The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 21

AFTER THE GREAT DEPORTATIONS OF JULY 1942, THE SHAPE and nature of the Ghetto changed from a congested city of ever-crowded streets into a labor camp full of German workshops policed by the SS. In its large, vastly depopulated southern neighborhood known as “the wild Ghetto,” a special corps, the Werterfassung, busily salvaged what it could from abandoned belongings and remodeled the deserted homes for German use, while the remaining 35,000 or so Jews were resettled in housing blocks near the shops and escorted to and from work by guards. In reality, another 20,000 to 30,000 “wild” Jews lived in hiding in the Ghetto, staying out of sight, traveling through a maze of subterranean tunnels that led between buildings, and surviving as part of a labyrinthine economy.

Autumn of 1942 also heralded a new Underground group the Żabińskis found immensely helpful: Zegota, cryptonym for the Council to Aid the Jews, a cell founded by Zofia Kossak and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz, with the mission of helping Jews hidden in Polish homes. Although its formal name was the Konrad Zegota committee, there was no Konrad Zegota. Zofia Kossak (code name “Weronika”), a noted author and conservative nationalist, mingled freely with the upper classes, especially the landed gentry, and had close friends in the Catholic clergy. In contrast, Krahelska-Filipowicz, editor of the art magazine Arkady, was a Socialist activist, wife of a former ambassador to the United States, and well acquainted with military and political leaders of the Underground. Between them, they knew scores of people, and the others they recruited also had a wide network of professional, political, or social contacts. That was the point, to create a human lattice from all corners of society. Aleksander Kamiński, for example, figured in the popular Polish Scouts Association before the war, Henryk Wolinski belonged to the Polish Bar Association, and left-wing Zionist Party member and psychologist Adolf Berman headed Centos, a child welfare organization in the Ghetto. The Writers’ Union, the Underground Journalists Association, the Democratic Doctors’ Committee, and labor unions comprising railway, tramway, and sanitation department workers all aided Zegota. As Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski point out in Zegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland: “The people of Zegota were not just idealists but activists, and activists are, by nature, people who know people.”[64]

Drawing together a consortium of Polish Catholic and political groups, Zegota’s sole purpose was rescue, not sabotage or fighting, and, as such, it was the only organization of its kind in occupied Europe during the war, one that historians credit with saving 28,000 Jews in Warsaw. Its headquarters at 24 Zurawia Street, run by Eugenia Wąsowska (a bookbinder and printer) and lawyer Janina Raabe, kept office hours twice a week and also provided temporary shelter for some people on the run. Conspiring with the Polish Underground and Resistance, it supplied the Żabińskis’ villa with money and false documents, and scoured outlying towns for houses where the zoo’s Guests could ride out the war. Keeping one person alive often required putting a great many in jeopardy, and it tested them nonstop, as they resisted both propaganda and death threats. Yet 70,000–90,000 people in Warsaw and the suburbs, or about one-twelfth of the city’s population, risked their lives to help neighbors escape.[65] Besides the rescuers and Underground helpers, there were maids, postmen, milkmen, and many others who didn’t inquire about extra faces or extra mouths to feed.

When Marceli Lemi-Łebkowski, a well-known lawyer and activist, arrived at the zoo with false documents provided by the Underground and “important clandestine missions to fulfill,” he and his family pretended to be refugees from the east who wanted to rent two rooms, one for his sick wife, and one for their two daughters, Nunia and Ewa. Marceli would have to live in another safe house and visit them from time to time, because a new man about the villa might be hard to explain—not so a sick woman and her daughters. Their rent bought coke to heat the upstairs bedrooms, which meant more people could lodge in the villa, among them Marek and Dziuś, two young boys serving in the Underground army’s Youth Sabotage Group. The boys had left memorial flowers at sites German soldiers frequently used for shooting Poles, and scrawled on walls and fences “Hitler will lose the war! Germany will die!”—deadly offenses.

That winter, some trustworthy legal tenants paid rent, but mainly the villa embraced people lost between worlds and on the run from the Gestapo. In time, the Guests included Irena Mayzel, Kazio and Ludwinia Kramsztyk, Dr. Ludwig Hirszfeld (a specialist in communicable diseases), Dr. Roza Anzelówna from the National Hygiene Institute, the Lemi-Łebkowski family, Mrs. Poznańska, Dr. Lonia Tenenbaum, Mrs. Weiss (wife of a lawyer), the Keller family, Marysia Aszer, journalist Maria Aszerówna, Rachela Auerbach, the Kenigswein family, Drs. Anzelm and Kinszerbaum, Eugienia “Genia” Sylkes, Magdalena Gross, Maurycy Fraenkel, and Irene Sendler, among many others—according to Jan, about three hundred in all.

As if invisible ink ran through their veins, Jewish and Polish outlaws only appeared indoors, after hours, where Guests and tenants fused into a single family. As a result, Antonina’s daily chores increased, but she also had more helpers, and she enjoyed having the two young Lemi-Łebkowska girls around, quickly discovering how little they knew about housework, and schooling them “rigorously” in the wifely trades.

A zoo without animals equaled a waste of land to the Nazis, who decided to build a fur farm on the grounds. Not only would the fur warm German soldiers fighting on the eastern front (they’d already confiscated all fur from the Ghetto Jews for this purpose), extras could be sold to help finance the war. For efficiency they put a Pole in charge of it: Witold Wroblewski, an elderly bachelor used to living alone with fur farm animals. Like the outcast in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, he would enviously watch those inside the warm, comfortable villa, “full of light and the smell of baking bread,” he later told Antonina. One day, to Jan and Antonina’s surprise and distress, he arrived at their door and, without any niceties or discussion, declared that he was moving in.

Luck favored the Żabińskis, who soon discovered that “Fox Man,” as they came to call him, was a Pole raised in Germany who felt sympathy for their mission and could be trusted. By far the most eccentric human in the villa, he arrived with a female cat, Balbina, and what Antonina referred to as “several inseparable parakeets,” but nothing else, no personal belongings. That made quick work of moving him into Jan’s old study, and he paid with badly needed coke and coal to heat the house. Though it surely impeded his life as a businessman, Fox Man couldn’t abide calendars or clocks, street names or numbers; and sometimes he slept on the floor between his desk and his bed, as if fatigue simply overtook him and he hadn’t the energy to lurch a step farther. When housemates learned that he had played piano professionally before the war, he entered the Żabińskis’ inner circle, because, as Magdalena liked to say: “The House Under a Crazy Star respects artists above all.” Though everyone nagged him to play piano, he kept refusing, then one day, at exactly 1 A.M., he emerged from his bedroom, padded quietly to the piano, and suddenly began playing nonstop until morning. After that, Magdalena organized regular piano recitals in the evenings, after curfew, and his Chopin and Rachmaninoff made a wonderful change from the frantic bars of “Go, go, go to Crete!”

Antonina often wrote about Fox Man’s gray cat, Balbina, whom she described as appropriately sluttish (“always getting married like a good, normal cat”). But every time Balbina had kittens, Fox Man would snatch them from the basket and replace them with newborn foxes for her to nurse. Antonina doesn’t say what became of the kittens, which he may have fed to the fur farm’s omnivorous raccoon dogs (ranched for their gray fur with raccoon-like markings). According to breeders, a female fox should only nurse a few pups at one time, to ensure all grow thick, healthy coats; using Balbina as a wet nurse for the extra pups struck him as an ideal if somewhat impish solution. “The first day was always the hardest for her,” Antonina noted, “she could swear that she gave birth to kittens, but on the second day she knew it was only her imagination.”

Understandably confused by their odd scent and snarls, the cat discovered the baby foxes had ravenous appetites, and after lots of licking and feeding they finally began to smell like her, though her repeated attempts to school them in the feline arts mainly failed. Meowing around them in “a quite distinguished tone of voice… to teach them how normal cats should speak,” she never did persuade them to meow back, and their loud barking constantly startled her. “In her cat’s heart, she was ashamed that they barked,” Antonina mused, adding that the offspring were loudmouths with “high tempers.” But they did master an agile cat-leap onto tables, cabinets, and tall bookcases, and villa-ites often found a baby fox, curled up like a Bavarian soup tureen, napping atop the piano or a chest of drawers.

Favoring live food, Balbina hunted outside each day to feed her brood, diligently dragging home birds, rabbits, meadow mice, and rats, though, as she soon discovered, she needed to hunt nonstop to still their lidless hunger. Outside, she led the way—a small, thin tabby followed by offspring three times her size with long snouts and fluffy black tails ending in white flowers. She taught them how to stalk prey while crouching low like a sphinx, how to pounce on game, and if one strayed, she meowed harshly until the young fox dutifully trotted back to the fold. Whenever the fox pups spied a chicken, they stalked it, crawling fast on their bellies, then pouncing with sharp teeth to rip it apart, snarling as they fed, while Balbina kept her distance and watched.

After “giving birth” to several broods of baby foxes, tiring and confusing as that was, Balbina finally got used to their alien ways, and they became half-cat, she half-vixen. Praising the cat’s good-citizenry of never attacking housemates, Antonina wrote: “It’s as if she has her own moral code.” She spared Fox Man’s parakeets, even when he released them from their cage; Wicek the rabbit didn’t tempt her, nor did Kuba the chick; she didn’t bother hunting the invading mouse or two; and if a stray bird flew into the house (a bad omen), she’d eye it lazily. But one new arrival did rekindle Balbina’s feral instincts.

In the spring, a neighbor brought a strange orphan for Ryś’s royal zoo—a paunchy baby muskrat with glossy brown fur, yellow-beige belly, long scaly tail, and tiny black eyes. Webbed front paws with fingers help muskrats build lodges, hold food, or dig burrows; when they swim, fringed hind feet make strong canoe-paddle sweeps. Oddest of all, perhaps, four sharp chisel-like front teeth protrude beyond the cheeks and lips, so that a muskrat can eat stems and roots, bulrushes and cattails while underwater, without opening its mouth.

Antonina found the creature fascinating and gave it a large cage on the porch, adding a glass developing tray from an old darkroom as wading pool, since muskrats are native-born swimmers. Ryś named it Szczurcio (Little Rat), and soon it learned its name and adapted to life in the three-ring villa, spending its days sleeping, eating, or wallowing. Wild muskrats don’t tame easily, but in a few weeks Szczurcio let Ryś open the cage, carry him around, and pet or scratch his fur. While Szczurcio slept, Balbina would circle the cage like a mountain lion, searching for a way in. Awake, he tormented her by playing in the little tub incessantly and splashing her with water, which she hated. No one knew why the muskrat tempted Balbina so, but whoever fed Szczurcio or cleaned his cage had to lock the door afterward with small twists of wire.

Antonina enjoyed watching the muskrat’s “exquisite toilette”—each morning, Szczurcio would dunk his face in the pan of water and snort heartily, blow air out his nose, then splash his face with wet paws like a man preparing to shave, and wash for a long time. After that he would climb into the tub and stretch out on his belly, turn onto his back, and roll over several times. Finally he left the bathtub and shook his fur like a dog, splashing mightily. Strangely enough, he often climbed the wall of the cage and sat on the perch like the cage’s previous occupant, Koko the cockatoo. There, using his fingers, he would carefully comb water through his fur. Visitors found it a little odd to see a muskrat perching and preening like a bird, but the villa held a bizarre crew even at the quietest times, and he was Ryś’s new favorite pet. After his morning ablutions, Szczurcio would eat a carrot, potato, dandelions, bread, or grain, though he no doubt craved the branches, bark, and marsh weeds on which wild muskrats thrive.

When he outgrew the little tub of water, Antonina replaced it with a giant jar Jan had once used in a cockroach study.[66] Szczurcio leapt into the jar when it arrived and splashed with such abandon that Antonina moved his cage into the kitchen, where the floor was ceramic tile and fresh water lay closer to hand.

“You know, Mother,” Ryś said one day, “Szczurcio is learning how to open his cage. He’s not stupid!”

“I don’t think he’s quite that smart,” Antonina replied.

Szczurcio spent hours fiddling with the wire, grabbing the ends with his fingers and trying to untwist them, and after a night’s crafty work, he finally succeeded in unknotting the wire and lifting up the sliding door, scrambling down a chair leg to the floor, shimmying up the water pipe, and sliding into the marshlike kitchen sink. Then he leapt atop the stove, climbed onto a warm radiator, and fell asleep. That’s where Ryś found him in the morning. Returning him to his cage, Ryś closed the door and knotted the wire even tighter.

Early the next day, Ryś ran through the house to Antonina’s bedroom, where he cried out in alarm: “Mom! Mom! Where’s Szczurcio? His cage is empty! I can’t find him anywhere! Maybe Balbina ate him? I have to go to school, and Dad is at work! Help!”

Still bedridden, Antonina couldn’t help much with this dawn crisis, but she deputized Fox Man and the housekeeper, Pietrasia, to launch a search party, and they dutifully scouted all the closets, sofas, easy chairs, corners, boots—any bolt-hole where a muskrat might hide—with no success.

Because she couldn’t believe the muskrat had simply “evaporated like camphor,” she suspected Balbina or Żarka of mayhem, and had cat and dog brought to her bed for close inspection. There she carefully felt their stomachs for any suspicious bulges. If they’d eaten such a large animal—almost the size of a rabbit—surely their bellies would still be swollen. No, they felt slender as usual, so she declared the detainees innocent and released them.

Suddenly Pietrasia ran into her bedroom. “Come quick!” she shouted. “To the kitchen. Szczurcio is in the stove chimney! I started a fire the way I do every morning, and I heard a terrible noise!”

Using her cane, Antonina slowly rose from bed onto her swollen legs, carefully descended the stairs, and hobbled into the kitchen.

“Szczurcio, Szczurcio,” she called sweetly.

A scuffling noise in the wall. When a soot-covered head poked from the chimney, she grabbed the fugitive’s back and pulled him out, whiskers coated in grime, front paws singed. Gently, she washed him in warm water and soap, over and over, trying to remove the cooking grease from his fur. Then she applied ointment to his burns and placed him back in his cage.

Laughing, she explained that a muskrat builds a lodge by heaping plants and mud into a mound, then digging a burrow from below water level. This muskrat wanted a lodge not a cage, she said, and who could blame it for creating a facsimile world? He had even bent the metal burners to fashion an easier route into the chimney.

When Ryś returned from school that afternoon, he was thrilled to find Szczurcio back in his cage, and at dinner, as people carried food to the table, Ryś regaled all with the adventures of Szczurcio and the stovepipe. One little girl laughed so hard that she tripped on her way from the kitchen, spilling a full bowl of hot soup over Fox Man’s head and onto Balbina, who had been sitting in his lap. Springing from his chair, Fox Man bolted into his bedroom, followed by his cat, and closed the door. Ryś ran after him, spied through the keyhole, and whispered regular reports:

“He took off his jacket!”

“He’s drying it using a towel!”

“Now he’s drying Balbina!”

“He’s drying his face!”

“Ooooh! No! He opened the cage with his parakeets!”

At this point, Magdalena couldn’t stand the suspense any longer and flung open the door. There stood Fox Man, the house concert master, column-like in the middle of the room, with parakeets circling his forehead like merry-go-round animals. After a few moments they landed on his head and started digging through his hair, pulling out and eating the soup noodles. At last Fox Man noticed the crowd in the doorway, silent and agog, waiting for some explanation.

“It would be a pity to waste such good food,” he said of the bizarre scene, as if he’d found the only and obvious thing to do.