The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 30

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DURING SUMMER, THE BLACK FLY’S MARDI GRAS, CLOUDS of insects tormented the zoo as usual and anyone abroad at sunset wore long sleeves and pants, despite the heat. Inside the villa, Wicek the rabbit, on the prowl for something edible, heard a squeaky noise and hopped toward the kitchen, where he found Kuba the chick eating. During dinner, Kuba sometimes roamed the table, pecking up crumbs, with Wicek watching from a distance until, in one broad leap, he would suddenly appear next to a chunk of bread or a bowl of potatoes and start gobbling, to the fright of the chick and the great amusement of the humans.

Whenever Ryś lay awake after curfew, waiting for his father to return home, rabbit and chick perched on the edge of his comforter and sat vigil with him. According to Antonina, at the sound of the doorbell all three would grow excited and listen for Jan’s footsteps on the hall stairs, which echoed hollowly, because the wooden staircase floated right above steps leading from the kitchen to the basement, and the space resounded like a muffled drum.

Ryś would search his father’s face for exhaustion or worry, and sometimes Jan’s chilly hands unwrapped food he’d bought with food stamps, or he returned with an exciting story, or pulled another animal from his magic backpack. After Ryś fell asleep, Jan would quietly head downstairs as the rabbit hopped off the bed, the chick slid down the comforter, and both animals followed him to the dining room table for his evening meal. According to Antonina, the rabbit inevitably jumped onto Jan’s lap and the chick crawled onto Jan’s arm, then climbed to his neck, where he curled up in the jacket collar and slept; and even when Antonina removed Jan’s dishes and replaced them with papers and books, the animals refused to leave the warmth of lap and collar.

WARSAW ENDURED A BRUTALLY cold winter in 1943. Ryś caught a bad chest cold that sharpened into pneumonia, and he remained in hospital for several weeks, recovering without the punch of heavyweight antibiotics. Penicillin wasn’t discovered until 1939, in war-bound Britain, which couldn’t spare scientists to hunt the most fecund mold for human trials. But on July 9, 1941, Howard Florey and Norman Heatley flew to the United States on a plane with blacked-out windows, bearing a small priceless box of penicillin, and joined a lab in Peoria, Illinois, where they studied luxuriant molds from all over the world, only to discover that a strain of penicillin from a moldy cantaloupe in a Peoria market, when submerged in a deep vat and allowed to ferment, yielded ten times as much penicillin as competing molds. The requisite trials finally proved the drug’s value as the best antibacterial agent of its day, but wounded soldiers didn’t start receiving it until D-Day (June 6, 1944), and civilians and animals not until the end of the war.

When Ryś finally returned home, ice and snow had already started melting from the spring garden, and he could help weed, delve, and plant, with Wicek (whose fur had changed from black to silver gray in winter) hopping beside him, stride for stride like a well-trained dog. The nearly fledged chick pecked at the freshly turned soil, pulling up fat pink worms, and Antonina noted that the real chickens, the ones roosting in the chicken house, treated Kuba like an outsider, pecking him fiercely. However, Wicek allowed the chick to climb onto his back and nest deep, and she often saw them hopping around the garden together, rider and steed.

Before the war, the zoo had undulated from one landscape to another—mountains, valleys, ponds, lakes, pools, and woods—depending on the needs of its animals and Jan’s fancy as zoo director. But now that the zoo fell under the Warsaw Parks and Gardens Department, Jan answered to a bureaucrat who envisioned one continuous pullulation of green, with every woodlet, hedge, or obelisk echoing the others, according to his design. For that he needed Praski Park and, especially, the zoo’s large lawns and arboretum.

In the spring, Director Müller of the Königsberg Zoo, hearing that the Warsaw Zoo had been destroyed, offered to buy all the usable cages. His zoo, though considerably smaller than Jan’s, nestled in a fortress city founded by Teutonic knights and thought to be impregnable. Late in the war, Churchill would target Königsberg for one of the RAF’s controversial “terror raids,” ultimately destroying most of the city (zoo included), which finally surrendered to the Red Army on April 9, 1945, when it became known as Kaliningrad.

But in 1943, as self-crowned “Father of Warsaw,” Danglu Leist, the German president, didn’t want his city to be out-shone by a smaller one, and he decided Warsaw should have its zoo once more. Antonina described Jan as “ecstatic” when Leist invited him to submit a budget for a reborn zoo, remarking that even with the zoo animals gone, the buildings destroyed, the equipment dilapidated, the zoo still prospered in Jan’s heart and imaginings. At last, “phoenix-like,” she thought, the zoo, his career, and his passion for zookeeping might flourish again; and his Underground work could only profit from the bustle of an open zoo’s daily life, with its moving mosaic of visitors, animals, and workmen, against which the villa’s escapades might fade. A restored zoo would vitalize every contour of their life; it was perfect. Too perfect, Jan felt. He began immediately analyzing the plan for flaws, foremost that Poles were “boycotting all amusement activities created by the enemy.” Normally the zoo offered a wellspring of research and programs, but, fearing a Polish intelligentsia, the Nazis had allowed only elementary schools to stay open; all high schools and universities were banned. With the zoo’s teaching role abolished, it could offer only a small gallery of animals, and with food scarce and the city markets empty, how could the zoo justify feeding its animals? What’s more, a zoo might hurt the city’s economy, Jan reasoned, or expose him to danger if he didn’t run it according to German dictates. While such problems seemed insurmountable, Antonina admired Jan’s self-sacrifice, which she felt showed “character, bravery, and a realistic mind.”

“It’s hard to say what would be best for the city or the zoo,” Jan told Julian Kulski, Warsaw’s Polish vice president. “What if in fifty or a hundred years someone were to read a history of the Warsaw Zoo, re-created by Germans for their pleasure, even though it drained the city? How would you like that footnote to your biography?”

“I live with this sort of dilemma every day,” Kulski moaned. “I swear I never would have taken this job if all the people of Warsaw had been killed in 1939 and the Germans had repopulated the city with outsiders. I’m only doing it to serve my people.”

During the next two days, Jan carefully crafted a letter to Leist, in which he praised his decision to reopen the zoo and appended a colossal budget for basics the zoo would require. Leist didn’t bother with an answer, nor did Jan expect one, but neither did he expect what happened later.

Somehow the director of Parks and Gardens got wind of the proposed rebirth of the zoo, which would have destroyed his unified parks project, and so to foil Jan he sent word to the Germans that Dr. Żabiński’s services were no longer needed and his job should be terminated.

Antonina didn’t credit this to “antipathy or revenge,” but rather an “idee fixe” of leaving his mark on Warsaw’s parks. Still, it threatened Jan and his family, because anyone not needed by a German employer lost his working papers, which made him eligible for deportation to Germany to drudge in munitions factories. Since the villa belonged to the zoo, the Żabińskis could easily lose their home, many melinas, and Jan’s small salary. Then what would become of the Guests?

Kulski doctored the complaint against Jan before the Germans could read it, and, instead of losing work, Jan was transferred to the Pedagogic Museum on Jezuicka Street, a sleepy little enclave with only an elderly director, a secretary, and a few guards, whom the Germans seldom bothered. Jan said his job mainly entailed dusting old physical education equipment and preserving zoological and botanical posters lent to schools before the war. That left him more time to scheme with the Underground and teach biology in the “flying university.” Jan also kept a part-time job in the Health Department, so with one thing and another, Antonina and Ryś knew that Jan melted away each morning, to face who knew what hazards, and reappeared in the obscure no-man’s-land before curfew. Though Antonina didn’t realize exactly what he was up to, her mental cameo of Jan was haloed in danger and potential loss, and she tried to banish the naturally-arising mind-theaters in which he was captured or killed. “But I worried about his safety all day long,” she confessed.

In addition to building bombs, derailing trains, and poisoning pork sandwiches headed for the German canteen, Jan continued to work with a team of construction people building bunkers and hideouts. Zegota also rented five flats, just for refugees, who had to be regularly supplied with provisions and moved from one safe house to the next.

Officially, as spoken truths, Antonina knew few of Jan’s activities; he rarely told Antonina about them, and she rarely asked him to confirm what she suspected. She found it essential not to know too much about his warcraft, comrades, or plans. Otherwise, worry would pollute her mood all day and interfere with her equally vital responsibilities. Because many people relied on her for their sustenance and sanity, she “played a sort of hide-and-seek game” with herself, she noted, pretending not to know, as Jan’s shadow life floated around the edges of her awareness. “When people are constantly on the brink of life and death, it’s better to know as little as possible,” she told herself. But, without meaning to exactly, one still tends to conjure up scary scenarios, their pathos or salvation, as if one could endure a trauma before it occurred, in small manageable doses, as a sort of inoculation. Are there homeopathic degrees of anguish? With sleights of mind, Antonina half fooled herself enough to endure years of horror and upheaval, but there’s a difference between not knowing and choosing not to know what one knows but would rather not face. Both she and Jan continued to keep a small dose of cyanide with them at all times.

When the governor’s office phoned one day, summoning Jan, the villa-ites all assumed he’d be arrested, and as panic filled the house, they advised him to run away while he could. “But then who will guard and support everyone?” he asked Antonina, knowing that he would be condemning them to death.

The next morning, as Jan was leaving for the governor’s office, after they had said their goodbyes, she whispered the unspeakable: “Do you have your cyanide with you?”

His meeting was called for 9 A.M., and Antonina swore she felt the seconds ticking away inside while going through the motions of household chores. Around 2 P.M., as she was dropping peeled potatoes into a pot, she heard a voice whisper “Punia,” and she looked up, pulse skipping, to see Jan standing right in front of her at the open kitchen window. He was smiling.

“Do you know what they wanted?” he asked. “You’re not going to believe this. When I got to the governor’s office I was taken by car to Konstancin, Governor Fischer’s private residence. Apparently, his guards had discovered snakes around the house and in the woods nearby, and they were afraid members of the Underground might have dumped lots of poisonous vipers there to wipe out the German government! Leist told them to contact me as the only person who knew about snakes. Well, I proved there weren’t any poisonous vipers by catching the snakes by hand!” Then Jan added somberly: “Luckily, I didn’t need the cyanide this time.”

BEFORE LEAVING WORK one afternoon, Jan placed two pistols in his backpack and covered them with a freshly killed rabbit. As he stepped off the trolley at the Veterans Circle stop, he suddenly encountered two German soldiers, one of whom yelled “Hands up!” and ordered him to open his backpack for inspection.

“I’m lost,” Jan thought. With disarming casualness, he smiled and said: “How can I open my backpack with my hands up? You’d better check it yourself.” A soldier poked around a little inside the backpack and saw the carcass.

“Oh, a rabbit! Maybe for dinner tomorrow?”

“Yes. We have to eat something,” Jan said, still smiling.

The German said he could put his arms down, and with an “Also, gehen Sie nach Hause!” sent him on his way.

Antonina wrote that as she listened to Jan’s account of his close call, the veins in her head throbbed so hard she could feel her scalp moving. That Jan seemed amused as he told her the story, joking “about what might have been a tragedy, upset me even more.”

Jan confessed to a journalist years later that he had found such risks alluring, exciting, and felt a soldierly pride in ridding himself of fear and thinking fast in tight spots. “Cool” is how Antonina described him, a compliment. This thread of his personality, so unlike her own, she found admirable, alien, and also humbling, since she couldn’t match his feats of bravery. She had had close calls, too, but whereas she ranked Jan’s as heroic, she deemed hers merely lucky.

By the winter of 1944, for example, when the city gas lines didn’t work well and their second-floor bathroom had no hot water, pregnant Antonina craved the carnal luxury of a steaming bath. On a whim, she telephoned Jan’s cousins Marysia and Mikołaj Gutowski, who lived in the borough of Żoliborz, just north of City Center, a pretty neighborhood on the left bank of the Vistula that once belonged to monks who named it Jolie Bord (Beautiful Embankment). At the mention of hot water, just as she’d hoped, her cousin said they had plenty and invited her to spend the night. Antonina rarely left the villa alone, even to visit the butcher, market, or other shops, but this sybaritic rarity tantalized her, so “after getting permission from Jan,” she braved the deep snow, February winds, and German soldiers, and went to their house early one evening.

After a long bath, she joined her cousins in a dining room “beautifully decorated with elegant furniture and objects.” Glinting light caught her eye: a framed collection of tiny teaspoons silvering on one wall, each decorated with the emblem of a different German city—inexpensive souvenirs Gutowski had collected on prewar trips. After dinner she went to the guest room and fell asleep, but at 4 A.M. she woke to the growl of truck engines just outside the house, and heard Marysia and Mikołaj running to the front window. She followed them and stood in darkness watching trucks with tarp roofs parked at Tucholski Square, surrounded by a huge crowd and German police, with other trucks pulling up. Antonina wrote that as the soldiers kept loading hostages bound for the camps, she anxiously hoped they wouldn’t cart her off, too. Deciding not to get involved, she and her cousins returned to bed, but soon a loud pounding on the door summoned Mikołaj downstairs, still in his pajamas, and Antonina worried what her family would do without her help. Suddenly German soldiers stood in the hallway and asked for her documents.

Pointing at Antonina, a soldier asked Mikołaj: “Why isn’t this woman registered here?”

“She’s my niece, the zookeeper’s wife,” he explained in fluent German. “She’s just spending the night here because their bathroom is broken; she came to take a bath and spend the night—that’s all. It’s dark and slippery out, not a good time for a pregnant woman to be on the street alone.”

As the soldiers continued inspecting the house, they moved slowly from one elegantly furnished room to another, exchanging smiles of pleasure.

“So gemütlich,” one said, a word conveying a pleasant cheerfulness. “Back home bombing raids have destroyed our houses.”

Antonina noted later that she could well imagine his sorrow. In March, American bombers had dropped 2,000 tons of bombs on Berlin, and in April thousands of planes had jousted over Germany’s once-beautiful cities. The soldiers had much gemütlichkeit to long for, though the worst still awaited them. By the end of the war, the Allies would blanket-bomb German cities, including Dresden, historic seat of humanism and architectural splendor.[85]

Antonina stood to one side and quietly watched their faces for signs of trouble as they entered the dining room, where a soldier spied the pageant of German commemorative spoons on the wall. He paused, edged closer, and then his face flashed surprised delight as he drew his friend’s attention to the rows of perfectly arranged spoons, each celebrating a different city. The soldier said politely: “Thank you, everything is fine here, we’re finished with our inspection. Goodbye!” And they left.

Thinking over events later, Antonina figured all that saved her were sentimental memories and the idea that someone in the house had German roots. Marysia’s whim of buying German souvenirs, and displaying them in the folk-art way, had spared them arrest, interrogation, perhaps death. Despite all she chose not to see, Antonina still hid valuable secrets (people, locations, contacts), and so did Mikołaj, a Catholic engineer who, with Zegota’s help, sometimes hid Jews.

At last all went to bed, and the next morning Antonina returned home, where the Guests assured her that if she and Jan could escape narrowly so often, they must live “under the influence of a lucky star,” not just a crazy one.

By the time spring came, the hibernating zoo began churning with life, trees unfurled new leaves, the ground softened, and many city dwellers arrived, gardening tools in hand, to work their small vegetable plots. The Żabińskis gave refuge to even more desperate Guests, who joined the villa, underfoot and in closets, or crept into small sheds and cages. Their lack of comforts, photographs, and family relics greatly saddened Antonina, who described them in her diary as “people stripped of everything but their lives.”

In June, Antonina affirmed life’s relentless optimism by giving birth to a little girl named Teresa, who stole center stage despite the global tug-of-war. Ryś was fascinated by the newborn, and Antonina wrote that she fancied herself back in a fairy tale about a baby princess (Jabłonowski Princess Teresa had been born in 1910), for whom gifts arrived each day. A shiny golden wicker crib, a handmade baby quilt, knitted hats and sweaters and socks at a time when wool was hard to find—these seemed “priceless treasures laden with magic spells of protection.” One very poor friend had even embroidered cloth diapers with tiny pearl designs. Antonina doted on the tokens, removing them from tissue paper, touching them, admiring them, arranging them on her comforter like icons. Couples were trying not to give birth during the war, given life’s uncertainties, and this healthy baby posed a good omen in one of the most superstitious of cultures, especially about child-bearing.[86]

According to Polish folklore, for example, a pregnant woman dared not gaze at a cripple or the baby could become crippled, too. Looking into a fire while pregnant supposedly caused red birthmarks, and looking through a keyhole doomed the baby to crossed eyes. If an expectant mother stepped over a rope on the ground or under a clothesline, the umbilical cord would tangle during childbirth. Mothers-to-be should only stare at beautiful vistas, objects, and people, and could produce a happy, sociable child by singing and talking a lot. Craving sour foods foretold a boy, craving sweets a girl. If possible, one should give birth on a lucky day of the week at a lucky hour to guarantee the baby’s lifelong good fortune, whereas a sinister day doled out hexes. Although the Virgin Mary blessed Saturdays, when any newborn automatically evaded evil, Sunday’s children could blossom into mystics and seers. Superstitious rituals accompanied the saving and drying of the umbilical cord, the first bath, first haircut, first breast-feeding, and so on. Since it marked the end of infancy, weaning held special significance:

Also, pregnancy should stay hidden as long as possible, and not be divulged, even by the husband, lest a jealous neighbor cast the evil eye on the baby. In Antonina’s day, the evil eye, born of envy to sour and begrudge good fortune, worried many Poles, who believed a happy event invited evil and that praising a newborn cast a vicious spell. “What a beautiful baby” became so poisonous that, as antidote, the mother had to counter with: “Oh, it’s an ugly child,” and then spit in disgust. Following similar logic, when a girl got her first period it was customary for her mother to slap her. The dehexing fell mainly to mothers, who saved offspring by forgoing shows of happiness and pride, thus sacrificing what they prized dearly for what they valued most, because the moment one loved something it became eligible for loss. While to Catholics, Satan and his minions always hovered, Jews also ran a daily gauntlet of demons, the best known of which is perhaps the zombie-like dybbuk, the spirit of someone who died and has returned to haunt the body of a living person.

On July 10, Antonina finally emerged from bed, to celebrate Teresa’s birth at a small christening party. Traditionally one served braided bread and cheese on such an occasion, to dispel evil forces. Out came bacon-stuffed meat preserves, made from the carcasses of crows shot by Germans the previous winter. Fox Man cooked waffles, and Maurycy made a traditional liqueur of honeyed vodka, called pępkowa (navel). Of course, in Maurycy’s eyes, the occasion required the presence of his hamster, so Piotr joined the table and began collecting crumbs as usual, carefully checking each plate and cup, perking up his head, sniffing around, whiskers twitching, at last discovering the source of a new aroma which spirited sweetly from the empty liqueur glasses. Lifting a honey-scented glass in his tiny paws, he licked with pleasure, then went to the other glasses and imbibed until he grew drunk, as the partiers laughed. He paid dearly for the spree: the next morning, Maurycy found his companion lying stiff and lifeless on the floor of his cage.