The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 18

¹⁹⁴¹

AS SUMMER PASSED INTO AUTUMN, FLOCKS OF BULLFINCHES, red crossbills, and waxwings began streaming south from Siberia and northern Europe along sky corridors older than the Silk Road, passing overhead in squadron V-formations. Because Poland lies at the intersection of several great flyways—south from Siberia, north from Africa, west from China—autumn laced the air with a stitchery of migrating songbirds and chevrons of blaring geese. Insect-eating birds flew deep into Africa, with the spotted flycatcher, for example, covering thousands of miles and flying nonstop for about sixty hours over the Sahara. Not needing to fly quite so far, great blue herons and other waders settled along the shores of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Caspian, or Nile. Nomadic birds needn’t follow a strict route; during the war, some veered off east and west, avoiding bomb-scented Warsaw entirely, though much of Europe proved equally inhospitable.

At the villa, Guests and visitors migrated in late autumn to warmer rooms or more durable hideouts. The Żabińskis faced their third wartime winter with a stockpile of coal so meager they could warm only the dining room, provided they first drained the water from the radiators and sealed off the staircase and second floor. That divided the house into three climates: subterranean dank, first-floor equator, and polar bedrooms. An old American woodstove borrowed from the Lions House smoked irritably, but they huddled beside it anyway, peering through a small glass door at red-and-blue flames licking chunks of coal and periodically rinsing them with fire. As the chimney piped a hymn of warmth, they enjoyed the wordless magic of conjuring heat indoors on frigid days. Bundled up in fleece and flannel, Jan and Ryś could sleep beneath further layers of blankets and down comforters, then spring from bed and stay warm just long enough to dress for work or school. The kitchen felt like a meat locker, frost embroidered the windows inside and out, and fixing meals, doing dishes or, worse yet, the laundry—any chore that meant dipping her hands in water—tortured Antonina, whose skin chapped until it bled. “Slick-skinned humans just aren’t adapted to fierce cold,” she mused, except by using their wits, donning the hides of animals, trapping smoky fires.

Each day, after Jan and Ryś had left, she hitched up a sled and pulled a barrel of scraps from the slaughterhouse to the chicken shed, then fed the rabbits hay and carrots from the summer garden. While Ryś attended Underground school several blocks away, Jan worked downtown, in a small lab that inspected and disinfected buildings, a minor job that doled out useful perks: food stamps, a daily meal of meat and soup, a work permit, a little pay, and something priceless to the Underground—legal access to all parts of the city.

Because they hadn’t enough fuel to heat the cages, sheds, and three floors of the villa, all the Guests were spirited away to other winter safe houses, either in Warsaw or the suburbs. The Underground hid some Jews on country estates that, instead of being confiscated, stayed in the owners’ hands to produce food for German troops. There, an illegal woman could assume the role of governess, maid, nanny, cook, or tailor; and a man work in the fields or at the mill. Others might hide with peasant farmers or as teachers in the communal schools. One such estate, owned by Maurycy Herling-Grudziński, lay only about five miles west of downtown Warsaw, and at one time or another, five hundred or so refugees sheltered there.

Even with the Guests and relatives gone, the wintry villa included two eccentric tenants, and according to Antonina, the first to arrive, Wicek (Vincent), belonged to an aristocratic family of impeccable lineage. “His mother was a member of a famous line of silver rabbits” known as arctic hares, a breed whose young start out glossy black and silver up later on as they pale into adolescence. October’s wet gales made Wicek shiver in a garden hutch, so Antonina brought him indoors to the relative warmth of the dining room by day and Ryś’s heavily blanketed bed at night. Each morning, while Ryś dressed for school, Wicek slid from between the bedcovers and hopped along the hallway to the stairwell, then carefully descended the narrow steps and nosed open the wooden divider to scurry into the dining room, where he nestled beside the stove’s glass door. There he flattened his long ears against his back for added warmth, and stretched one rear leg straight out while tucking the other three in tight. Naturally gifted with amber eyes outlined in black like Egyptian hieroglyphs, three layers of fur, large snowshoe feet, and extra long incisors for gnawing moss and lichen, he quickly developed habits and tastes unknown to rabbit culture and a bizarre griffin-like personality.

At first, whenever Ryś sat down to dinner, Wicek draped himself along Ryś’s foot like one furry black slipper, instinctively crouching as hares do in arctic windstorms. Then, as Wicek grew large and muscular, he bounced around the house like hard rubber, and at meals hopped from the floor straight onto Ryś’s lap, thrust his front paws onto the table, and grabbed Ryś’s food. Naturally vegetarian, arctic hares may resort to tree bark and pinecones at times, but Wicek preferred stealing a horse cutlet or slice of beef, and bouncing away to devour it in a shadowy corner. According to Antonina, he’d zoom into the kitchen whenever he heard the thud of her meat-tenderizing hammer, hop onto a stool, leap from there to the table and snatch a slice of raw meat, then dart away with his trophy and feast like a small panther.

During the holidays, when a friend sent the Żabińskis a gift of kielbasa, Wicek became a razor-toothed pest, begging for scraps and mugging anyone he found eating sausage. In time, he also discovered cold cuts hidden atop a piano in Jan’s office next to the kitchen. In theory, the piano’s slippery legs deterred hungry mice; not so, hungry hares. With all his pilfering, Wicek quickly grew into a fat, furry thug, and whenever they left the house, they jailed him behind a corner cupboard, since he’d begun eating their clothes. One day he chewed the collar of Jan’s jacket hanging on a chair in the bedroom; another, he scalloped a felt hat and hemmed a visitor’s coat. They joked about his being an attack rabbit, but in a more solemn mood, Antonina wrote that wherever she turned in the human or animal world, she found “shocking and unpredictable behavior.”

When a sickly male chicken joined the household, Antonina nursed it back to health and Ryś claimed it as another pet, naming it Kuba (Jacob). In prewar days, the villa had harbored more exotic animals, including a frisky pair of baby otters, but the Żabińskis continued their tradition of people and animals coexisting under one roof, over and over welcoming stray animals into their lives and an already stressed household. Zookeepers by disposition, not fate, even in wartime with food scarce, they needed to remain among animals for life to feel true and for Jan to continue his research in animal psychology. According to Jan, “The personality of animals will develop according to how you raise, train, educate them—you can’t generalize about them. Just like people who own dogs and cats will tell you, no two are exactly alike. Who knew that a rabbit could learn to kiss a human, open doors, or give us reminders about dinnertime?”[55]

Wicek’s personality intrigued Antonina, too, who declared him “insolent,” preternaturally cunning, and even scary at times. A kissing, predatory, carnivorous rabbit—it was the stuff of fairy tales and a good subject for one of her children’s books. She kept tabs on his escapades, watching him crouch in wait, ears alert as radar dishes, tracking every noise, straining to decipher sounds.

The indoor zoo created a diverting circus of rituals, odors, and noises, with the bonus of play and laughter, a tonic for everyone, especially Ryś. Animals helped distract him from the war, Antonina thought, so feathered or four-legged, clawed or hoofed, reeking of badger musk or scentless as a newborn fawn, in time all entered his zoo within the villa’s menagerie within the old Warsaw Zoo: a matryoshka doll of zoos.

In the villa, some of Antonina’s clan sprayed table legs and chairs, some shredded and gnawed or leapt onto the furniture, but she enjoyed them as specially exempt children or wards. House rules decreed that Ryś looked after pets, as a mini-zookeeper who tended a small fiefdom of gnomes even needier than he. This kept Ryś busy with important chores, ones he could master, at a time when everyone else seemed to have grown-up secrets and responsibilities.

There was no way so young a child could comprehend the network of social contacts, payoffs, barter, reciprocal altruism, petty bribes, black market, hush money, and sheer idealism of wartime Warsaw. A house “under a crazy star” helped everyone forget the crazier world for minutes, sometimes hours, at a time, by serving up the moment as a flowing chain of sensations, gusts of play, focused chores, chiming voices. The rapt brain-state of living from moment to moment arises naturally in times of danger and uncertainty, but it’s also a rhythm of remedy which Antonina cultivated for herself and her family. One of the most remarkable things about Antonina was her determination to include play, animals, wonder, curiosity, marvel, and a wide blaze of innocence in a household where all dodged the ambient dangers, horrors, and uncertainties. That takes a special stripe of bravery rarely valued in wartime.

While Rabbi Shapira preached meditating on beauty, holiness, and nature as a way to transcend suffering and stay sane, Antonina was filling the villa with the innocent distractions of muskrat, rooster, hare, dogs, eagle, hamster, cats, and baby foxes, which drew people into a timeless natural world both habitual and novel. Paying attention to the villa’s unique ecosystem and routines, they could rest awhile as the needs and rhythms of different species mingled. The zoo vistas still offered trees, birds, and garden; sweet linden blooms still hung like pomanders; and, after dark, piano music capped the day.

This sensory blend grew more vital as dozens more Guests arrived with horrific tales of Nazi brutality, and the Żabińskis embraced them, drawing support from “clandestine groups and contacts, some very strange indeed,” as Irena Sendler (code name “Jolanta”) described it. A Christian doctor’s daughter with many Jewish friends, she reconfigured her job at the Social Welfare Department, recruited ten like-minded others, and began issuing false documents with forged signatures. She also wangled a legal pass into the Ghetto via a “sanitary-epidemiological station,” supposedly to deal with infectious diseases. In truth the social workers “smuggled in food, medicine, clothing, and money, while freeing as many people as possible, particularly children.” That meant first persuading parents to give her their children, then finding ways to smuggle the little ones out—in body bags, boxes, coffins, through the old courthouse or All Saints church—finally placing them with Catholic families or in orphanages. A jar she buried in a garden held lists of the children’s real names, so that after the war they might be reunited with family. Nuns often hid children in orphanages in or near Warsaw, with some specializing in hard-to-place Semitic-looking boys, whose heads and faces were bandaged, as if they’d been wounded.

The Żabińskis received word, by telephone or messenger, to expect a Guest for a brief stay, and Irena often visited them in person, with news, just to talk, or to hide when her office fell under surveillance. Later, captured by the Gestapo and brutally tortured in Pawiak Prison, Irena escaped with the Underground’s help; she became one of the zoo’s favorite Guests.

The Polish government-in-exile, based in London, staffed a radio station and planned missions, borrowing British planes, agents, and resources. Smuggling in cash strapped to parachutists whose money belts held as much as $100,000 and the addresses of recipients in code, Polish agents known as cichociemni (pronounced cheekoh-chemnee), “the dark and silent ones,” also packed weapons, weapon-making kits, and plans. According to one cichociemni’s account, to keep dispersal to a minimum his group jumped from 300 feet and aimed for “a cross of red and white flowers impudently alight in a large clearing.” Whooshing between pine trees, he landed on his feet and was met by a helmeted man who quickly exchanged password and handshake. Then rural youths appeared to claim the boxes and gather up the parachutes, from which women would sew blouses and underwear. After delivering an encrypted message from the commander-in-chief to the commander of the Home Army, he swallowed the regulation dose of caffeine-laced Excedrin to stay alert and put a cyanide pill in a special pocket of his trousers, before being led to a schoolhouse where a zaftig headmistress fed him a bacon and tomato omelette, sending him on his way at dawn. Some of the jumpers joined local units and many fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Of 365 couriers, 11 died; 63 aircraft were shot down; and only about half of the 858 drops were successful. But they supplied a tireless Underground, described by ally and enemy alike as the best organized in Europe, and it needed to be, since the Third Reich had singled out the Poles for special punishment.

By now, Jan delved deeper into Underground work and taught general biology and parasitology at the Faculty of Pharmacy and Dental Medicine of Warsaw’s “flying university.” Classes were small and the meeting rooms nomadic, to avoid discovery, floating from one edge of Warsaw to the other, in private apartments, technical schools, churches, businesses, and monasteries, inside the Ghetto and outside. It issued primary school, bachelor, and graduate degrees in medicine and other professions, despite the lack of libraries, laboratories, and classrooms. A certain sad irony (or perhaps it was optimism) prompted the Ghetto doctors, who could only comfort those dying patients whom a little food and medicine would have cured, to teach cutting-edge medicine to a future generation of doctors. At the outbreak of the war, thinking to decapitate the country, the Nazis had rounded up and shot most of the Polish intelligentsia, then outlawed education and the press, a strategy that boomeranged because it not only made learning subversively appealing, it also freed the surviving intellectuals to focus their brainpower on feats of resistance and sabotage. Widely read clandestine newspapers circulated in and out of the Ghetto, where they were sometimes stacked in Jewish toilets (which Germans scrupulously avoided). In this time of blatant deprivation, libraries, colleges, theater, and concerts flourished, even secret All-Warsaw soccer championships.

By the spring of 1942, a stream of Guests began arriving at the zoo once more, hiding in cages, sheds, and closets, where they tried to forge daily routines while living in a state of contained panic. Versed in the layout of the house, surely they joked about the clunkiness of so-and-so’s footsteps, children running, hoof and paw skitterings, door slammings, phone ringing, and the occasional banshee screeching of quarreling pets. At least, in a radio era, they’d grown used to gathering news by ear and adding mental images.

Antonina worried about her friend, sculptor Magdalena Gross, whose life and art had derailed with the bombing of the zoo, which wasn’t just her open-air workshop but her compass, in both senses, an imaginative realm for her work and a direction for her life. Antonina wrote in her diary of Gross’s rapture, how the animals absorbed her until she lost herself in their quiddities for hours, oblivious to zoogoers who stood quietly watching. Jan, a lifelong fan of what he called “the plastic arts,” also admired her work enormously.

Small sculpture her specialty, Gross had captured two dozen or so animals, lifelike and witty, on the brink of a familiar motion or with distinctly human traits: A camel with its head laid back on one hump, legs splayed, caught mid-stretch. A young llama with perked-up ears spying something edible. A wary Japanese goose pointing a sharp beak skyward while eyeing the viewer, like “a beautiful but brainless woman,” Gross had explained. A flamingo, mid-Chaplinesque walk, its right heel lifted. A macho pheasant showing off for his harem. An exotic hen hunkering down and trotting fast, “like a shopper thinking only about how to buy some herrings.” A deer craning its head backwards when startled by a sound. A bright-eyed heron with long, solid beak, curvaceous shoulders, and chin plunged deep into a large fluffed-up chest—which Magdalena identified as herself. A tall marabou with head sunk deep between its shoulders. An elk sniffing the air for a whiff of a mate. A feisty rooster, ready for trouble, rolling a wild eye.

Gross sought the innuendos of flesh unique to each animal: how it angled hips and shoulders to balance, threatened rivals, showed emotion. She relished tiny flexions, angling her own arms and legs to understand the rigging of her models’ muscles and bones. Jan, who served as Magdalena Gross’s advisor, was fascinated by the core design of animals, their center of gravity and geometry—how, for example, a bird balances its low smooth mass on two twiglike legs, while a mammal’s richer core of shapes and textures requires the props of four thick legs. With his college studies in agricultural engineering, zoology, and fine arts, he may well have been influenced by Darcy Wentworth Thompson’s charming classic, On Growth and Form (1917), a study of biological engineering, which considers such motifs as the architecture of the spine or the pelvis evolving bone-wings to spare the torso pain. She spent months crafting a sculpture. To select from a repertoire of moves one pose that might embody it—that took time and a kind of infatuation, an ecstasy of imagining Gross loved. The joy shows in her sculptures.

Antonina often praised her artistry and mused how Magdalena figured in the long saga of humans depicting animals in art, stretching back to the Paleolithic age, when by the light of firebrands, humans drew buffalo, horses, reindeer, antelopes, and mammoths on cave walls. They weren’t exactly drawn; sometimes pigments were carefully blown onto the wall (the laser-perfect replica cave at Lascaux today was decorated using that technique). Animal fetishes carved from antler and stone joined the reliquary, either for worship or for use by hunters in sacred cave ceremonies. Bulging from the natural contours of limestone walls, the animals galloped through initiation rites, in flickering darkness where one could easily confuse heartbeats and hoofbeats.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, and between the wars in the heydey of Dadaism and Surrealism (neither of which was an ism as much as an idea about the role of art in life and life as art), animal sculpture flourished in Polish art, and continued during and after World War II. In Antonina’s eyes, Magdalena joined the fluent tradition of magical animals adorning the art of ancient Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, the Far East, Mexico, Peru, India, and Poland.

Magdalena would first model in clay before fixing a design in bronze, and during this soft, forgiving stage, she often asked Jan to critique the anatomical details of her work, though he reported to Antonina that she rarely erred. Each sculpture took many months to finish, and Magdalena averaged only one bronze a year, because she studied every flake and fiber of her model, dickering with design, and it was hard to let the clay mannequin rest. Once, when someone asked her if she liked her finished handiwork, she said: “I’ll answer your question in three years.” She cast only two endangered animals—the European elk and bison—devoting two years to the latter, a special gift for Jan. Of course, the zoo animals wouldn’t pose—they often took wing, toddled off, or hid from her—and wild animals reserve making eye contact for the rough occasions of eating, mating, or dueling. Vigorously minding them calmed her, which in turn calmed them, and in time they allowed her to stare for longer spells.

Famous as Gross was (her Bison and Bee-Eater took gold medals at the 1937 International Art Exhibition in Paris), Antonina reckoned her a surprisingly modest woman, endearingly optimistic, and simply besotted with animals and art. Antonina recalled how Gross charmed her models, their patrons, and guards: “Everyone welcomed the sight of this sunny little ‘Mrs. Madzia,’ with her dark smiling eyes, molding clay with delicacy and gusto.”

When Jews had been ordered into the Ghetto, Gross refused, by no means an easier fate, because those who lived on the surface had to disguise themselves as Aryans and keep up the masquerade at all times, cultivating Polish street language and a plausible accent. Estimates vary, but the most reliable, from Adolf Berman (who aided them and kept good records), found 15,000 to 20,000 people still in hiding as late as 1944, and he assumed the number had been much higher. In Secret City, a study of the Jews who, at one time or another, lived on the Aryan side, Gunnar Paulsson puts the figure closer to 28,000. As he rightly says, with figures that high, we’re really talking about an embedded city of fugitives, complete with its own criminal element (scores of blackmailers, extortionists, thieves, corrupt policemen, and greedy landlords), social workers, cultural life, publications, favorite cafes, and lingo. Jews in hiding were known as cats, their hiding places melinas (from the Polish for a “den of thieves”), and if a melina was discovered, one referred to it as burnt. “Consisting of 28,000 Jews, perhaps 70,000–90,000 people who were helping them, and 3,000–4,000 szmalcowniks [blackmailers, from the Polish word for lard] and other harmful individuals,” Paulsson writes, “[this] population numbered more than 100,000, probably exceeding the size of the Polish Underground in Warsaw, which fielded 70,000 fighters in 1944.”[56]

The smallest oversight could give a cat away—not knowing the price of a tram ticket, say, or appearing too aloof, not receiving enough letters or visitors, not taking part in the typical social life of a housing block, like this one described by Alicja Kaczyńska:

Paulsson tells of “Helena Szereszewska’s daughter, Marysia, who considered herself completely assimilated and moved about freely,” and who “once saw some lemons (almost unobtainable in wartime) on a market stall. Out of curiosity, she asked the price, and when the stall-keeper named the astronomical sum she exclaimed ‘Jezu, Maria!’ as a Polish Catholic would. The stall-keeper replied slyly: ‘You’ve known them such a short time, missy, and you’re already on a first-name basis!’”

Lodging with an old woman, Gross delivered tortes and pastries for several bakeries, which paid her just enough to survive, and she risked leaving the apartment to meet friends at a cat-friendly coffeehouse. Jews in hiding sometimes met at a cafe at 24 Miodowa Street, or at another on Sewerynów Street, where they could dine at “the Catholic Community Centre of St. Joseph, which had a well-patronized restaurant. The fact that it was in a quiet side street and the service by the nuns was so pleasant attracted many Jews to the place…. It was known to nearly all the Jews hidden in Warsaw, and offered an hour’s respite from the cruel outside.”

Whenever Gross left home, there was always the chance of being recognized and denounced, but in an atmosphere of daily street executions and house searches, Antonina worried when she heard a rumor that Nazis had begun combing through the apartment houses in Magdalena’s neighborhood, at odd hours, raiding attics and basements to roust out hidden Jews.