The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 15

¹⁹⁴¹

THE PIG FARM SURVIVED ONLY UNTIL MIDWINTER, BECAUSE even in the centrally heated zoo buildings that once housed elephants and hippopotamuses, animals still needed warm bedding. Perversely, it seemed, the “director of slaughterhouses,” who funded the zoo, met amiably with Jan and listened to his appeals, but denied him the money to purchase straw.

“This makes no sense at all,” he told Antonina afterward. “I cannot believe his idiocy!” Antonina was surprised, because with food scarce, pigs became trotting gold, and how much did straw cost?

“I tried everything I could think of to change his mind,” Jan told her. “I don’t get it. He has always been our friend.”

Antonina declared: “He’s a lazy, stubborn fool!”

As the nights crackled with cold and frost feathered the windowpanes, winds knifed through the rinds of wooden buildings and slit life from the piglets. Then an epidemic of dysentery followed, killing much of the remaining herd, and the director of slaughterhouses shut down the pig farm. Infuriating in principle, and depriving the villa of meat, this also thwarted Jan’s trips to the Ghetto, supposedly for scraps. Months passed before he learned the truth: in cahoots with another low-level official, the director of slaughterhouses had conspired to rent the zoo to a German herbal plant company.

One day in March, a gang of workmen arrived at the zoo with saws and axes and began dismembering trees, hacking down flower beds, decorative shrubs, and cherished rosebushes at the entrance gate. The Żabińskis tried screaming, pleading, bribing, threatening, but it was no use. Apparently Nazi orders demanded the uprooting of the zoo, flower and weed alike, because after all, these were only Slav plants, best used as fertilizer for healthy German botanicals. Immigrants usually do try to re-create some of their homeland (especially the cuisine) when they resettle, however this Lebensraum didn’t only apply to people, Antonina realized, but also to German animals and plants, and through eugenics the Nazis meant to erase Poland’s genes from the planet, rip out its roots, crush its hips and tubers, replace its seeds with their own, just as she had feared a year earlier after Warsaw’s surrender. Perhaps they felt that superior soldiers needed superior food, which Nazi biology argued could grow only from “pure” seeds. If Nazism hungered for a private mythology, its own botany and biology, in which plants and animals displayed an ancient lineage undiluted by Asiatic or Mideastern blood, that meant starting clean, replacing thousands of Polish farmers and so-called Polish or Jewish crops and livestock with their German equivalents.

At the weekend, by chance, Danglu Leist, the German president of Warsaw[37] and a devotee of zoos, arrived with his wife and daughter, asking for the old zoo director to give them a tour of the grounds and help them imagine the zoo before the war. As Jan strolled with them he compared the Warsaw Zoo’s microclimates to those of zoos in Berlin, Monaheim, Hamburg, Hagenbeck, and other cities, much to Leist’s pleasure. Then Jan led his guests to the destroyed rose garden near the main gate where large beautiful bushes, carelessly dug up, lay broken-caned in a pile as casualties of war. Leist’s wife and daughter decried the waste of beauty, and that fueled Leist’s anger.

“What is this?” he demanded.

“It’s not my doing,” Jan said calmly, with just the right mix of anguish and outrage. He told them about the ruined pig farm and the German herb company renting the zoo from the director of slaughterhouses.

“How could you let that happen?!” Leist raged at Jan.

“What a horrible pity,” his wife lamented. “I love roses so much!”

“Nobody asked me.” Jan quietly apologized to Leist’s wife, implying that, since it wasn’t his fault, it must be her husband’s feckless doings.

She smacked Leist with a hard stare, and he protested angrily: “I didn’t know anything about it!”

Before leaving the zoo, he ordered Jan to appear in his office at 10 A.M. the next morning to meet with Warsaw’s Polish vice president, Julian Kulski, who would be forced to explain the scandal. When the three men gathered the following day, it transpired that Kulski knew nothing about the scheme, and President Leist promptly canceled the rental agreement, promised to punish the wrongdoers, and asked Kulski for advice on how best to use the zoo without destroying it. Unlike Leist, Jan knew of Kulski’s link to the Underground, and as Kulski proposed a public vegetable garden with individual plots, Jan smiled, impressed by a scheme that served the double purpose of cheaply feeding locals and portraying the Nazis as compassionate rulers. Small plots wouldn’t destroy the heart of the zoo, but would increase Kulski’s influence. Leist approved, and once more Jan changed his career—from zoo director to ruler of a pig farm to magistrate of garden plots. The job bound Jan to the Warsaw Parks and Gardens Department, and that allowed him a new pass into the Ghetto, this time to inspect its flora and gardens. In truth, precious little vegetation grew in the Ghetto, only a few trees by the church on Leszno Street, and certainly no parks or gardens, but he grabbed any excuse to visit friends “to keep up their spirits and smuggle in food and news.”[38]

Early on, Antonina had sometimes joined Jan to visit the famous entomologist Dr. Szymon Tenenbaum, his dentist wife Lonia, and their daughter Irena. As boys, Jan and Szymon attended the same school and became friends who loved crawling around in ditches and peering under rocks, Szymon a bug zealot even then. The scarab-like beetle became his sun god, speciality, and mania. As an adult, he started traveling the world and collecting in his spare time, and by publishing a five-volume study of the beetles of the Balearic Islands, he joined the ranks of leading entomologists. During the school year, he served as principal of a Jewish high school, but he collected many rare specimens in Białowieża during the summer, when bugs thronged and any hollow log might hide a tiny Pompeii. Jan, too, liked beetles, and once conducted a large cockroach study of his own.

Even in the Ghetto, Szymon continued to write articles and collect insects, pinning his quarry in sap-brown wooden display boxes with glass fronts. But when Jews were first ordered into the Ghetto, Szymon worried how to protect his large, valuable collection and asked Jan if he’d hide it in the villa. Luckily, in 1939 when the SS raided the zoo and stole over two hundred valuable books, many of the microscopes, and other equipment, they somehow overlooked Tenenbaum’s collection of half a million specimens.

The Żabińskis and Tenenbaums became closer friends during the war, as the catastrophe of everyday life drew them tightly together. War didn’t only sunder people, Antonina mused in her memoirs, it could also intensify friendships and spark romances; every handshake opened a door or steered fate. By chance, because of this friendship with the Tenenbaums, they met a man who, unknowingly, helped solidify Jan’s link with the Ghetto.

One Sunday morning during the summer of 1941, Antonina watched a limousine stop in front of the villa and a heavyset German civilian emerge. Before he could ring the doorbell, she ran to the piano in the living room and started pounding out the loud, skipping chords of Jacques Offenbach’s “Go, go, go to Crete!” from La Belle Helène, as the signal for Guests to slip into their hiding places and be silent. Antonina’s choice of composer says much about her personality and the atmosphere in the villa.

A German-French Jew, Jacques Hoffmann was the seventh child of a cantor, Isaac Judah Eberst, who, for some reason, decided one day to assume the name of his birthplace, Offenbach. Isaac had six daughters and two sons, and music animated the whole family’s life, with Jacques becoming a cello virtuoso and composer who played in cafes and fashionable salons. Fun-loving and satiric, Jacques couldn’t resist a prank, personally or musically, and chafing authority was his favorite pastime—he was so often fined for shenanigans at the solemn Paris Conservatory that some weeks he didn’t receive any salary at all. He loved composing popular dances, including a waltz based on a synagogue melody, which scandalized his father. In 1855, he opened his own musical theater “because of the continued impossibility of getting my work produced by anybody else,” he said wryly, adding that “the idea of really gay, cheerful, witty music—in short, the idea of music with life in it—was gradually being forgotten.”

He wrote enormously popular farces, satires, and operettas which captivated the elite and were sung in the streets of Paris, saucy and rollicking music that mocked pretensions, authority, and the idealizing of antiquity. And he cut a colorful figure himself in pince-nez, side-whiskers, and flamboyant clothes. Part of the reason his music besotted so many is that, as music critic Milton Cross observes, it came during “a period of political repression, censorship, and infringement on personal liberties.”[39] As “the secret police penetrated into the private lives of citizens… the theater went in for gaiety, levity, tongue-in-cheek mockery.”

Bubbling with farce and beautiful melodies, La Belle Helène is a comic opera full of wit and vivacity that tells the tale of beautiful Helen, whose boring husband Menelaus wages war with the Trojans to avenge Helen’s abduction. The drama caricatures the rulers, bent on war, questions morality, and celebrates the love of Helen and Paris, who want desperately to escape to a better world. Act I ends with the Pythian Oracle telling Menelaus he must go to Greece, and then the chorus, Helen, Paris, and most of the cast shooing him away in a madcap, galloping “Go, go, go to Crete!” Its message is subversive, ridiculing the overlords and championing peace and love—the perfect signal for the villa’s Helens and Parises. Even better, it was by a Jewish composer at a time when playing Jewish music was a punishable offense.

Jan answered the door.

“Does the ex-director of the zoo live here?” a stranger asked.

Moments later, the man entered the house.

“My name is Ziegler,” he said, and introduced himself as director of the Warsaw Ghetto’s Labor Bureau, the office which, in theory, found work for the unemployed inside and outside the Ghetto, but in practice organized workgangs, deporting the most skillful to serve in armaments factories like the Krupps steelworks in Essen, but did little to help the vast numbers of hungry, semi-employed, often ill workers created by Nazi rule.[40]

“I am hoping to see the zoo’s remarkable insect collection, the one donated by Dr. Szymon Tenenbaum,” Ziegler said. Hearing Antonina’s buoyant piano-playing, he smiled broadly and added: “What a cheerful atmosphere!”

Jan led him into the living room. “Yes, our home is very musical,” Jan said. “We like Offenbach very much.”

Grudgingly, it seemed, Ziegler conceded, “Oh, well, Offenbach was a shallow composer. But one has to admit that, on the whole, Jews are a talented people.”

Jan and Antonina exchanged anxious glances. How did Ziegler know about the insect collection? Jan later recalled thinking: “Okay, I guess this is it, doomsday.”

Seeing their confusion, Ziegler said, “You are surprised. Let me explain. I was authorized by Dr. Tenenbaum to view his insect collection, which apparently you are keeping for him in your house.”

Jan and Antonina listened warily. Diagnosing danger had become a craft like defusing live bombs—one tremble of the voice, one error in judgment, and the world would explode. What was Ziegler planning? If he wanted, he could just take the insect collection, no one would stop him, so it was pointless to lie about keeping it for Szymon. They knew they had to answer fast to avoid arousing suspicion.

“Oh, yes,” Jan said with achieved casualness, “Dr. Tenenbaum left his collection with us before he moved into the Ghetto. Our building is dry, you see, we have central heating; whereas his collection could so easily be damaged in a wet, cold room.”

Ziegler shook his head knowingly. “Yes, I agree,” he said, adding that he too was an entomologist, an amateur one, who found insects endlessly fascinating. That was how he came to know Dr. Tenenbaum in the first place; but, as it happened, Lonia Tenenbaum was also his dentist.

“I see Szymon Tenenbaum often,” he continued with relish. “Sometimes we take my car and drive to the outskirts of Warsaw, where he finds insects in the culverts and ditches. He’s an excellent scientist.”

They showed Ziegler to the cellar of the administration building, where shallow rectangular boxes stood upright on the shelves like a matching set of old books, each one bound in varnished brown wood with dovetailed joints, glass covers, small metal latches, and a simple number on each spine instead of a title.

Ziegler pulled one box after another from the shelves and held them up to the light, where they offered a panorama of Earth’s coleoptera: gemlike iridescent green beetles collected in Palestine; metallic blue tiger beetles with tufted legs; red-and-green Neptunides beetles from Uganda that cast a sheen like satin ribbon; slender leopard-spotted beetles from Hungary; Pyrophorus noctilucus, a little brown beetle more luminous than a firefly, which glows so brightly that South American natives trap several in a lantern to light a hut or tie a few to their ankles to shine their path at night; featherwings, the smallest known beetles, with wings mere stalks edged by tiny hairs; olive-green male Hercules beetles eight inches long, from Amazonia (where natives wear them as necklaces), each sporting such medieval jousting weapons as a giant sword-shaped horn that curves forward overhead and a smaller notched horn curving upward to meet it; female Hercules beetles, also giant, but hornless with beaded wing cases carpeted with red hairs; Egyptian dung beetles like those incised on death-chamber stones; heavily antlered stag beetles; beetles with long looping antennae that bounce overhead like tram wires or lariats; dimple-shelled, cyanide-blue palmetto beetles, which oil sixty thousand short yellow bristles on the soles of their feet to cling impossibly tight to waxy leaves; palmetto beetle larvae wearing straw hats thatched from their own feces, extruded strand by golden strand from an anal turret; net-winged beetles from Arizona with orange-brown wing covers tipped in black, whose hollow wing veins form lacy ridges and cross-ridges filled with noxious blood it dribbles out to repel attackers; hard-to-catch oval whirligig beetles that stride on surface tension near creek banks and ooze a nasty white sap; shiny brown meloid beetles, known whole as “blister beetles” and powdered as “Spanish fly,” brimming with cantharidin, a toxin that in small doses spurs erection and in only slightly larger doses kills (Lucretius is said to have died from cantharidin poison); brown Mexican bean beetles that ooze alkaloid blood from their knee joints to deter attackers; beetles with antennae topped by small combs, knobs, brushes, hooves, fringes, or honey dippers; beetles with faces like toothy Halloween pumpkins; fluorescent beetles the blue of Delft miniatures.

Every large beetle monopolized one ball-tipped pin, but smaller beetles floated above one another, sometimes three to a pin. A white flag at the base of each pin told lineage in blue ink graced by swirling capitals, seraph f’s and d’s, written small but legibly in a steady, meticulous hand. Clearly, collecting the insects fed only part of Tenenbaum’s absorption; he also cherished hours wielding microscope, pen, labels, specimens, tweezers, and display boxes crafted for museum drawers and drawing room walls, like those of his contemporary, Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell. How long had Tenenbaum curved over the minute piety of delicately arranging the beetles’ legs, antennae, and mouth parts to advantage? Like Lutz Heck, Tenenbaum went on safaris, returning with beetles mounted like deer heads under glass, but more trophies could be hung on the walls of his lap-sized rooms than in any lodge or zoological museum. The sheer time it took to catalogue, gas, prepare, and pin them humbles the mind.

In one glass aerodrome sat row upon row of bombardier beetles, which can zap an attacker with a jet of scalding chemicals fired from a gun turret at the tip of its abdomen. Harmless when stored separately, the hypergolic chemicals combine in a special gland to concoct a potion volatile as nerve gas. A master of defense and weaponry, the bombardier swivels its gun turret, aims straight at a foe, and fires a 26-mile-per-hour blast of searing irritants—not in a continuous stream, but as a salvo of minute explosions. Thanks to Charles Darwin’s misfortune, Tenenbaum knew the bombardier squirts a burning fluid (Darwin was foolish enough to hold one in his mouth while picking up two other bugs). But its secret chem lab was discovered only long after the war by Thomas Eisner, son of a chemist father (whom Hitler had ordered to extract gold from seawater), and a Jewish mother who painted expressionist canvases. The family fled to Spain, Uruguay, and then the United States, where Thomas became an entomologist and discovered that the bombardier’s pulsed jet was oddly similar to the propulsion system Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger created for 29,000 German V-1 buzz bombs at Peenemünde. Bombardier beetles fire quietly, but the pulse jets of the V-1, flying at about 3,000 feet, buzzed loudly enough to terrify city dwellers as they raced overhead at 350 miles per hour. Only the pause of the telltale buzz spelled death, because when a rocket reached its target, the engine suddenly quit, and in the following suspenseful silence it plummeted to earth with a 1,870-pound warhead. The British nicknamed them “doodle-bugs,” coming full circle to the weaponry of bombardier beetles.

The wonder on Ziegler’s face as he peered into one sense-stealing box after another erased any doubts Antonina had about his motives, because “when he saw the beautiful beetles and butterflies, he forgot all about the world.”[41] Moving from row to row, fondling individual specimens with his eyes, reviewing armed and armored legions, he stood spellbound.

“Wunderbar! Wunderbar!” he kept whispering to himself. “What a collection! So much work went into it!”

At last he returned to the present, the Żabińskis, his real business. His face flushed and he looked uncomfortable as he said:

“Now… the doctor asks if you’ll visit him. Possibly I can help, but…”

Ziegler’s words trailed into a dangerous and inviting silence. Though he didn’t risk finishing the sentence, Antonina and Jan both knew what he meant, something too delicate to propose. Jan quickly replied how immensely convenient it would be if he could ride with Ziegler to the Ghetto and see Dr. Tenenbaum.

“I need to consult with Tenenbaum right away,” he explained in a professional tone, “to inquire how best to prevent the insect cases from molding.”

Then, to douse any suspicion, Jan showed Ziegler his official Parks Department pass into the Ghetto, implying that the favor he asked was merely for a ride in Ziegler’s limousine, nothing illegal. Still charmed by the exquisite collection he’d viewed, and determined it survive for posterity, Ziegler agreed, and off they drove.

Antonina knew Jan wanted to ride with Ziegler because most Ghetto gates were heavily guarded by German sentry on the outside and Jewish police on the inside. Occasionally the gates opened to allow someone through on official business, but passes were prized and hard come by, usually requiring connections and bribery. By chance, the office building at the corner of Leszno and ?

Zelazna Streets, which housed the Labor Bureau where Ziegler worked, formed part of the infamous Ghetto wall.

Topped with crushed glass or barbed wire and built by unpaid Jewish labor, the ten miles of wall rose to about twenty feet in places and zigzagged, closing off some streets, bisecting others lengthwise, hitting random dead ends. “The creation, existence, and destruction of the Ghetto involved a perverse civic planning,” writes Philip Boehm in Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto,

The outside world could be glimpsed through cracks in the walls, beyond which children played and housewives strolled home laden with provisions. Watching keyhole life thriving beyond the Ghetto became torture, and in an inspired twist, Warsaw’s Uprising Museum (opened in 2005) includes a brick wall with reverse views: holes through which visitors can glimpse daily life inside the Ghetto, thanks to archival films.

At first there were twenty-two gates, then thirteen, and finally only four—all corral style and menacing, in stark contrast to Warsaw’s delicately ornate wrought-iron gates. Bridges crossed Aryan streets instead of water. Some notorious soldiers patrolled the boundaries of the Ghetto, hunting children who dared wedge through holes in the masonry to beg or buy food on the Aryan side. Because only children were small enough to squeeze through, they became a tribe of daring smugglers and traders who risked death daily as their families’ breadwinners. Jack Klajman, a tough Ghetto child who survived the war by hustling and smuggling, recalls a vicious German major the children nicknamed Frankenstein:

As quickly as children gouged holes in the wall, the holes were patched, then new ones dug. On rare occasions a child smuggler stole out through a gate by hiding among the legs of a labor crew, or a priest. The Ghetto walls sealed one church inside, All Saints, whose Father Godlewski not only slipped real birth certificates of deceased parishioners to the Underground, but would sometimes smuggle a child out under his long robes.

Avenues of escape did exist for the brave with friends on the other side and money for lodging and bribes, but an outside host or guardian like the Żabińskis was essential, because one needed a hideout, food, a raft of false documents, and, depending on if one lived “on the surface” or “under the surface,” different webs of agreed-upon stories. If one lived on the surface and was stopped by police, even with false documents one might be asked for the names of neighbors, family, friends, who would then be telephoned or interviewed.

Five tram lines crossed the Ghetto, pausing at a gate on either side, but when they slowed for sharp curves, people could jump off or toss bags to passengers. The conductor and Polish policeman on board both had to be bribed—the going rate was two zlotys—and one prayed that Polish passengers would stay mum. In the far corners of the Jewish cemetery, located inside the Ghetto, smugglers sometimes scaled the fence and climbed into one of two adjacent Christian cemeteries. Some people volunteered for the work gangs that left and returned to the Ghetto each day, and then bribed a gatekeeper to miscount the number of workers. Many cooperative German and Polish policemen guarded the Ghetto gates, eager for bribes, and some helped for free from sheer decency.

Beneath the Ghetto existed a literal underground—shelters and passageways, some with toilets and electricity—where people had crafted intersecting routes between and under the buildings. These led to other avenues of escape, such as slipping through a chiseled hole in the brick wall, or wading through sewers whose labyrinths ultimately led to manhole covers on the Aryan side (though sewers only reached three or four feet high and bred noxious fumes). Some people escaped by clinging to the underside of horse-drawn garbage carts that regularly visited the Ghetto and whose drivers often smuggled in food or left behind an old horse. Those who had the money could disappear in a private ambulance or in a hearse carrying supposed converts to Christian cemeteries, provided gatekeepers were bribed not to search delivery trucks and wagons. Each escapee required at least half a dozen documents and changed houses 7.5 times, on average, so it’s not surprising that between 1942 and 1943 the Underground forged fifty thousand documents.

Because the wall meandered, the front of Ziegler’s building was accessible from the Aryan side of the city while its seldom-used back door opened onto the Ghetto. In the next building, victims of typhus were quarantined, and across the street stood a somber three-story brick school used as a children’s hospital. Unlike other gates, this one wasn’t policed by Wehrmacht, Gestapo, or even Polish policemen, only a doorman charged with opening the gate for clerks; and so it promised Jan a rare, lightly guarded way in and out. But this wasn’t the only building with one door on the Aryan side and one on the Ghetto side. A convenient crossroads for Jews and Poles to meet, for instance, was the District Court building on Leszno Street, whose rear door opened onto a narrow passageway leading to Mirowski Place on the Aryan side. People mingled and whispered in its corridors, traded in jewels, met friends, smuggled food, and relayed messages, while ostensibly attending court proceedings. Bribed guards and policemen looked aside as some Jews escaped, especially children, right up until the rezoning of August 1942, which finally declared the courthouse outside the Ghetto limits.

There was also a pharmacy on Długa Street with entrances on both sides of the Ghetto wall, where an obliging “pharmacist would allow anyone through who could state a good reason,” and several municipal buildings where, for a few zlotys, guards sometimes allowed people to escape.

As their limousine arrived at Leszno 80, the Labor Bureau, the driver honked the horn, a guard swung open the gate, the car entered the courtyard, and they climbed out. This humdrum building contained a lifesaving office because only Jews with a labor card allowing them to work in Wehrmacht factories in the Ghetto avoided deportation.

Lingering beside the front door, Jan thanked Ziegler elaborately in a loud voice, and, though surprised by his sudden formality, Ziegler politely waited for Jan to finish, while the doorkeeper eyed them intently. Jan stretched out the scene, talking mainly in German sprinkled with Polish words, ultimately asking the by-now-impatient Ziegler about using this entrance in the future if he had any trouble with the insect collection and needed to consult about it. Ziegler told the guard to let Jan enter whenever he wished. After that, both men went in and Ziegler showed Jan the way to his upstairs office, and, while giving him a tour of the building, pointed out another staircase that led to the Ghetto door. Instead of heading straight to the Ghetto to visit Tenenbaum, Jan thought it best to spend a little time schmoozing in the dusty offices and narrow hallways of the Labor Bureau, where he made a point of saying hello to as many people as possible. Then he went back downstairs and, in a commanding voice, asked the guard to open the front gate. Drawing attention to himself as a loud, pompous, self-important official would make an impression, he reasoned, and he wanted the guard to remember him.

Two days later Jan returned, using the same boorish voice to demand the gate open for him, and the guard obliged with a welcoming gesture. This time, Jan went to the rear staircase, left the building through the Ghetto door, and visited several friends, including Tenenbaum, whom he told of the curious events involving Ziegler.

Tenenbaum explained that Ziegler had byzantine dental problems and was Dr. Lonia’s continual patient; not only had Ziegler found a superb dentist in her, but all of his complex costly treatments were gratis. (Either she had no choice in the matter or she offered free treatments to gain his goodwill.) They agreed to exploit Ziegler’s passion for entomology as long as possible, and discussed Underground matters. Tenenbaum now served as principal of the secret Jewish high school, and though Jan offered to smuggle him out, Tenenbaum refused, believing that he and his family stood a better chance of survival inside the Ghetto.

So Jan befriended Ziegler, visited him at his office, and occasionally went with him into the Ghetto to visit Tenenbaum and talk about insects. After a while, he became known as Ziegler’s confederate, someone well in with the Labor Bureau head, which smoothed the path for him through the gate, and he often returned by himself to sneak in food to various friends. Occasionally he gave the gatekeeper small tips, as was customary, but not too much nor too often to arouse suspicion.

At last the day seemed right to use the gate for the purpose Jan had had in mind from the start—this time an elegantly dressed and well-coached man accompanied him. As usual, Jan asked the guard to open the gate, and he and his “colleague” walked to freedom.

Emboldened by that success, Jan helped five others escape before the guard grew suspicious. According to Antonina, the guard said to Jan:

“I know you, but who is this other man?”

Jan feigned insult, and “with thunder in his eyes,” yelled: “I told you that this man is with me!”

The intimidated guard only managed in a weak voice:

“I know that you can come and go whenever you want, but I don’t know this person.”

Danger clung to every nuance. One sign of guilt, one wrong word, too much bullying, and the guard might guess more than ego was at stake, closing a precious canal between the Ghetto and the Aryan city. Quickly reaching into his pocket, Jan casually said to the doorkeeper:

“Oh, this thing. This man has a permit, of course.”

And with that he revealed his own Parks Department pass to the Ghetto, a yellow permit given only to German citizens, ethnic Germans, and non-Jewish Poles. Since Jan’s bona fides weren’t in question, he didn’t need to produce two cards. The surprised guard fell silent in embarrassment. Then Jan shook the guard’s hand good-naturedly, smiled, and said solemnly: “Don’t worry, I never break the law.”

From then on, Jan had no problem escorting Aryan-looking Jews to freedom, but unfortunately, the guard didn’t pose the only threat. Any clerk from the Labor Bureau might chance by when Jan and a so-called colleague passed and give them away. Sneaking fugitives past the German troops stationed on zoo grounds created another problem, but the Żabińskis devised two schemes that worked throughout the war—hiding Guests either in the hollows of the villa or in the old animal cages, sheds, and enclosures.

Blending into the kitchen’s glossy white woodwork, a door with a lever handle led downstairs to a long basement of rudimentary rooms. At the far end of one, Jan built an emergency exit in 1939—a ten-foot corridor tunneling directly to the Pheasant House (an aviary with a small central building) that adjoined the kitchen garden—which became an entryway for those sheltering in the villa and a handy route for delivering meals. Jan installed running water and a toilet in the basement, and pipes from the upstairs furnace kept the basement relatively warm. Sounds traveled easily between floorboards, so although the Guests heard voices from above, they lived in whispers.

Another tunnel, this one crouchably low and enclosed by rusty iron ribs, led into the Lions House, and some Guests hid in the attached shed, even though it lay within shouting distance of the German armaments warehouse. Looking like part of a whale skeleton, the tunnel used to protect handlers squiring big cats to and from their cages.

Ziegler visited the zoo several more times to behold the remarkable museum of insects and socialize with the Żabińskis.

Sometimes he even brought Tenenbaum along with him, on the pretext that the collection occasionally needed direct supervision from its collector, and then Tenenbaum spent hours in his own private paradise, on his knees in the garden, collecting more insects.

Ziegler appeared at the zoo one day with the Tenenbaums’ golden dachshund, Żarka, tucked under his arm.

“Poor dog,” he said. “She would have a much better life here in the zoo.”

“Of course, she’s welcome to stay,” Antonina offered.

Dipping a hand into his pocket, Ziegler produced little pieces of sausage for Żarka, then set her down and left, though Żarka ran after him and scratched at the door, finally lying down beside it in the lingering scent of the last human she knew.

In the following days, Antonina often found her there, waiting for her family to reappear and whisk her back to a tournament of familiar shapes and scents. This hurly-burly villa had too many rooms for Żarka, Antonina decided, dark corners, steps, mazes, bustle; despite short curvy legs, Żarka kept pacing, unable to settle, nosing around through a forest of furniture and strangers. After a while, she settled into villa life, but always startled easily. If someone’s footsteps or a banging door broke the silence, the dachshund’s shiny skin would shake nervously all along its thin body, as if trying to creep away.

When winter charged in with skyscraper snows and fewer smells for dogs to read like newsprint, Ziegler visited once more. Still rosy-cheeked and roly-poly, wearing the same old glasses, he greeted Żarka fondly and she remembered him at once, jumping onto his lap and nosing around in his pockets for ham or sausage. This time Ziegler had no treats for Żarka, and he didn’t play with her either, just patted her absent-mindedly.

“Tenenbaum died,” he said sadly. “Imagine, I was just talking with him two days ago. He told me so many interesting stories…. Yesterday he had internal bleeding… and that was the end. An ulcer broke in his stomach…. Did you know he was very ill?”

They didn’t. There was little else to say after that shocking news and the sorrow they shared. Overcome by emotion, Ziegler stood up so fast that Żarka fell off his lap, and he abruptly left.

After Szymon’s death, the villa went into prolonged mourning, and Antonina worried if his wife could survive the Ghetto much longer. Jan devised an escape plan, but where would they hide her? Much as they wished the villa to sail safely through the war with human cargo, it could only provide temporary shelter for most people, even the wives of boyhood friends.