teacher, in-laws, friends, and pets—mingling silhouettes and weird noises seemed normal. Startlingly visible, the villa shone like a display box, with a few low shrubs growing around it, some mature trees, and its signature tall windows. Jan staged things that way on purpose, with full exposure and lots of human traffic, abiding by the axiom more public, less suspicious.

Why so much glass? The villa showcased the International Style of architecture, a mode that ignored the history, culture, geology, or climate surrounding a house. Instead, with a bow to the machine age and Futurism, it strove for radical simplicity, without ornamental features, in sleek buildings constructed from glass, steel, and concrete. Architectural leaders—Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, and Philip Johnson—hoped to reflect honesty, directness, and integrity by creating open-faced buildings with nothing to hide. The movement’s slogans said it all: “ornament is crime,” “form follows function,” “machines for living.” At odds with Nazi aesthetics (which worshipped classical architecture), building and living in a modernist villa was itself an affront to National Socialism, and Jan and Antonina made the most of all the style implied: transparency, honesty, simplicity.

In that flux, where people appeared and disappeared, unnamed and unexpected, it proved hard to spot the Guests, even harder to tell which people were not there, and when. However this crypto-innocence meant living on the edge and silently glossing every noise, tracking every shadow. Did a sound fit into the ever-changing concordance of villa life? Inevitably, a vital paranoia reigned in the house as the only sane response to perpetual danger, while its inhabitants mastered the martial arts of stealth: tiptoe, freeze, camouflage, distract, pantomime. Some villa Guests hid while others hovered, emerging only after dark to roam the house at liberty.

So many people also meant added chores for Antonina, who had a large family to oversee; livestock, poultry, and rabbits to manage; a busy garden with tomatoes and pole beans to stake; bread to bake daily; preserves, pickled vegetables, and compotes to jar.

Poles were growing used to occupation’s unexpected frights, finding the pulse calm one moment and sprinting the next as war reset their metabolism, especially the resting level of attention. Each morning, they awoke in darkness, not knowing the day’s fate, maybe sorrowful, maybe ending in arrest. Would she be one of those people, Antonina wondered, who vanished because they happened to be on a tram or in a church when Germans chose it at random, sealed off the exits, and killed everyone inside as revenge for some real or imaginary insult?

Household chores, however humdrum and repetitious, lulled with motions familiar, harmless, and automatic. Constant vigilance had become exhausting, the senses never quite relaxed, the brain’s watchmen kept patrolling the wharves of possibility, peering into shadows, listening for danger, until the mind became its own penitent and prisoner. In a country under a death sentence, with seasonal cues like morning light or drifting constellations hidden behind shutters, time changed shape, lost some of its elasticity, and Antonina wrote that her days grew even more ephemeral and “brittle, like soap bubbles breaking.”

Soon Finland and Romania sided with Germany, and Yugoslavia and Greece surrendered. Germany’s attack on its former ally, the Soviet Union, triggered rounds of rumors and forecasts, and Antonina found the Battle of Leningrad especially depressing, since she’d hoped the war might be winding down, not flaming anew. At times, she heard that Berlin had been bombarded, that a Carpathian brigade had overwhelmed the Germans, that the German army had surrendered, but for the most part she and Jan monitored clashes in the secret dailies, weeklies, and news sheets printed throughout the war to keep partisans informed. The editors also sent copies to the Gestapo HQ “just to facilitate your research, [and] to let you know what we think of you….”[36]

German soldiers often came to shoot the flocks of crows that filled the sky like ash before settling in trees. When the soldiers left, Antonina stole out and gathered up the corpses, cleaned and cooked them, making a pâte diners assumed to be pheasant, a Polish delicacy. Once, when ladies praised the rich preserves, Antonina laughed to herself: “Why spoil their appetite with mere details of zoological naming?”

The villa’s emotional climate ran to extremes, waves of relaxation followed by a froth of anxiety as people juggled the pastoral pleasantries of one moment with the depressing news of the next. When life sparkled with conversation and piano music, Antonina dodged the war for a spell and even felt delight, especially on foggy mornings when the downtown vanished and she could fancy herself in another land or era. For that, Antonina told her diary, she was grateful, since life in the lampshade store on Kapucyńska Street had held a steady drizzle of sadness.

Members of the Underground frequently passed through, and sometimes twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds from the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Prominent before the war, youth groups were outlawed during Nazi occupation, but under the aegis of the Home Army they aided the Resistance as soldiers, couriers, social workers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, and saboteurs. Younger scouts enacted minor sabotage like scrawling “Poland will win!” or “Hitler is a Dogcatcher!” (a play on his name) on the walls, a shootable offense, and they became secret letter carriers, while older ones went as far as assassinating Nazi officials and rescuing prisoners from the Gestapo. All helped around the villa by splitting wood, hauling coal, and keeping a fire in the furnace. Some delivered the garden’s potatoes and other vegetables to Underground hideouts, using bicycle rickshaws, a popular vehicle during occupation when taxicabs disappeared and all the cars belonged to Germans.

Inevitably, Ryś overheard scouts whispering alluring secrets and found it frustrating not to join in, when everyone else had exciting, cloak-and-dagger jobs to do. Almost from birth, he’d been schooled in the ambient dangers and told they were real, not pretend or story. Warned not to breathe a word of the Guests to anyone, ever, no matter whom, he knew that if he slipped up, he, his parents, and everyone in the house would be murdered. What a heavy burden for a small child! Full of intrigue and exciting as his world became, with a hodgepodge of eccentric people and dramas, he dared not tell a soul. Small wonder he grew more anxious and worried each day, a fate Antonina lamented in her memoirs, but what could she do when all the adults were anxious and worried, too? Inevitably, Ryś became his own worst nightmare. If a Guest’s name or an Underground secret tumbled out while playing, his mother and father would be shot, and even if he survived, he’d be all alone, and it would be his fault. Since he couldn’t trust himself, avoiding strangers, especially other children, made the most sense. Antonina noted that he didn’t even try to make friends at school, but hurried home instead to play with Moryś the pig, whom he could talk with as much as he pleased, and who would never betray him.

Moryś liked to play what they called his “scaredy game,” in which he pretended to be scared by some little sound—Ryś closing a book or moving something on a table—and bolted away, hooves skidding on the wooden floor. A few seconds later he would grunt happily next to Ryś’s chair, ready for another pretend fright and escape.

Much as Antonina might have wished a normal childhood for Ryś, events had already rusted that possibility and daily life kept corroding. One evening, German soldiers noticed Ryś and Moryś playing in the garden and strolled over to investigate; not fearing humans, Moryś trotted right up to them for a snort and a scratch. Then, as Ryś watched in horror, they dragged Moryś off squealing to be butchered. Shattered, Ryś cried inconsolably for days, and for months he refused to enter the garden, even to pick greens for the rabbits, chickens, and turkeys. In time, he risked the garden world again, but never with the same jubilant nonchalance.