The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 23

NEW YEAR, 1943, APPROACHED WITH ANTONINA STILL MAINLY bedridden, and after three months, cabin fever and lack of exercise had depleted her body and spirits. She usually kept the door to her bedroom open so that she could join, however remotely, the stir of the house, its mingling smells and sounds. On January 9, when Heinrich Himmler visited Warsaw, he condemned another 8,000 Jews to “resettlement,” but by now everyone understood that “resettlement” meant death, and instead of lining up as ordered, many hid while others ambushed the soldiers and dashed across the rooftops, creating just enough friction to curb deportations for several months. Surprisingly, sketchy telephone service continued, even to some bunkers, though it’s hard to imagine why the Germans allowed it, unless they figured clever electricians could hook up illegal phones anyway or the Underground had its own telephone workers.[67]

Before dawn one day, the Żabińskis awoke, not to a chorus of gibbons and macaws as they used to, but to a jangling telephone and a voice that seemed to come from the far side of the moon. Maurycy Fraenkel, a lawyer friend who lived in the dying Ghetto, asked if he could “visit” them.

Although they hadn’t heard from him in quite a while, on at least one occasion Jan had visited him in the Ghetto, and they knew him as Magdalena’s “dearest friend,” so they quickly agreed. Antonina noted that several nerve-trampling hours followed for Magdalena,

whose lips were blue, and her face so white that we could see many freckles, normally almost invisible. Her strong, ever-busy hands were trembling. The sparkle had vanished from her eyes, and we could read only one painful thought on her face: “Will he be able to escape and come here?”

He did escape but arrived a gnarled specimen, bent over like a gargoyle from the Other Side, as people sometimes referred to the Ghetto, a Yiddish term, sitre akhre, for the dim world where demons dwell and zombies wear “a husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light.”[68]

The unbearable weight of ghetto life had physically crippled him—his head hung low between curved shoulders, his chin rested on his chest, and he breathed heavily. Swollen red from frost, his nose glowed against a pale, sickly face. When he entered his new bedroom, in a dreamy sort of way he dragged an armchair from beside the wardrobe to the darkest corner of the room, where he sat hunched over, shrinking himself even more, as if he were trying to become invisible.

“Will you agree to have me here?” he asked softly. “You will be in danger…. It is so quiet here. I can’t understand….” That was all he could manage before his voice trailed away.

Antonina wondered if his nervous system, adapted to the hurly-burly of Ghetto life, found this sudden plunge into calm and quiet unnerving, if it sapped more energy from him than the distressed world of the Ghetto had.

Born in Lwów, Maurycy Paweł Fraenkel had a passion for classical music, many composers and conductors as friends, and he had often organized small, private concerts. As a young man he studied law and moved to Warsaw, where he met Magdalena Gross, whose gift he greatly admired, at first becoming her patron, then close friend, and finally sweetheart. Before the war, she had brought him to the zoo, which he relished, and he had helped the Żabińskis buy several boxcars full of cement to use in zoo renovations.

Maurycy soon grew used to life across the river from the lurid Ghetto, and as he ventured out of corners and shadows, Antonina wrote that his backbone seemed to straighten a little, though never completely. He had a sarcastic sense of humor, though he never laughed out loud, and a huge smile would light his face until his eyes scrunched and blinked behind thick glasses. Antonina found him

calm, kind, agreeable, and gentle. He didn’t know how to be aggressive, frightful, or disagreeable even for a second. This was why he moved to the Ghetto when told to, without thinking twice about it. After he experienced the full tragedy of being there, he tried to commit suicide. By luck, the poison he used was too stale to work. After that, with nothing to lose, he decided to risk an escape.

Without documents he couldn’t register anywhere, so officially he ceased to exist for a long time, living among friends but gaunt and ghostly, one of the disappeared. He had lost many voices: the lawyer’s, the impresario’s, the lover’s, and it isn’t surprising that he found speaking or even coherence difficult.

While Antonina lay ill, Maurycy sat next to her bed for hours, slowly recovering his spiritual balance, Antonina thought, as well as the energy to talk again. What weighed heaviest was the colossal risk he created just by being there, and he often referred to Governor Frank’s threat of October 15, 1941, the decree that all Poles hiding Jews would be killed. Every Jew receiving help had to deal with this painful issue, including the dozen hidden in the villa and the rest in the animal houses, but Maurycy was especially bothered by the burden he added to the Żabińskis’ lives. It was one thing to expose himself to danger, he told Antonina, but the thought of spreading an epidemic of fear throughout the zoo, the hub of so many lives, piled on more guilt than he could shoulder.

In Antonina’s bedroom, shelves and drawers recessed into white walls, and the bed nestled in a shallow alcove, from which it jutted like a well-upholstered pier. All the furniture had been crafted from silver birch, a plentiful tree in Poland, both hard and durable, a pale wood whose fibers vary from plain to flame-like, with here and there brown knots and fine brown traces of insects that once attacked the cambium of the living tree.

On the south side of the room, beside tall windows, a glass door opened onto the wraparound terrace; and on the north side, three white doors led to the hallway, the attic, and the step-in closet where Guests hid. Instead of the lever handles of the villa’s other doors, the closet bore a high keyhole, and though it offered little space inside, a Guest could curl up there among the glide of fabrics and Antonina’s comforting scent. Because the closet opened on both sides like a magician’s trunk, bunched clothes concealed the opposite door whichever way one looked. As safety hatches go, it served well, especially since its hallway door began a foot or so above the floor, suggesting only a shallow cupboard, which a pile of laundry or a small table could easily disguise.

One day Maurycy, seated in a bedside chair, heard the housekeeper Pietrasia on the stairs and he hid in the closet, nestled among Antonina’s polka-dot dresses. As Pietrasia left the room, Maurycy quietly emerged and sat down, but before Antonina could say a word Pietrasia opened the door and rushed back in with a housekeeping question she’d forgotten to ask. Seeing a stranger, she stopped abruptly, breathed hard, and frantically crossed herself.

“So you will continue to take salicylic acid,” Maurycy said to Antonina in a doctorly tone, and delicately holding her wrist, he added: “And now I will check your pulse.” Later, Antonina wrote that her anxious pulse wasn’t hard to feel, and that his own had pounded down to his fingertips.

Pietrasia studied their faces, finding them calm, and shook her head in confusion. Mumbling that she must have had some sort of vision problem or blackout, she left the room, rubbing her brow and shaking her head as she went downstairs.

Antonina called Ryś and said: “Please bring me the doctor’s coat and hat and let him out of the house by the kitchen door, so that Pietrasia will see him leaving. After that, call her to check on the chickens. Do you understand?”

Ryś blinked his eyes, thought awhile, and then a smile crept over his face. “I’ll tell her that this morning I accidentally let a chicken out and we have to find it. Then the doctor can sneak back in through the garden door. That would work.”

“Thank you for being so smart,” Antonina told him. “Now hurry!”

From then on, Maurycy only roamed the house at night, after the housekeeper had left for the day and he could safely prowl downstairs, as if on forbidden tundra. Every evening, Antonina found him walking back and forth across the living room, slowly, reverently, so that he “would not forget how to walk,” he explained. At some point, he’d pause to check on the hamster he’d befriended, before joining other Guests for Fox Man’s piano concert.

One evening, between Rachmaninoff preludes, Fox Man took Maurycy aside and said, “Doctor, I’m bad at paperwork, and some of it’s in German—a language I don’t speak well at all. My fur business is growing and I really need a secretary…. Maybe you could help me?”

Maurycy had once confided to Antonina that, in seclusion, using an unfamiliar name, he felt like a phantom. This offer of Fox Man’s meant Maurycy could become real again, with papers and mobility, and, best of all, residency status in the villa as an employee of the fur farm. Becoming real was no small accomplishment, since occupation ushered in an overgrowth and undergrowth of official identity cards and documents—bogus working papers, birth certificate, passport, registration card, coupons, and passes. His new papers declared him to be Paweł Zieliński, the official secretary of the fox farm, and so he rejoined the household as a lodger, which also meant he didn’t have to hide in the upstairs closet, a space now available for another Guest. Becoming real brought psychological changes, too. He slept on a couch downstairs in the hamster’s narrow room, adjacent to the dining room, among the rustlings of his favorite pet, and Antonina noticed that his entire mood began to change.

Maurycy told Antonina that every night he prepared his bed slowly with a happiness unknown to him since before occupation, taking pleasure in the simple acts of carefully folding his only suit, frayed as it was, and laying it over a chair beside his own bookshelf, occupied by the handful of books he had salvaged from his old life, in a house where he could sleep unmolested, surrounded by a surrogate family whose presence padded his existence.

For a great many people, the Ghetto had erased the subtle mysticism of everyday life, such reassuring subliminals as privacy, agency, and above all the faith that allows one to lie down at night and surrender easily to sleep. Among the innocence of hamsters, Maurycy slept near his books, with documents that bestowed the status of being real, and, best of all, under the same roof as his beloved Magdalena. Finding love undemolished, with enough space to exist and his heart still limber, gave him hope, Antonina thought, and even renegade “moments of pleasure and joy, feelings he’d lost in Ghetto life.”

On February 2, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad in the first big defeat of the Wehrmacht, but only three weeks later Jews working in Berlin armaments factories were freighted off to Auschwitz, and by mid-March the Kraków Ghetto was liquidated. Meanwhile, the Underground continued attacks of various kinds, 514 since January 1; and on January 18 the first armed resistance began in the Warsaw Ghetto.

During this time of seismic upheaval, more and more Ghetto dwellers washed up on the deck of the villa, arriving weather-beaten, “like shipwrecked souls,” Antonina wrote in her diary. “We felt that our house wasn’t a light, flimsy boat dancing on high waves, but a Captain Nemo’s submarine gliding through deep ocean on its journey to a safe port.” Meanwhile, the war storm blew violently, scaring all, and “casting a shadow on the lives of our Guests, who fled from the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of gas chambers,” needing more than refuge. “They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war’s horrors would one day end,” while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.

Keeping the body alive at the expense of spirit wasn’t Antonina’s way. Jan believed in tactics and subterfuge, and Antonina in living as joyously as possible, given the circumstances, while staying vigilant. So, on the one hand, Jan and Antonina each kept a cyanide pill with them at all times, but on the other, they encouraged humor, music, and conviviality. To the extent possible, theirs was a bearable, at times even festive, Underground existence. Surely, in response to the inevitable frustrations brought about by living in close quarters, the Guests uttered Yiddish’s famous curses, which run the gamut from graphic (“May you piss green worms!” or “A barracks should collapse on you!”) to ornate:

Nonetheless, “I have to admit that the atmosphere in our house was quite pleasant,” Antonina confessed in her diary, “sometimes even almost happy.” This contrasted sharply with the texture of life and the mood inside even the best hideouts around town. For example, Antonina and Jan knew Adolf Berman well, and most likely read the letter Adolf received in November 1943, from Judit Ringelblum (Emanuel’s wife), which told of the mood in a bunker nicknamed “Krysia”:

Sharing a room, the hamster and Maurycy seemed to find amusement in each other, and Antonina noted how quickly the two became companions. “You know what,” Maurycy said one day, “I like this little animal so much, and since my new name is Paweł [Paul], I think his should be Piotr [Peter]. Then we can be two disciples!”

After supper each evening Maurycy turned Piotr loose on the table’s polished mesa, where the hamster skittered from plate to plate, whisking up crumbs until his fat cheeks dragged. Then Maurycy would gather him up in one hand and carry him back to his cage. In time, Piotr trusted him enough to float around the house on the carpet of Maurycy’s open palm, the pair became inseparable, and villa-mates began referring to Paweł and Piotr collectively as “the Hamsters.”