The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 27

IN SPRING OF 1943, ANTONINA ROSE FROM BED AT LAST, IN tune with hibernating marmots, bats, hedgehogs, skunks, and dormice. Before the war, she had loved the yammering zoo in springtime, with all its noisy come-ons, bugger off!s, and hallelujahs, especially at night, in the quiet city, when feral noises leapt from the zoo as from a giant jukebox. Animal time colliding with city time produced an offbeat rhythm she relished and often wrote of, as in this reverie in her children’s book about lynxes, Rysie:

While chill still clung to the air and her muscles felt faint from disuse, she lived in a cocoon of woolen undergarments, heavy sweaters, and warm stockings. Wobbling around the house with a cane, she had to learn how to walk again, her knees trembled, and things slipped from her fingers. A toddler again after so many years, she felt cosseted by Magdalena and the others, who allowed her to be a sick little girl, fussed over by family, but she also scolded herself and “felt so embarrassed and useless.” For three months, others had done her work for her, waited on her, nursed her, and even now, eager to return to her role in the working household, she couldn’t handle chores. “What kind of woman am I?” she chided herself. Whenever she said so in their earshot, Magdalena, Nunia, or Maurycy would counter with:

“Stop that! We’re helping you out of pure selfishness. What on earth could we do without you? Your only job is to get stronger. And to give us our orders! We’ve missed all your energy, wit, and, okay, sometimes your scatterbrained behavior. Amuse us again!”

Then Antonina would laugh, brighten, and slowly wind the machinery of the crazy household as if it were an antique clock. She wrote that they monitored her constantly, fussed, “didn’t allow me fatigue, chill, hunger, or worry,” and in return, she thanked them for “spoiling me like no one ever had.” Writing those words is the closest she comes to talking about being an orphan. Always present in their absence, her dead parents belonged to singed events, a grief before words when she was only nine, a final end at the hands of the Bolsheviks too horrible for a child to keep imagining. They may have haunted her memories, but she never mentions them in her memoirs.

Antonina’s friends bundled her up, encouraged her to heal through rest, and embraced by that close circle, she thrived and sometimes “even forgot the occupation” and her “relentless yearning for the war to end soon.”

Jan continued to leave the house early and return just before curfew hour, and, although the villa-ites never saw him at work, at home they found him short-tempered and uneasy. To keep their life livable, he checked and rechecked every ritual and routine, a taxing responsibility, since the tiniest chaos, neglect, or impulse could unmask them. Small wonder that he rigidified from the strain and began addressing them as his “soldiers” and Antonina as his “deputy.” Jan ruled the villa and the Guests couldn’t disobey him, but the atmosphere began to sour because, as a volatile dictator, Jan apparently made daily life tense by often yelling at Antonina, despite her efforts to please him. In her diary, she wrote that “he was always on the alert, took all the responsibilities on his shoulders, and protected us from bad events, trying to check everything very carefully. Sometimes he talked to us as if we were his soldiers…. He was cold and expected more from me than from the rest of people in our household…. [T]he happy atmosphere in our home was gone.”

She went on to say that nothing she did ever seemed good enough, nothing made him proud of her, and perpetually disappointing him felt wretched. In time, her loyal, angry Guests stopped talking to Jan entirely or even making eye contact with him—hating how he treated her but unwilling to confront him, they blotted him out. Jan bristled at their silent protest, complained that civil disobedience in the household wouldn’t do, and anyway why were they blaming and excluding him?

“Hey, everybody! You’re ignoring me just because I criticize Punia a little,” he said, using one of his pet names for her (Little Wildcat, or Bush Kitten). This is undeserved! You think I don’t have a say here at home? Punia isn’t always right!”

“You’re away all day,” Maurycy said quietly. “I know your life outside of this house is full of all sorts of dangers and traps. But that keeps it interesting, too. Tola’s situation is different,” he said, using another of Antonina’s nicknames. “It reminds me of a soldier who’s on constant duty on a battlefield. She has to stay alert all the time. How can you not understand this and scold her for being a little absentminded now and then?”

One afternoon in March the housekeeper yelled from the kitchen, “My God! Fire! Fire!” Looking out the window, Antonina saw a huge mushroom of smoke and flames, a devouring blaze in the Germans’ storage area, where a blast of wind was spreading fire like honey across the roof of the barracks. Antonina grabbed her fur coat and ran outside to check on the zoo buildings and the fox farm, which stood only a gust away from the flames.

A German soldier biked up fast to the villa, dismounted, and said angrily:

“You set this fire! Who lives here?”

Antonina looked at his hard face and smiled. “You don’t know?” she said pleasantly. “The director of the old Warsaw Zoo lives here. I am his wife. And we’re much too serious for pranks like setting a fire.”

Anger met by pleasantries is hard to sustain, and the soldier calmed down.

“Okay, but those buildings over there—”

“Yes. Our previous employees occupy two small apartments. They’re nice people I know and trust. I’m sure they didn’t do it. Why would they risk their lives to burn down a stupid haystack?”

“Well, something started it,” he said. “It wasn’t lightning. Someone had to set this fire!”

Antonina faced him innocently. “You don’t know? I’m almost positive who set the fire,” she said.

The amazed-looking German waited for her to solve the mystery.

As Antonina continued in a friendly, conversational tone, rarely used German words floated up from a deep bog of memory. “Your soldiers take their girlfriends to that place all the time. The days are still pretty cold, and it’s cozy to sit in hay. Most likely a couple was there again today, they smoked a cigarette, and left a butt there… and you know the rest.” Despite her poor German, he understood perfectly well and started to laugh.

Heading into the house, they talked of other things.

“What happened to the zoo’s animals?” he asked. “You had the twelfth elephant born in captivity. I read about it in the newspaper. Where is she now?”

Antonina explained that Tuzinka survived the first days of bombings, and that Lutz Heck had shipped her to Königsberg with some other animals. As they approached the porch, two German policemen pulled up on a motorcycle with a sidecar, and her companion told them the whole story, after which the men laughed crudely, then they all went indoors to write a report.

Soon after they left the telephone rang. She heard a stern German voice say, “This is the Gestapo,” then speak too fast for her to follow. But she caught the words “Fire?” and “Who am I talking to?”

“The haystack was on fire,” she said as best she could. “A building burned down, a fire truck came, and everything is fine now. The German police were already here and they wrote a report.”

“You say they did an investigation? Everything is fine? Okay. Danke schön.”

Her hand was shaking so hard she had trouble setting the telephone receiver back on its cradle, as all the events of the past hour started flooding in on her and she replayed them inside her head, making sure she’d done and said the right things. With the coast clear, the Guests came out of hiding and hugged her, praising her bravery. In her diary, she noted that she “couldn’t wait to tell Jan.”

During supper, Jan listened to the whole story, but instead of the hoped-for approval, he grew quiet and thoughtful.

“We all know that our Punia is a wunderkind,” he said. “But I’m a little surprised that everyone is so excited about this event. She acted exactly the way I’d expect her to. Let me explain what I mean from a psychological point of view.

“You already know from our stories about the zoo before the war that whenever I had a tough problem with some animal—whether it was sick or hard to feed or just too wild—I would always assign the animal to Punia. And I was right to, because nobody can handle animals as well. Why am I telling you this? Not as an advertisement for her, or to prove how wonderful she is, or how much in love I am, or to make her feel good. As we all know, even as a child, Punia lived around a lot of animals and identified with them.

“It’s as if she’s porous. She’s almost able to read their minds. It’s a snap for her to find out what’s bothering her animal friends. Maybe because she treats them like people. But you’ve seen her. At a moment’s notice, she can lose her Homo sapiens nature and transform herself into a panther, badger, or muskrat!”

“Well, as an artist working with animals,” Magdalena said, laughing, “I have a flawless eye for these things, and I’ve always said that she is a young female lion.”

Jan continued: “She has a precise and very special gift, a way of observing and understanding animals that’s rare, certainly not typical for an untrained woman naturalist. It’s unique, a sixth sense.”

Antonina listened with pride to her husband’s surprising speech, a banquet of praise so lengthy and rare that immediately afterward she recorded his words verbatim in her diary, adding: “He was talking about my talents, praising me in the presence of other people. It never happened before!… He was serious!? He had called me ‘silly’ so often I’d started hearing it as a second name.”

“I’m talking about this,” Jan said, “to explain a little how animals react in different situations. We know how cautious wild animals can be, how easily they scare when their instinct tells them to defend themselves. When they sense a stranger crossing their territory, they get aggressive for their own protection. But, in Punia’s case, it’s like that instinct is absent, leaving her unafraid of either two-or four-legged animals. Nor does she convey fear. That combination might persuade people or animals around her not to attack. Especially animals, which are better at telepathy than humans, and can read each other’s brain waves.

“When our Punia radiates a calm and friendly interest in her animals… she works as a sort of lighting rod for their fear, absorbs it, neutralizes it. Through her comforting tone of voice, her gentle movements, the safe way her eyes meet them, she imparts a trust in her ability to protect them, heal them, nourish them, and so on.

“You see what I’m trying to say—Punia is able to emit waves of calm and understanding. Humans aren’t as sensitive as other animals when it comes to signaling in this way, but everyone can tap into some of these invisible waves, more or less, depending on how sensitive their nervous system is. I think some people are much better at catching these signals, and I don’t think that it has any connection with intellectual ability. It may even be that more primitive organisms are more receptive. If we were to use scientific nomenclature, we might ask: What kind of psychic transmitter is Punia, and what kind of message is she sending?”

Jan seems to have been influenced by Friedrich Bernhard Marby (1882–1966), an occultist, astrologer, and anti-Nazi who combined the occult tradition of Nordic runes with the scientific principles of his day:

If Jan were alive today, he’d know about the role of mirror neurons in the brain, special cells in the premotor cortex that fire right before a person reaches for a rock, steps forward, turns away, begins to smile. Amazingly, the same neurons fire whether we do something or watch someone else do the same thing, and both summon similar feelings. Learning from our own mishaps isn’t as safe as learning from someone else’s, which helps us decipher the world of intentions, making our social whirl possible. The brain evolved clever ways to spy or eavesdrop on risk, to fathom another’s joy or pain quickly, as detailed sensations, without resorting to words. We feel what we see, we experience others as self.

“It’s a funny thing,” Jan went on, “she’s not a child, she’s not stupid, but her relationship with other people tends to be very naïve; she believes that everyone is honest and kind. Punia knows that there are bad people around her, too, she recognizes them from a distance. But she really can’t believe that they may hurt her.

“Another thing Punia has going for her is the way she observes her surroundings and notices every little detail. She saw German soldiers dating their girls on that haystack, and knowing the Germans’ crude sense of humor, she used it well in this particular situation. She didn’t worry about her German vocabulary being poor, because her voice and speech are very musical and calming. Her instinct and intuition told her exactly what to do. And, of course, her looks were her trump card. She’s tall, thin, blond—the ideal figure of a German woman, the Nordic type. I’m sure that was a big plus, too.

“But if you want to know what I think about the outcome of this tragic comedy, I think the Germans found Punia’s explanation for the fire that destroyed their buildings very convenient. It gave them an excuse not to investigate all the stealing that’s been going on over there. The fire was an easy way to cover up crime. If they really wanted to punish someone, Punia wouldn’t have had such an easy time.

“I don’t want to criticize your heroine—Punia did a great job. She was very clever, and I’m glad I can trust her, but I like to look at things from a more cynical point of view.”

He’d made her near nightmare sound relatively unimportant, her response cool and calculating, maybe as he imagined it would have been for him. Talented and omnicompetent as Antonina was, she revered and deferred to Jan, often felt inadequate, and was perpetually trying to live up to his expectations and gain his approval. At times Ryś, following his father’s example, snarled that as a male even he could understand things beyond a ditzy female. Yet Antonina comes across from her diaries as someone who felt deeply loved by Jan, Ryś, and the Guests, and an important complement to her husband, whom she regarded as strict with everyone, most of all himself. She also agreed with him about the subtle ways that all animals communicate. After Jan’s mini-lecture on her mind-bending, she found it hard to sleep. Such praise in front of her friends! Rare as light in a Polish winter.

“Jan was right, the German soldiers’ reaction to my telepathic waves was similar to the zoo animals,” Antonina reflected in her diary. There were many mystical episodes in her past when she felt certain she could build an invisible bridge with animals, make them listen to her requests, bridle their fear, trust her. According to Antonina, her first experiences of this sort happened when she was a girl and spent all her free time in the stables around high-spirited, purebred horses, but for as long as she could remember animals had calmed down around her. Maybe her unusual degree of empathy and alert senses were part of a more creatural sensibility some people inherit, one tinted and tilted by childhood experience. Also, and importantly in Antonina’s case, children with insecure attachments to their parents sometimes forge a strong bond with nature itself.

That night she lay awake thinking about the thin veil between humans and other animals, only the faintest border, which people nonetheless drew as “a symbolic Chinese Wall,” one that she, on the other hand, saw as shimmery, nearly invisible. “If not, why do we humanize animals and animalize humans?”

For hours, Antonina lay thinking about people and animals, and how little animal psychology had developed compared with other sciences, say chemistry or physics. “We’re still walking, eyes closed, in the labyrinth of psychological enigma,” she thought. “But, who knows, maybe one day we’ll discover the secrets of animal behavior, and maybe one day we’ll master our bleaker instincts.”

Meanwhile, Antonina and Jan ran their own informal study throughout the war, living closely with mammals, reptiles, insects, birds, and an arcade of humans. Why was it, she asked herself, that “animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast”?