The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 16

THE ANIMAL WORLD THRIVES ON PLOY AND COUNTERPLOY, from chameleons and lion-fish blending in with their backdrop to the majestic cons of mammals. A rhesus monkey who decides not to tell his troop-mates about the melon he just found doesn’t need a “theory of mind” to deceive them, only a history of that lie yielding benefits. If his troop-mates find out, he’ll be pummeled, and that lesson may alter his selfish ways. But many animals have little choice about sharing food and instinctively call others to the meal. The great apes (including us) have been staging clever deceits, lying on purpose, sometimes just athletically—as practice or sport—for at least 12 million years. Trained interrogators can read the clues of a higher voice, swollen pupils, less eye contact, more complaining, and also learn what “tells” to try and hide.

As a zoologist, Jan had spent years studying the minutiae of animal behavior—all the fineries of courtship, bluff, threat, appeasement gestures, status displays, and many dialects of love, loyalty, and affection. Extrapolating from their behaviors to those of humans came naturally to such a diligent zoologist, especially strategies of deceit. He could adopt new personas fast, a gift that served his shadow life in the Underground army and also suited his temperament and training.

Not only the Żabińskis, but all Guests and visitors had to cultivate paranoia and abide by the strict rules of their little fiefdom, which meant Ryś and any other children in the house inhaled varieties of truth. Along with languages, they absorbed the lessons of facade-building, tribal loyalty, self-sacrifice, persuasive lying, and creative deception. How do you concoct apparent normalcy? Everything had to appear unremarkable in the household, even if that meant wholly fictitious routines. Pretend to be normal. From whose perspective? Would the prewar routines of a Polish zoo director’s family seem normal to a patrolling German soldier? The Germans knew the Poles as a deeply sociable people, often with several generations living in one household, plus visiting relatives and friends. So a certain amount of hubbub made sense, but too many lodgers might arouse suspicion.

The current director of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan Maciej Rembiszewski, who, as a boy, volunteered at Jan’s zoo (and told him he planned to be a zookeeper himself when he grew up), remembers Jan as a strict boss, a perfectionist, and Antonina depicts him as a demanding paterfamilias, who couldn’t tolerate sloppy work or loose ends. From her, we learn that Jan’s motto was: “A good strategy should dictate the right actions. Any action mustn’t be impulsive, but analyzed along with all its possible outcomes. A solid plan always includes many backups and alternatives.”

After Szymon’s death, Jan visited his wife, Lonia, with details of an escape plan, and news that friends in the Underground were aligning the right stepping-stones so that, after her brief zoo stay, she could vanish to a safer place in the country, maybe even work again as a dentist.

When Jan and Lonia reached the front gate of the Labor Bureau, he intended to use the same ruse he always did and say she was an Aryan colleague who had accompanied him to see Ziegler, since by now the guard was used to his comings and goings, alone or with colleagues. Just as they arrived at the door and he prepared to shepherd Lonia through, he stopped, dismayed to find the guard missing and a woman—the guard’s wife, as it turned out—standing in his place. The offices above bustled with Germans only a yell away. She seemed to recognize him, either because she used to watch from the window of a nearby flat or because her husband had described him and his loutish ways, but Lonia’s presence troubled her and she became flustered. Not prepared for exceptions, she refused to open the gate.

“We have been visiting Mr. Ziegler,” Jan explained firmly.

She said: “Fine, I will open the gate if Mr. Ziegler comes down and personally authorizes your departure.”

Her husband had responded well to browbeating, but Jan hesitated—how would verbal abuse work on this woman? Not well, he decided. Staying in character as the arrogant loud-mouth her husband knew, he insisted:

“What are you doing? I come here every day, and your husband knows me very well. Now you’re ordering me to go back upstairs and pester Mr. Ziegler! It will cost you…!”

Wavering a little, still unsure, she watched Jan’s face grow hot with anger as he snarled like a man fully capable of retaliation, and at last she quietly opened the gate to let them pass. What happened next jarred both Jan and Lonia: right across the street stood two German policemen, smoking and talking while staring their way.

According to Antonina, Lonia described the scene later in words filled with “terror and racing thoughts”:

That night, passing by the upstairs bedroom, Antonina happened to see Lonia quietly crying into her pillow, with Żarka’s wet nose pressed sympathetically against her cheek. Lonia had watched Szymon die; her daughter had been discovered by the Gestapo in Kraków and shot; only the dachshund survived as family.

After a few weeks, the Underground found her safer lodgings in the country, and as Lonia was saying goodbye, Żarka ran up carrying a leash in her mouth. “You have to stay behind; we don’t have a home yet,” Lonia told her.

Antonina noted in her memoirs that she found this scene wincingly sad, and that Lonia survived the war, but not Żarka. One day the dachshund, nosing around the German warehouse, ate some rat poison, and after dragging herself back to the villa, died in Antonina’s lap.

Three weeks before the Warsaw Uprising, Jan moved Szymon’s insect collection to the safety of the Natural History Museum, and after the war Lonia donated it to the State Zoological Museum, in one of whose satellite buildings 250,000 of the original specimens reside today, in a village about an hour north of Warsaw.

To view Tenenbaum’s collection, one turns down a narrow macadam road, past an animal hotel (a new concept borrowed from America), past a Christmas tree farm full of pert rows of spruce, to a wooded dead end occupied by two single-story buildings owned by the Polish Academy of Science. The smaller one contains offices, the other miscellaneous overflow from the Zoological Museum.

Entering that huge attic of a building, one finds a divine clutter of millions of specimens where many oddities scream for attention, from stuffed jaguars, lynxes, and native birds to shelves of glass jars crammed with snakes, frogs, and reptiles. Long wooden cabinets and drawers divide one part of the room into narrow alleys of garaged treasures. Tenenbaum’s boxed insects occupy two lockers—twenty boxes per shelf, stored upright like books, five shelves per locker. This represents about half of the full collection, which Jan told a journalist ran to four hundred boxes, and Antonina recalled as eight hundred.[45] According to museum records, “Szymon Tenenbaum’s wife donated… c. 250,000 specimens after the war.” At the moment, the boxes remain intact but the archival plan is to remove the insects and file them with many others according to order, suborder, family, genus, and species—all the bombardier beetles in one locker, all the featherwings in another. What a sad dismantling that would be. Certainly the insects would be easier to study, but not the unique vision and artistry of the collectors, who belong to an exotic suborder of Homo sapiens sapiens (the animal that knows and knows it knows).

An insect collection is a silent oasis in the noisy clamor of the world, isolating phenomena so that they can be seen undistractedly. In that sense, what is being collected are not the bugs themselves but the deep attention of the collector. That is also a rarity, a sort of gallery that ripples through the mind and whose real holdings are the perpetuation of wonder in a maelstrom of social and personal distractions. “Collection” is a good word for what happens, because one becomes collected for a spell, gathering up one’s curiosity the way rainwater collects. Every glass-faced box holds a sample of a unique collector’s high regard, and that’s partly why people relish studying them, even if they know all the bug parts by heart.

So it doesn’t really matter where the boxes sit, but Szymon would have enjoyed this end-of-the-lane, out-of-the-way place, surrounded by farm fields and dense foliage askitter with insects, tiny beetles abounding, where his golden Żarka could chase birds and moles, a dachshund’s prerogative. One often recognizes only in hindsight a coincidence or unlikely object that altered fate. Who would have imagined that a zealous professor’s cavalcade of pinned beetles would open the gate from the Ghetto for so many people?