The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 25

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IN THE MIDDLE OF DECEMBER, JAN SECURED FRESH LODGINGS for the Kenigsweins with engineer and former career officer Feliks Cywiński, who had fought beside Jan during World War I and now worked closely with him in the Underground. Married with two children, Cywiński hid many people in his apartments at 19 and 21 Sapieżyńska Street, at his sister’s flat, his parents’, and in the upholstery shop of a friend (who closed it for a while, supposedly for renovations). There, he fed as many as seventeen people, providing separate pots and dishes for those who kept kosher, and bringing in medicine and an Underground doctor when necessary. A secret “Coordinating Committee of Democratic and Socialist Doctors,” set up in 1940, included over fifty physicians who cared for the sick or wounded, and they also published their own monthly periodical, in which they debunked Nazi propaganda about racial purity and disease. Once a month, Cywiński would move the Jews hiding with him to the zoo or some other safe house, so that he could invite neighbors and friends to his home, proving he’d nothing to hide. When his money ran out, Feliks went into debt, sold his own home, and used the profits to rent and furnish four more apartments for hiding Jews. Like the Kenigsweins, his charges often arrived from the zoo and stayed only a day or two, while documents were procured and other homes found.

Moving the Kenigsweins created a new problem for Antonina and Jan—how to transfer so many people without attracting notice. Antonina decided to lessen the risk by bleaching their black hair blond, since many Germans and Poles, too, assumed all blonds came from Scandinavian stock and all Jews had dark hair. This fallacy endured, even when jokes circulated about Hitler’s non-Aryan mustache and dark hair. From photographs and a comment of Jan’s, one learns that, at some point, Antonina had bleached her own brown hair, but that only meant lightening it several shades, not transforming it from shadow-black to citrine, and so she consulted a barber friend who gave her bottles of pure peroxide and a recipe. She needed a recipe because, as Emanuel Ringelblum emphasized: “In practice, it turned out that platinum blondes gave rise to more suspicion than brunettes.”

One day, she led the Kenigsweins into the upstairs bathroom, locked the door, and stationed Ryś outside as guard. Using cotton balls soaked in diluted peroxide, she rubbed down one head after another, creating scalded red scalps and blistered fingers, but still their hair wouldn’t yield a blond, even if she strengthened the caustic solution. When she opened the door at last, her victims emerged with brassy red hair.

“Mom, what did you do?” Ryś asked in alarm. “They all look like squirrels!” From that day on, “Squirrels” became the Kenigsweins’ code name.

At night, Jan escorted the Kenigsweins through the basement tunnel to the Pheasant House and downtown to Feliks’s home on Sapieżyńska Street. There, in times of danger, refugees would climb into a bunker whose entrance was a camouflaged opening in the bathroom, tucked in a recess behind the bathtub. Feliks didn’t know that Regina was pregnant until she went into labor one day, and then, since it was already after curfew, too late to call a doctor, the midwifery fell to him. “My happiest moment,” he said in a postwar interview, “was when a child was born literally into my hands. This was during the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The atmosphere in the town was very tense and the terror was raging at its ugliest, as German gendarmes and blackmailers penetrated the terrain and searched it thoroughly looking for escaping Jews.” Feliks cared for them until the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, when Samuel Kenigswein, a World World I veteran, spearheaded a battalion of his own.

Elsewhere in the city, other rescuers were also resorting to cosmetic tricks to disguise Jews, with some salons specializing in more elaborate ruses. For instance, Dr. Mada Walter and her husband opened a remarkable Institut de Beaute on Marszałkowska Street, where Mrs. Walter gave Jewish women lessons on how to appear Aryan and not attract notice.

“There I saw a dozen more or less undressed ladies,” Władysław Smólski, a Polish author and member of Zegota, testified after the war. “Some were seated under all kinds of lamps, others, with cream upon their faces, were being subjected to mysterious treatments. As soon as Mrs. Walter came, they all assembled around her, brought up chairs, and sat down, opening books. Then began their catechism instruction!”[74]

Although the women bore Semitic features, each one wore a cross or medallion around her neck, and Mrs. Walter taught them key Christian prayers and how to behave invisibly in church and at ceremonial events. They learned ways to cook and serve pork, prepare traditional Polish dishes, and order the moonshine vodka called bimber. Typically, when the police stopped Jews on the street, they checked the men for circumcision and ordered the women to recite the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary.

The smallest detail could betray them, so Mrs. Walter ran a kind of charm school, the charm of nondetection, which required just the right blend of fashionable makeup, restrained gestures, and Polish folk customs. This meant resisting all Jewish expressions—such as asking “What street are you from?” instead of “What district are you from?” They paid special attention to the habitual and the commonplace—how they walked, gestured, acted in public—with men reminded to remove their hats in church (in temple they would have kept them on), and everyone taught to celebrate their own patron saint’s day as well as those of friends and family.

Hair belonged off the forehead, neatly reined in or swept up into more Aryan styles, while bangs, curls, or frizz might raise suspicion. Black hair required bleaching to dull its glitter, but shouldn’t become implausibly pale. When it came to choosing clothes, Mrs. Walter advised: “Avoid red, yellow, green or even black. The best color is grey, or else a combination of several inconspicuous colors. You must avoid glasses of the shape that’s now fashionable, because they emphasize the semitic features of your nose.” And some outstanding semitic noses required “surgical intervention.” Fortunately, she worked with Polish surgeons (such as the eminent Dr. Andrzej Trojanowski and his colleagues) who reshaped Jewish noses and operated on Jewish men to restore foreskins, a controversial and clandestine surgery with an ancient tradition.[75]

Throughout history, “reskinning,” as the Romans called it, had saved persecuted Jews from discovery, and the Bible reports the practice as early as 168 B.C., during the reign of Antiochus IV, when the Greco-Roman fashion of naked sports events and public bathing emerged in Judea. Jewish men hoping to disguise their lineage had only two choices: they could try to avoid scenes of nakedness, or they could redress their appearance by using a special weight, known as the Pondus Judaeus, to stretch the foreskin until it covered the glans. Stretching created small tears between the skin cells, and as new cells formed to bridge the gap, the foreskin lengthened. No doubt this took a while, hurt, and wasn’t always easy to hide, though clothes of the era draped loosely. During World War II, the same effect could be achieved surgically, though, needless to say, medical literature of the Nazi era doesn’t detail the procedure.

In the circles within circles of Underground life, Jan surely knew the Walters; the bleach and recipe Antonina used may well have come from their salon. Mrs. Walter and her elderly husband hid five Jews at a time in their own home and offered “an endless chain” of people lessons in “good looks” at the Institut de Beaute throughout the war. In later years, Mrs. Walter wrote that “the accidental fact that not one of the casual inhabitants of our war-time nest fell victim to disaster gave rise to a superstitious legend which continually increased the influx of guests.” In fact, she explained, her actions were a simple voodoo of compassion: “Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers.”[76]