The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 31

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NOTHING HAD CHANGED IN THE VILLA’S ROSTER OR ROUTINES, but a new malaise hung in the air, Antonina thought, as everyone went about their chores with a friendly smile, while trying to hide scorched nerves. People seemed “distracted,” and “conversations stumbled, sentences fell apart mid-word.” On July 20, a bomb planted by Count von Stauffenberg exploded at Hitler’s Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair) headquarters in the Prussian forest, though Hitler escaped with only minor injuries. After that, panic grew in the local German population, and columns of retreating soldiers began streaming through Warsaw, blowing up buildings as they fled westward. Gestapo members burned their files, purged warehouses, and shipped personal belongings back to Germany. The German governor, mayor, and other administrators bolted away in any handy truck or cart, leaving only a garrison of 2,000 soldiers behind. As the Germans rushed out, creating a void, many Poles hurried in from nearby villages, afraid the coming soldiers might ransack their houses or farms.

Convinced the Uprising would start any minute, Jan felt sure it would cost only a few days at most for the 350,000 men of the Home Army to overwhelm the remaining Germans. In theory, once the bridges were captured by the Poles, battalions from both sides of the Vistula River could join ranks and create one single powerful army to liberate the city.

On July 27, when Russian troops reached the Vistula sixty-five miles south of Warsaw (Antonina said she could hear the gunfire), German Governor Hans Frank summoned 100,000 Polish men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to work nine hours a day building fortifications around the city, or be shot. The Home Army urged everyone to ignore Frank’s order and start preparing for battle, a call to arms echoed the next day by the Russians, pushing closer, who broadcast in Polish: “The hour for action has arrived!” By August 3, as the Red Army bivouacked ten miles from the right-bank district that included the zoo, life grew even tenser in the villa and people kept asking: “When will the Uprising start?”

The dramatis personae at the zoo changed abruptly. Most Guests had already left to join the army or escaped to safer melinas: Fox Man planned to move to a farm near Grójec; Maurycy joined Magdalena in Saska Kępa; and although the lawyer and his wife fled to the other side of Warsaw, their two daughters, Nunia and Ewa, decided to stay at the villa, because if something were to happen to Antonina, they insisted, then newborn Teresa, Ryś, Jan’s seventy-year-old mother, and the housekeeper would have to manage all alone, which wasn’t feasible. Although soldiers started evacuating civilians from the lands closest to the river, Jan hoped his family could remain in the zoo, since Polish soldiers were bound to win the Uprising soon, and the strain of traveling might kill the baby or Jan’s infirm mother. In his testimony to the Jewish Institute, he recalled that at 7 A.M. on August 1, a girl came to summon him for battle. This would have been someone like the Home Army messenger Halina Dobrowolska (during the war, Halina Korabiowska), whom I met one sunny summer afternoon in Warsaw. Now a lively woman in her eighties, she was a teenager during the war, and she remembers the day she was dispatched by bicycle and tram on a long, dangerous journey into the suburbs to summon fighters and warn families that the Uprising was due to start. She needed to take a trolley and finally found one, though the conductor was packing up, since most Warsawians had already abandoned their jobs and raced home to prepare for battle. Anticipating just such a problem, the Underground had supplied Halina with American dollars, which the conductor accepted, and he nervously drove her to her destination.

Jan raced upstairs to where Antonina slept with Teresa, and told her the news.

“Yesterday, you had different information!” she said anxiously.

“I don’t understand what’s happening either, but I have to go and find out.”

Their friend Stefan Korboński, who was also surprised by the timing of the Uprising and not given warning, captures some of the fervor and haste on the downtown streets that day:

Four hours later, Jan returned home to say goodbye to Antonina and his mother, explaining that the Uprising would be starting any moment. He handed Antonina a metal mess tin and said:

“There’s a loaded revolver in here, just in case German soldiers show up….”

Antonina froze. “I was paralyzed in place,” she wrote, and said to Jan: “German soldiers? What are you thinking? Did you forget what we believed only a few days ago, that the Underground army was supposed to win?… You don’t believe anymore!”

Jan replied grimly: “Look, a week ago we had a good chance of winning this battle. It’s too late now. The timing isn’t right for the Uprising. We should wait. Twenty-four hours ago, our leaders thought the same. But last night they suddenly changed their minds. This kind of indecisiveness can lead to very bad consequences.”

Jan didn’t know that the Russians, supposed allies, had their own voracious agenda, and that Stalin, who had been promised a chunk of Poland after the war, wanted both the Germans and the Poles to be defeated. Meanwhile, he refused to allow Allied planes headed for Poland to land on Russian airfields.

“I hugged Jan tight, my face pressed hard against his cheek,” Antonina recalled. “He kissed my hair, looked at the baby, and then ran downstairs. My heart was pounding like crazy!” She hid the tin with the revolver under her bed and went to check on Jan’s mother, whom she found sitting in an armchair, saying her rosary beads, “her face wet with tears.”

Jan’s mother would have abided by the custom of making a quick cross on her forehead and inviting Mary to bless Jan’s journey. Our Lady of the Home Army (the Virgin Mary) was patron saint for the soldiers during the Uprising, when one found hastily built altars to her in the city and shrines along the roadways (Poland still has many today). Soldiers and their families also prayed to Jesus Christ, and often carried in their wallet a small portrait of Christ with the inscription Jezu, ufam tobie (In Jesus we trust).

We don’t know what Antonina did to ease the pincers of uncertainty, but Jan once informed a journalist that she had been raised a strict Catholic, and since she’d had both children baptized, and always wore a medallion around her neck, she most likely prayed. During the war, when all hope had evaporated and only miracles remained, even unreligious people often turned to prayer. Some of the Guests used fortune-telling to help shore up morale, but as a self-proclaimed man of reason, and the son of a frankly atheist father, Jan frowned on superstition and religion, which means Antonina and Jan’s devoutly Catholic mother may have kept some house secrets of their own.

As airplanes flew low strafing runs over the city, Antonina tried to guess what was happening on the other side of the Vistula, and finally went up to the terrace, from which she searched the bright sizzle of gunfire across the river, reading every snap as a clue. The shots sounded “separate, personal,” she noted, not like the streaming echoes of a big military battle.

The leadership of the zoo’s little fiefdom fell to her, she realized, including Ryś, four-week-old Teresa, the girls Nunia and Ewa, her mother-in-law, the housekeeper, Fox Man and his two helpers. The “heavy ballast of being responsible for the lives of others” slid around her body and stole through her mind as obsession:

Sleep surrendered to war, and for twenty-three nights she forced herself to stay awake, terrified that she might doze off and not hear a noise, however tiny, that signaled danger. In some ways, this guardian spirit wasn’t new to Antonina, who remembered how, during the shellings of 1939, she had shielded her young son with her body. It sprang from the ferocity of motherhood, she decided, the instinct to battle if need be to protect one’s family.

Even though the battlefield lay across the river, she smelled death, sulfur, rot on westerly breezes, and heard the relentless clash of guns, artillery shells, and bombs. Without news or contact with the rest of the city, Antonina imagined the villa transformed “from an ark to a tiny ship on a vast ocean, hopelessly adrift without compass or rudder,” and she expected a bomb at any moment.

Stationed on the terrace, she and Ryś craned to see the fires across the river and divine events. At night, they watched bright sparks of gunfire—single shots, not the rapid echoes of a field battle—and airplanes whining and whistling above the city until early morning.

“Dad is fighting in the worst part of the city,” Ryś kept repeating as he pointed toward the Old City. For hours he stood sentry’s watch, scouting the battle through binoculars, searching for his father’s shape, ducking down whenever he heard a bomb growling toward him.

Just outside the door to Antonina’s bedroom, a metal train ladder led up to the flat roof, and Ryś often climbed it, binoculars in hand. Germans stationed in Praski Park had taken over a small amusement park near the bridge that included a tower for parachute-jump rides, from which they spotted Ryś atop the roof, spying on them. One day, a soldier stopped by to threaten Antonina that if he ever caught Ryś up there again he’d shoot him.

Despite the skittish, sleepless nights and the daily alarms, Antonina confessed to feeling “chills of excitement” about the Uprising, “having imagined this day through the long ghastly years of occupation,” though she could only guess at events. Across the river, in the heart of the city, food and water were scarce, but there was plenty of lump sugar and vodka (filched from German supplies) to fuel the Home Army as they built antitank barricades from paving stones. Of the 38,000 soldiers (4,000 were women), only one in fifteen had adequate weapons; the rest used sticks, hunting rifles, knives, and swords, hoping to capture enemy weapons.

Because the Germans still held the telephone exchange, a corps of brave girl couriers carried messages around the city, just as they had been doing secretly during occupation. When Halina Korabiowska returned to Warsaw, she headed downtown to help relay messages, set up field kitchens and hospitals, and supply the fighters.

“There were barricades everywhere,” Halina told me with excitement in her voice. “Everyone was happy in the beginning. At 5 P.M. the Uprising started and we put on red-and-white armbands…. In the early weeks of the Uprising, we survived on one meal a day of horsemeat and soup, but by the end we ate only dried peas, dogs, cats, and birds.

“I saw my fifteen-year-old friend carrying one end of a stretcher with a wounded soldier on it. A plane flew over and she saw the fear in the soldier’s eyes and lay down on top of him—she was badly wounded in the neck. Another day, on my messenger run, I encountered two women carrying heavy bags from a building. I stopped to ask if they needed help, and they said they’d found a cache of German medicines and also a huge sack of candy, some of which they offered me. I filled my jacket pockets and sleeves with candies and went among the soldiers holding my arms just high enough not to spill them. Whenever I encountered soldiers, I told them to put their hands together and I extended my arms and let candies pour into their hands!”

With the Germans in retreat, everyone could move and talk freely for the first time in years, Jews could emerge from hiding since the racist laws had evaporated, and people flew the Polish flag from their houses, sang patriotic songs, and wore red-and-white armbands. Feliks Cywiński commanded a brigade of soldiers that included Samuel Kenigswein, who led a battalion of his own. Warsaw’s long-suppressed cultural life started to bloom again, cinemas reopened, literary periodicals suddenly reappeared, concerts sparkled in elegantly furnished sitting rooms. A free postal service issued stamps—Boy Scouts ran it and hand-delivered letters. An archival photograph shows a metal mailbox decorated with both an eagle and a lily, to signify that the youngest scouts risked their lives delivering its letters.

When news of the Uprising reached Hitler, he ordered Himmler to send in his harshest troops, kill every Pole, and pulverize the whole city block by block, bomb, torch, and bulldoze it beyond repair as a warning to the rest of occupied Europe. For the job, Himmler chose the most savage units in the SS, composed of criminals, policemen, and former prisoners of war. On the Uprising’s fifth day, which came to be known as “Black Saturday,” Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed in, slaughtering 30,000 men, women, and children. The following day, while packs of Stukas dive-bombed the city—in archival films, one hears them whining like megaton mosquitoes—ill-equipped and mainly untrained Poles fought fiercely, radioed London to air-drop food and supplies, and begged the Russians to launch an immediate attack.

Antonina wrote in her diary that two SS men opened the door, guns drawn, yelling: “Alles rrraus!!”

Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst.

“Hands high,” they yelled. Antonina noticed the men’s first fingers cupping triggers.

Holding her baby in her arms, she could only raise one hand, and her brain had trouble “registering their vulgar, brutal sentences” as they bellowed:

“You’ll pay for the deaths of our heroic German soldiers being slaughtered by your husbands and sons. Your children”—they pointed to Ryś and Teresa—“suck in hatred for the German people along with their mother’s milk. Up till now we let you behave that way, but enough is enough! From now on, one thousand Poles will be killed for every dead German.”

“Surely this is the end,” she thought. Hugging her baby tight, mind darting to think up a plan, she felt her heart caged in her ribs, and her legs became too heavy to move. It wasn’t the first time she literally froze in fear. On this occasion, although she couldn’t move, she knew she had to say something, anything, and stay calm, talk to them the way she used to soothe angry animals and gain their trust. Her mouth filled with German words she didn’t think she knew, and she began talking about ancient tribes and the grandeur of German culture. As she hugged the baby tighter, words streamed from her mouth, and, in another chamber of mind, she concentrated hard and repeated over and over the command: Calm down! Put the guns down! Calm down! Put the guns down! Calm down! Put the guns down!

The Germans continued yelling, which she didn’t hear, and they never lowered their guns, but in a spill of cobbled thoughts she kept talking while issuing silent commands.

Suddenly a soldier looked at Fox Man’s fifteen-year-old helper and barked at him to go behind the shed in the garden. The boy started walking, followed by an SS man who reached into his pocket, pulling out a revolver as they disappeared from view. A single gunshot.

The other German told Ryś: “You’re next!”

Antonina saw her son’s face shriek with fear, the blood drain out of it, and his lips turn a light purple. She couldn’t move and risk their killing her and Teresa, too. Ryś raised his hands and started to walk slowly, robotically, “as if life had already left his little body,” she remembered later. Watching until he disappeared from view, she continued following him in her mind’s eye: “Now he’ll be close to the hollyhocks,” she thought, “now he’ll be near the study window.” A second shot. It felt like “a bayonet plunged into my heart… and we heard the third shot… I couldn’t see anything; my vision became blank, then dark. I felt so weak, I was close to fainting.”

“You sit down on the bench,” one German told her. “It’s difficult to stand up with a child in your arms.” A moment later the same man called:

“Hey, boys! Bring me that rooster! Get him from the bushes!”

Both boys ran out from the shrubs, shaking with fear. Ryś was holding his dead chicken, Kuba, by its wing, and Antonina stared fixated at big drops of blood dripping from Kuba’s bullet wounds.

“We’ve played such a funny joke!” a soldier said. Antonina saw their marble faces loosen into laughter as they left the garden, carrying the dead chicken, and she watched Ryś slink low while trying hard not to cry, until it was no use and tears flooded him. What could a mother do to comfort a child after that?

I walked over to him and whispered in his ear: “You are my hero, you were so brave, my son. Would you please help me go inside now, because I’m very weak.” Maybe the responsibility would help defuse some of his emotions. I knew how hard it was for him to show his feelings. Anyway, I needed him to steady me and the baby, since my legs really had softened from shock.

Later, when she calmed down, she tried to diagnose the behavior of the SS soldiers—did they ever consider shooting them, or was it always a sick game of power and fear? Certainly they hadn’t known about Kuba, so they must have been improvising as they went along. She couldn’t fathom their sudden tenderheartedness in urging her to sit down. Were they really worried that she might collapse holding her newborn? “If so,” she thought, “maybe their monstrous hearts contain some human feeling; and if that’s so, then pure evil doesn’t really exist.”

She’d been so sure the gunshots had killed the boys, that Ryś lay crumpled on the ground with a bullet in his head. A mother’s nervous system derails at such a time, and even though they’d all survived, she found herself sinking into a savage depression, which she berated herself for in her diary: “My weakness shamed me,” at precisely the time “I needed to be a leader of my little group.”

In the days that followed, she also suffered headaches from the infernal racket of the German army amassing rows of rocket launchers, mortars, and heavy artillery near the zoo. The seismic ructions of bombs followed, with shells of every caliber and shape delivering their own fiendish din: whistling, blasting, crackling, banging, crashing, scraping, thundering. Then there were the screaming meemies, army slang (inspired by French girls named Mimi) for a type of German shell that made a shrieking noise in flight, a term extended, in time, to battle fatigue caused by long exposure to enemy fire.

The Germans also shot mine-throwers known as “bellowing cows,” which yowled six times in a row as six mines cranked into position before a series of six explosions.

“I will never forget that sound to the end of my days,” wrote Jacek Fedorowicz, who was seven years old during the Warsaw Uprising. “After the cranking there was nothing one could do. If one heard the explosion, it meant one had not been killed…. I had a good ear for discerning the death-dealing sounds.” He managed to escape with the “remnants of my family’s fortune… sewn inside [my teddy bear] in the form of ‘piglets,’ or gold five-rouble coins. Apart from him, the only things I managed to salvage after the Uprising were a drinking glass and a copy of Dr. Dolittle.”[89]

Airplanes bombed the fighters in Old Town; soldiers machine-gunned Polish civilians in the streets; demolition crews torched and bombed huge buildings. The air filled with dust, fire, and sulfur. When it grew dark, Antonina heard an even scarier rumble from the direction of Kierbedź Bridge, the growl of a giant machine. Some people said the Germans had built a crematorium to burn the bodies of the dead, to protect Warsaw from plague, while others thought the Germans had unleashed a huge radioactive weapon. The river water reflected a pale green fluorescent light so brilliant she could see people standing at their windows on the other side of the river, and after sunset, the otherworldly rumble was joined by invisible choruses of drunken soldiers who sang late into the night.

According to Antonina, she lay awake all that night, scared cold, aware of the tiny hairs stiffening on the back of her neck. As it turned out, the weird light was far less sophisticated than she had imagined; in Praski Park, the Germans had installed a generator that drove colossal reflector lamps to dazzle the enemy.

Even after the battle moved out of the zoo district, soldiers invaded the zoo to prowl and pillage. One day a gang of Russians arrived with “wild eyes,” and busily began searching the cupboards, walls, and floors for anything they could steal, including picture frames and carpets.[90] When she approached them and silently stood her ground, she sensed scavengers darting around her “like hyenas” racing into the rooms. “If they guess my fear, they’ll devour me,” she thought. Their leader, a man with Asian features and icy eyes, walked up close and stared hard at her, while Teresa slept nearby in a tiny wicker cradle. Antonina resolved not to look away or move. Suddenly, he grabbed the small gold medallion she always wore around her neck, “and flashed his white teeth.” Slowly, gently, she pointed to the baby, then, defrosting the Russian of her childhood, commanded in a loud, stern voice:

“Not allowed! Your mother! Your wife! Your sister! Do you understand?”

When she placed her hand on his shoulder, he looked surprised, and she saw the manic fury draining from his eyes, his mouth relaxing, as if she’d smoothed the fabric of his face with a hot iron. Her mind-whispering had worked again, she thought. Next he placed his hand into the back pocket of his pants, and for a horrible instant she remembered the German soldier with his revolver aimed at Ryś. Instead, he withdrew his hand and opened it to reveal several dirty pink hard candies.

“For the baby!” he said, pointing to the cradle.

As Antonina shook his hand in thanks, he smiled at her admiringly and glanced at her ringless hands, then made a pitiful face, took a ring off his own finger, and offered it to her.

“It’s for you,” he said. “Take it! Put it on your finger!”

Her heart “shook” as she slipped on the ring, because it bore a silver eagle, a Polish emblem, which meant he’d probably ripped it off the finger of a dead Polish soldier. “Whose ring was it?” she wondered.

Then, loudly summoning his soldiers, he ordered: “Leave everything you took! I will kill you like dogs if you don’t obey me!”

Surprised, his men dropped all the furniture and loot they’d gathered and dragged small items out of their pockets.

“Let’s go now—don’t touch anything!” he said.

With that, she watched his men “shrink in size as they left one at a time like muzzled dogs.”

When they’d gone, she sat down at the table and looked again at the ring with the silver eagle and thought: “If felt words like mother, wife, sister, have the power to change a bastard’s spirit and conquer his murderous instincts, maybe there’s some hope for the future of humanity after all.”

From time to time, other soldiers visited the zoo, without incident, and then one day a car pulled up with several German clerks who managed Third Reich fur farms and knew Fox Man from his days in Grójec. Fox Man reported that the animals still survived with luxuriant fur, and they gave him permission to move both animals and employees to Germany. Packing up so many animals would take time, which meant everyone could stay in the villa for a while longer, possibly even until the Uprising triumphed and the Germans deserted Warsaw. Then no one would have to leave the zoo at all.

In the meantime, trying to weaken the Resistance, German airplanes kept dropping notes urging Warsaw’s civilians to abandon the city before it was gutted. Soon afterward, the German army trucked even more heavy artillery into Praski Park, hiding it among the trees and bushes near the river. Stationed so close, German soldiers often stopped by for a drink of water, a cup of soup, or some cooked potatoes. One evening, a tall young officer expressed concern about civilians living too close to the battlefield, and Antonina explained that she and the others were running a high-priority Wehrmacht fur farm, which they couldn’t leave because it was an inauspicious time for the raccoon dogs, which develop soft dense coats by molting in summer and then regrowing a winter pelage during September, October, and November. Tamper with their schedule by boxing them up, stressing them, and shipping them to a different climate, she warned, and their prized winter coats wouldn’t grow back soon. That seemed to satisfy him.

Thunder had never frightened her before, she wrote—“After all, it’s only sound filling the vacuum created by streaks of lightning”—but the artillery flared without letup, the air didn’t grow moist as a prelude to storm, no rain fell, and the dry thunder jangled her nerves. One afternoon, the artillery suddenly paused, and during that rare lull the women of the house lay down and rested, soaking in the quiet. Jan’s mother, Nunia, and Ewa all took a nap in their bedrooms, and Antonina nursed Teresa downstairs, on a sweltering day, with all the doors and windows open. Suddenly the kitchen door squeaked and a German officer strode into the room. He stopped for a moment when he saw her with the baby, and as he edged closer Antonina smelled alcohol on his breath. Snooping around suspiciously, he wandered into Jan’s study.

“Oooh! A piano—sheet music! Do you play?” he asked excitedly.

“A little,” she replied.

Paging through some Bach, he paused and started to whistle a fugue with tuneful expertise. She figured him for a professional musician.

“You seem to have a perfect ear for music,” she said.

When he asked her to play for him, she sat down at the piano, though something didn’t feel quite right. Tempted to grab Teresa and make a run for it, she feared he’d shoot her if she tried, so instead she began playing “Ständchen,” a romantic song by Schubert, hoping that this German favorite might calm him with sentimental memories.

“No, not that! Not that!” he screamed. “Why are you playing that?!”

Antonina’s fingers sprang from the keys. Clearly a wrong choice, but why? She’d heard and played the German serenade so often. As he strode to the bookshelf to page through sheet music, she glanced down and read the lyrics to “Ständchen”:

A broken heart, that would rattle anyone, she thought. Suddenly his face lit up as he opened a collection of national anthems, through which he searched, looking eagerly for something, which he finally found.

Placing the open book on the piano, he said: “Please, play this for me.”

As she started to play, the German officer sang along, pronouncing the English words in a heavy accent, and she wondered what the soldiers in Praski Park must be thinking as he belted out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Occasionally she peeked up at his half-closed eyes. When she finished with a flourish, he saluted her and quietly left the villa.

Who was this officer so fluent in music, she wondered, and what was the American anthem all about? “Maybe he was joking with another German sitting near the villa?” she thought. “Surely someone will come and interrogate me about the music? Now I’ll have to worry about provoking the SS.” Later, she decided that he probably meant to terrorize her, and, if so, it had worked, because the melody snagged in her head and kept repeating until a round of cannonades split the night.

As the Germans stepped up their attack on Old Town, Antonina still hoped the Underground army would win, but rumors of Hitler’s order to demolish the city trickled in. Soon she learned that Paris had been liberated by the Free French, U.S., and British forces; and then Aachen, the first German city to fall, devastated by 10,000 tons of bombs.

She had no word from or about Jan, stationed in Old Town, where the Home Army, forced into a smaller space, fought from building to building, even room to room in a house or cathedral. Many witnesses tell of the front suddenly erupting inside a building and flowing from floor to floor, while those outside faced a continuous shower of bombs and bullets. All Antonina and Ryś could do was watch the heavy gunfire ricocheting around Old Town and picture Jan and their friends moving along cobblestone streets she knew by heart.

In an archival photograph taken by field reporter Sylwester “Kris” Braun on August 14, Polish soldiers are proudly displaying a German armored personnel carrier they have just captured. Jan is not in the photograph, but it can hardly be sheer coincidence that, as the caption notes, they nicknamed the elephantine vehicle “Jas,” the same name as the Warsaw Zoo’s male elephant, killed early in the war.