The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 20

THE SNOWY AUTUMN OF 1942 HIT THE ZOO WITH A SPECIAL fury, as winds lashed wooden buildings until they moaned and whisked snowbanks into sparkling souffles. Bombing early in the war ripped up the zoo grounds, scrambling its landmarks, then snow fell heavily, hiding a bevy of new ruts, downed fences, twisted macadam, jagged fingers of metal. Below the deceptively soft snowscape, metal basilisks lurked everywhere, confining people to a maze of shoveled walks and well-trodden pastures.

Antonina’s range shrank even more because she was crippled by what sounds like phlebitis (she offers few clues), a painful infection in the leg veins that made walking agonizing and meant bed rest from fall of 1942 to spring of 1943. An unusually active thirty-four-year-old, she hated being confined to her bedroom, in heavy clothes, muffled under strata of blankets and comforters (“I felt so embarrassed and useless,” she moaned in ink), when there was a large household to manage. She was the top matryoshka, after all, and not just symbolically, since she was also pregnant. It’s hard to know if blood clots did form in her legs—from pregnancy, smoking, varicose veins, heredity? Certainly not inactivity or obesity. But phlebitis can be dangerous; in its severest form, deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot travels to the heart or lungs, causing death. Even mild phlebitis, or possibly rheumatoid arthritis (an inflammation of the joints), creates red swollen legs and requires bed rest, so, having no alternative, she held court in her bedroom, with family, friends, and staff alike paying calls.

In June of 1942, the Polish Underground received a letter, written in code, telling of an extermination camp at Treblinka, a town not far from Warsaw. Here’s part of its warning:

Historian Emanuel Ringelblum (who wrote Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War while hiding in a Warsaw bunker) and other members of the Underground knew exactly what the letter meant. The cryptic last sentence referred to the Passover instructions in Exodus 12:10: any leftovers of the sacrificial lamb were to be burnt. Soon news came from Chełmno of Jews being gassed in vans, and refugees from Wilno told of massacres in other towns as well. Such atrocities still seemed impossible to believe until a man who had escaped the gas chamber and hidden in a freight car all the way to Warsaw told people in the Ghetto what he’d witnessed. Even though the Underground then spread news of Treblinka, some people argued the Nazis wouldn’t visit the same bestiality on a city as important as Warsaw.

On July 22, 1942, the liquidation of the Ghetto began on Stawki Street, with 7,000 people herded to the train station, loaded into chlorinated red cattle cars, and delivered to the gas chambers at Majdanek. For this so-called “resettlement in the east,” they were allowed to pack three days’ worth of food, all their valuables, and thirty-three pounds of personal luggage. Between July and September of 1942, the Nazis shipped 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, leaving only 55,000 behind in the Ghetto, where a Jewish Fighting Organization, known as ZOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), arose and prepared for combat. To still the doomed as long as possible, the train station at Treblinka posted arrival and departure times for trains, though no prisoners ever left. “With great precision, they started to reach their insane goal,” Antonina wrote. “What looked at first like one individual’s bloodsucking instinct soon became a well-designed method to destroy whole nations.”

Another neighbor of theirs who, like Szymon Tenenbaum and Rabbi Shapira, chose to stay in the Ghetto when offered escape, was pediatrician Henryk Goldszmit (pen name: Janusz Korczak), who wrote autobiographical novels and books for parents and teachers with such titles as How to Love a Child and The Child’s Right to Respect. To the amazement of his friends, fans, and disciples, Korczak abandoned both his literary and medical careers in 1912 to found a progressive orphanage for boys and girls, ages seven to fourteen, at 92 Krochmalna Street.

In 1940, when Jews were ordered into the Ghetto, the orphanage moved to an abandoned businessmen’s club in the “district of the damned,” as he described it in a diary written on blue rice-paper pages that he filled with details of daily life in the orphanage, imaginative forays, philosophical contemplations, and soul-searching.[59] It’s the reliquary of an impossible predicament, revealing “how a spiritual and moral man struggled to shield innocent children from the atrocities of the adult world during one of history’s darkest times.” Reportedly shy and awkward with adults, he created an ideal democracy with the orphans, who called him “Pan Doctor.”

There, with wit, imagination, and self-deprecating humor, he devoted himself to a “children’s republic” complete with its own parliament, newspaper, and court system. Instead of punching one another, children learned to yell “I’ll sue you!” And every Saturday morning court cases were judged by five children who weren’t being sued that week. All rulings rested on Korczak’s “Code of Laws,” the first hundred of which parsed forgiveness. He once confided to a friend: “I am a doctor by training, a pedagogue by chance, a writer by passion, and a psychologist by necessity.”

At night, lying on his infirmary cot, with remnants of vodka and black bread tucked under his bed, he would escape to his own private planet, Ro, where an imaginary astronomer friend, Zi, had finally succeeded in building a machine to convert radiant sunlight into moral strength. Using it to waft peace throughout the universe, Zi complained that it worked everywhere except on “that restless spark, Planet Earth,” and they debated whether Zi should destroy bloody, warmongering Earth, with Doctor Pan pleading for compassion given the planet’s youth.

His blue pages stitched together sensations, fancies, and marauding ideas alike, but he didn’t relate sinister Ghetto events, for example, the deportations to the death camps that began on July 22, his sixty-fourth birthday. Instead of all the clangor and mayhem on that day, he wrote only of “a marvellous big moon” shining above the destitute in “this unfortunate, insane quarter.”

By then, as photographs show, his goatee and mustache had grayed, bags terraced beneath intense dark eyes, and though he often endured “adhesions, aches, ruptures, scars,”[60] he refused to escape from the Ghetto, leaving the children behind, despite many offers of help from disciples on the Aryan side. It creased him to hear the starving and suffering children compare their ills “like old people in a sanitarium,” he wrote in his diary. They needed ways to transcend pain, and so he encouraged prayers like this one: “Thank you, Merciful Lord, for having arranged to provide flowers with fragrance, glow worms with their glow, and to make the stars in the sky sparkle.”[61] By example, he taught them the mental salve of mindful chores, like the slow attentive picking up of bowls, spoons, and plates after a meal:

Inventing both silly games and the ramparts of deeper play, he decided one day to stage a drama inspired by his affection for Eastern religion, The Post Office, by the Indian author Rabindranath Tagore. That production now assumes the potency of symbol, opening as it did on July 18, just three weeks before the children were shipped to Treblinka. In the play, a bedridden boy named Amal suffers in a claustrophobic room and dreams of flying to a land where a king’s doctor can cure him. By the play’s end the royal doctor appears, heals him, flings open the doors and windows, and Amal beholds a circus of stars. Korczak said he chose the play to help the trapped, terrified children accept death more serenely.

Anticipating their calamity and fright when deportation day came (August 6, 1942), he joined them aboard the train bound for Treblinka, because, he said, he knew his presence would calm them—“You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this.” A photograph taken at the Umschlagplatz (Transshipment Square) shows him marching, hatless, in military boots, hand in hand with several children, while 192 other children and ten staff members follow, four abreast, escorted by German soldiers. Korczak and the children boarded red boxcars not much larger than chicken coops, usually stuffed with seventy-five vertical adults, though all the children easily fit. In Joshua Perle’s eyewitness account in The Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, he describes the scene: “A miracle occurred, two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak.”

In 1971, the Russians named a newly discovered asteroid after him, 2163 Korczak, but maybe they should have named it Ro, the planet he dreamed of. The Poles claim Korczak as a martyr, and the Israelis revere him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls make possible the world’s salvation.[63] According to Jewish legend, these few, through their good hearts and good deeds, keep the too-wicked world from being destroyed. For their sake alone, all of humanity is spared. The legend tells that they are ordinary people, not flawless or magical, and that most of them remain unrecognized throughout their lives, while they choose to perpetuate goodness, even in the midst of inferno.