The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 24

IN THE SPRING OF 1943, HEINRICH HIMMLER WISHED TO GIVE Hitler an incomparable birthday present, one to elevate him above all others in Hitler’s favor. Himmler, who often held intimate conversations with Hitler’s photograph and strove to be Hitler’s best and most faithful servant, would have lassoed and gift-wrapped the moon if he could. “For him, I would do anything,” he once told a friend. “Believe me, if Hitler were to say I should shoot my mother, I would do it and be proud of his confidence.”[71] As a gift, he swore to liquidate the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, on April 19, the first day of Passover, an important Jewish holy day, and also the eve of Hitler’s birthday.

At 4 A.M., small German patrols and assault squads cautiously entered the Ghetto and caught a few Jews on their way to work, but the Jews somehow managed to escape and the Germans withdrew. At 7 A.M., Major General Jürgen Stroop, commander of an SS brigade, returned with 36 officers and 2,054 soldiers, and roared straight to the center of the Ghetto with tanks and machine guns. To his surprise, he found barricades manned by Jews who returned fire with pistols, several rifles, one machine gun, and many “Molotov cocktails,” gasoline-filled bottles bunged up with burning rags. Finns had recently borrowed the idea of the bottle grenade from Franco nationalists, who improvised it during the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, a time when predinner cocktails slid into vogue among the swanky set. When Russia invaded Finland, the Finns sarcastically named the bomb after Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov. Though vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped, Jews managed to hold Nazis at bay until nightfall, and again the following day when soldiers reappeared with flamethrowers, police dogs, and poison gas. From then on, about 1,500 guerrillas fought back at every chance.

What Himmler planned as a gift-wrapped massacre became a siege lasting nearly a month, until at last the Germans decided to torch everything—buildings, bunkers, sewers, and all the people in them. Many died in the fires, some surrendered, others committed suicide, and a few escaped to tell and write of the armageddon. Underground newspapers called upon Christian Poles to help escaping Jews find shelter, and the Żabińskis eagerly obliged.

“Nearby, on the other side of the wall, life flowed on as usual, as yesterday, as always,” one survivor wrote. “People, citizens of the capital, enjoyed themselves. They saw the smoke from the fires by day and the flames by night. A carousel went round and round beside the ghetto, children danced in a circle. It was charming. They were happy. Country girls visiting the capital rode on the roundabout, looking over the flames of the ghetto, laughing, catching leaves of ash that floated their way, as a loud carnival tune played.”[72]

Finally, on May 16, Major General Stroop sent Hitler a proud report: “The Warsaw Ghetto is no more.” According to the Underground Economic Bulletin of May 16, 1943, 100,000 apartments burned down, 2,000 places of industry, 3,000 shops, and a score of factories. In the end, the Germans captured only 9 rifles, 59 pistols, and several hundred homemade bombs of various sorts. Seven thousand Jews had been shot outright, 22,000 were shipped to the death mills of Treblinka or Majdanek, and thousands more went to labor camps. To achieve this cost the Germans only 16 dead and 85 wounded.

As everyone at the villa followed news of the Ghetto Uprising, Antonina recorded their mood as “electrified, stunned, helpless, proud.” At first, they’d heard that Polish and Jewish flags were hoisted above the Ghetto, then, as smoke and sounds of artillery fire rose, they learned from their friend Stefan Korboński, a high-ranking member of the Underground, that the Jewish Fighting Organization and the Jewish Fighting Union—only 700 men and women—were battling heroically, but “the Germans have removed, murdered, or burned alive tens of thousands of Jews. Out of the three million Polish Jews no more than 10 per cent remain.”[73]

Then, one terrible day, a gray rainfall settled on the zoo, a long, slow rain of ash carried on a westerly wind from the burning Jewish Quarter just across the river. Everyone at the villa had friends trapped in that final stage of annihilating Warsaw’s 450,000 Jews.

On December 10, just before curfew, after Jan had made it home safely again and Pietrasia had left for the day, Antonina summoned the family, Fox Man, Magdalena, Maurycy, Wanda, and others to the dinner table for their evening soup of borscht, a glossy red beet soup that reflects candlelight and pools like claret on a large silver spoon. Despite the swirling cold that appeared as snow-djinns under the streetlamps, the villa had enough coal to keep everyone warm that winter. In the kitchen, after dinner, while Ryś was changing the water in Szczurcio’s bathtub, he heard a quiet knocking. Carefully, he opened the door, then he ran excitedly into the dining room to tell his parents the news.

“Mom,” he said, “Sable’s daughter and her family are here!”

Mystified, Fox Man set down his newspaper. The fur farm didn’t raise sable, a small minklike animal.

“This house is totally crazy!” he said. “You use animal names for people and people’s names for animals! I never know whether it’s people or animals you’re talking about. Who or what is this ‘Sable’? I don’t know if it’s a first name or a code name or a person’s name or an animal’s name. It’s all too confusing!” Then he stood up dramatically and went to his room.

Antonina hurried to the kitchen to greet the new sables in the house: Regina Kenigswein, her husband Samuel, and their two boys—five-year-old Miecio and three-year-old Stefcio. Their youngest, Staś, less than a year old, went to a foundling home run by Father Boduen, because they worried the baby’s crying might draw attention. Regina was also “carrying a baby under her heart,” as the saying went—she was pregnant with her fourth.

In the summer of 1942, during the mass deportations to concentration camps, with the passages from the courthouse sealed and escape routes through the mazy sewers not yet mapped, Samuel had asked a Catholic friend, Zygmunt Piętak, for help escaping with his family and finding refuge on the Aryan side. A complex web of friends, acquaintances, and chance primed most escapes from the Ghetto, and that held true for the Kenigsweins. Samuel and his friend Szapse Rotholc had joined the Ghetto police force and quickly befriended sympathetic or greedy German guards and Polish smugglers. At night, carrying the sedated children in sacks, the Kenigsweins bribed guards and climbed over the Ghetto wall. At first they were placed in an apartment Piętak had rented for them, where they hid until late 1943. During that entire time, Piętak served as their only contact with the outside world, visiting them often with food and necessities. But when money ran out and they were evicted, Piętak asked Jan if he could lodge the family while the Underground found them shelter elsewhere.

Antonina knew Regina, the daughter of a Mr. Sable (in Polish, Sobol) who had supplied fruit for the zoo animals before the war, a kind, stoop-shouldered man who always wore the same old faded vest, and lumbered beneath heavy baskets of fruits and vegetables. Despite the load, he usually found room in his pockets for extra treats and gifts, like sweet cherries for the monkeys or a yellow apple for Ryś. But the real bridge between the Sable family and the Żabińskis was through Mr. Sable’s son, who belonged to the Ghetto labor force and sometimes stole away from his work site and ran to the zoo, where the Żabińskis gave him potatoes and other vegetables to smuggle home. One day, he explained that he’d been reassigned to another work gang inside the Ghetto, and implored Antonina to cajole his German boss into letting him continue working outside. Antonina did, and noted afterward:

“Maybe this Arbeitsführer was a good man, or maybe he was just shocked when I told him that without the food Sable took back to the Ghetto his family would starve to death. Using quite good Polish, he said that I should be ‘more careful.’ But young Sable was allowed to keep working outside the Ghetto and bringing food home to his family for over a month.”

Not only had the Żabińskis known Regina as a girl, they had attended her wedding and Jan had worked with her husband, Samuel—to build bunkers. A famous boxer, Samuel Kenigswein used to fight at the Maccabee and Stars sports clubs in Warsaw, and he was also a trained carpenter who helped Zegota create and remodel hideouts. During the war, architect Emilia Hizowa, a central figure in Zegota, invented false walls that slid open at the push of a button, and workmen installed them in flats around the city, where residents took care not to block them with furniture. The ploy worked: The uncluttered passed as the honest and drew no attention.

When the Kenigsweins first arrived at the zoo, their plight stirred Antonina deeply: “I looked at them with tears in my eyes. Poor chicks with big eyes full of fear and sadness looked back at me.” Regina’s eyes, especially, disturbed her, because they were “the leaden eyes of a young mother doomed to death.”

Antonina wrote that she felt a wrenching inside, a tug-of-war between compassion and self-interest, and a kind of embarrassment that she could do so little for them without endangering herself and her own family. Meanwhile, where would the Kenigsweins sleep? For several days, they stayed in the Lions House, then Regina and the children moved through the Pheasant House tunnel into the villa. Antonina found a large warm sheepskin coat and a pair of boots for Samuel, and before nightfall, he stole into the wooden Pheasant House and they locked him inside. The next morning, before the housekeeper arrived, Regina and her children quietly moved upstairs to a bedroom on the second floor, where they would stay for two months. When Antonina praised the children for making so little fuss or noise, she learned that a secret Ghetto school had taught them games to play in small areas, the quietest ways to move, and how to lie down fluently in as few bends as possible.

The fox farm employed many strangers; unknown boys sometimes stopped by the kitchen, looking for handouts; policemen often visited, too. What’s more, the housekeeper couldn’t really be trusted, nor could the Żabińskis tell her why their appetites suddenly swelled. Because they couldn’t steal food from the kitchen without her noticing, they went to her looking ravenous, empty plate in hand, asking for seconds, thirds, fourths. As a servant, it wasn’t her place to comment on their robust change in eating habits, but now and then Antonina heard her muttering: “I can’t believe how much they eat! I’ve never seen anything like it!” When she wasn’t looking, Ryś sneaked plates and bowls upstairs and downstairs, one after the other. Sometimes Jan or Antonina would tell him: “The lions need to be fed,” or the “pheasants,” “peacocks,” and so on, and Ryś would carry food to the caged Guests. But to play it safe, Antonina fired the housekeeper, replacing her with a woman named Franciszka, the sister-in-law of an old friend of Jan’s, someone they trusted, though even she never knew all the planes of existence and resistance in the three-dimensional chess game of villa life.