The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 32

BY SEPTEMBER, 5,000 SOLDIERS IN OLD TOWN HAD ESCAPED through the sewers, despite Germans dropping grenades and burning gasoline down the manholes. Elsewhere, the Allies were advancing on all fronts: after liberating France and Belgium, the United States and Britain were pushing into Germany from the Netherlands, Rhineland, and Alsace; and though the Red Army paused near Warsaw, it had already captured Bulgaria and Romania, was prepared to take Belgrade and Budapest, and planned to storm the Reich from the Baltics; the United States had landed on Okinawa and was pounding the South Pacific.

A German officer assured Fox Man that, whatever happened to the military, the Third Reich needed its valuable fur farms and he should prepare to pack his animals into well-vented crates and move them to a small town in the suburbs for safety. As shells starting falling closer to the zoo, Antonina prepared to uproot her household, too, and the nearby town of Łowicz, where Fox Man was headed, seemed a haven out of battle range but still close to the city. Antonina, Ryś, Jan’s mother, the two girls, Fox Man, and his helpers planned to travel together, hoping all would pass as fur farm workers. Choosing which pets to leave behind tormented them (muskrat, Wicek, other rabbits, cat, dog, eagle?), but in the end they decided to risk taking only Wicek and release all the rest to the wild and their wits.

Although they could cart whatever household items they pleased, it seemed prudent to travel light, so they bundled up only mattresses, comforters, pillows, winter coats, boots, water containers, pots, shovels, and other practical items. Anything of value had to be hidden far from bombs and prowling soldiers; they loaded the fur coats, silver, typewriter, sewing machine, documents, photographs, heirlooms, and other treasures into large boxes, and Fox Man and his boys quickly stashed them in the underground corridor leading from the villa to the Pheasant House, then they bricked up the entrance to the tunnel.

On August 23, the day of departure, Ryś watched as a huge shell landed about fifty yards from the villa, and dug in but didn’t explode; a bomb squad appeared soon afterward with an officer who swore that anyone still in the villa at noon would be shot. Ryś ran to the Pheasant House and fed the rabbits dandelion leaves a last time, then opened all the cages and turned them loose. Confused by their newfound freedom, the rabbits refused to leave, so Ryś lifted them out by their long ears, one at a time, and carried them to the lawn. No predators lurked in the brush, ponds, or sky, and the last of the household pets—eagle and muskrat—had been freed the day before.

“Go, silly rabbits, go!” Ryś said, shooing them. “You’re free!”

Antonina watched fur balls of all sizes hopping slowly through the grass. Suddenly Balbina sprang from the bushes and ran to Ryś with a high-flagging tail and a loud purr. One whiff of the cat and the rabbits bolted, as Ryś lifted Balbina into his arms.

“What! Balbina, do you want to go with us?” Carrying her, he walked toward the house, but the cat squirmed free.

“You don’t want to go with us? Too bad,” he said, adding bitterly, “But you’re lucky, at least you can stay here.” She sloped away between the bushes.

Watching this scene from the porch, Antonina felt a powerful desire to stay home, too, accompanied by an equally strong wish for the truck to arrive that would carry them to the train station, checking her watch over and over, though “the watch hands moved without pity.” The impulse to plunge into some bolt-hole in Warsaw flashed through her mind, but where would they go? She worried about her lame mother-in-law, “who couldn’t walk half a mile,” and being waylaid by Germans, who, she’d heard, were arresting every Pole they could find and shipping all to a death camp near Pruszków. As things stood, traveling west with the fur farm animals made the most sense.

At last, at 11:30 A.M., Fox Man’s old truck clattered up to the villa, and they quickly stowed their luggage. Leaving the zoo behind, they wove through back streets until they reached the train station where a freight car waited, already loaded with foxes, minks, nutrias, raccoon dogs, and Wicek. Antonina and the others boarded, and soon the train crossed the river, paused at a couple of stations to pick up more passengers, and finally set off slowly. In Łowicz, they were told to unload their crates and await the arrival of fur animals from elsewhere in Poland, and then the assembled stock would travel to one large farm in Germany. Antonina spent the day strolling through the village, struck by her liberty and the momentous quiet of a town showing no signs of war. The next day she went looking for help and learned that Andrzej Grabski, son of the Polish ex-prime minister, happened to be on the German fur company board; when she explained that she feared taking her small children to Germany, Grabski found a temporary shelter for her in town. Six days later she said goodbye to Fox Man (who had to remain in Łowicz with the animals), rented a horse-drawn wagon, and headed for the village of Marywil, only four miles away, yet “a long, slow journey that felt like forever.”

When they finally arrived at a little schoolhouse on an old estate, a woman offered them a small classroom to sleep in, whose wooden walls were splotched with dirt and floor strewn with mud and straw. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling, all the windowpanes were broken, and piles of cigarette butts littered the floor. They set Wicek’s cage beside a clay stove, and Antonina wrote that his scratching to get out created the only noise in a vault of silence that seemed bizarre after weeks of explosions and gunfire, not a calming silence but vacant, unnatural, disturbing, “a nuisance to our ears.”

“The quiet is spooky,” Ryś said, wrapping his arms around her neck and hugging her tight. Although she didn’t want him scared or suffering, she wrote that it felt wonderful to have him need her soothing. During the uncertain and violent days of August, she’d watched him trying to act strong and grown-up, but now, to her relief, “at last he could let himself be a child.”

“Mom, I know we’re never going home again,” he said tearfully.

Moving from a large old city at war to a peaceful hamlet where there was no point settling in for what they anticipated as a short stay, they’d lost contact with friends, family, and the Underground, but they also lost the frights of artillery. Haunted by a distant underpinning of her world, Antonina described feeling “whipped by a disaster [I] couldn’t name or influence… unreal and floating” much of this time, though she vowed to buoy up Ryś’s spirits.

On a hunt for broom, rags, and bucket, they knocked on the door of a room where Mrs. Kokot, the local teacher, her blacksmith husband, and their two boys lived. A short, solid woman with dimples and work-worn hands greeted them.

“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Kokot said, “that we didn’t have time to clean the classroom before you moved in. My husband will stop by tomorrow and install a proper stove. Don’t worry, everything will be all right. You’ll settle in soon and feel at home here.”

Over the next few days, Mrs. Kokot provided bread and butter, and brought a small wooden bathtub for Teresa and hot water. Soon life didn’t seem quite as dire, but Antonina worried about Ryś, who had “lost everything he knew… like a tiny piece of grass uprooted by a strong wind and blown far away from its garden.” What with “the earthquake of leaving Warsaw, worries about his father,” whom they’d had no news of, “and all the unknowns, and the poverty,” it didn’t surprise her when he became depressed and moody.

But as days passed, Ryś grew closer to the Kokot family, whose daily routines yielded order and a predictability he craved. Antonina worried that, having acted more adult than child for most of the war, Ryś had gotten to the point that “he flatly refused to accept childhood, and whoever treated him like a child drew a rude response.” But the mundane events of Kokot family life, in which children went to school and played without fear, proved a tonic. As he watched them going about their lives, she noted, he admired how well they worked together as a family, and also performed many charitable acts—Mrs. Kokot would ride her bike to the village to give a sick person an injection, or as far as the city to bring a doctor; and her husband would fix neighbors’ engines, sewing machines, rubber wheels, watches, lamps, or any other sick objects.

“Ryś never made much of intellectuals,” Antonina mused, “being absorbed in abstract ideas seemed silly to him. He admired practical know-how, and so he deeply respected the Kokots for their talents, common sense, and hard work.” Shadowing Mr. Kokot all day, he helped replace panes of broken glass, filled cracks in wooden window frames with moss and straw, and plugged the holes in walls by using straw caulking or a mixture of lamp oil and sand.

Then Ryś did something surprising. As the ultimate sign of friendship, he gave his beloved rabbit Wicek to the Kokots’ sons, Jędrek and Zbyszek. This extraordinary gesture didn’t alter Wicek’s living conditions much, since the boys played together all the time, but the privilege of feeding Wicek and piloting his future changed hands. At first, Antonina noted, Wicek didn’t understand what was happening. Then she heard Ryś giving him a serious and detailed explanation of who his new owners were and where he’d be sleeping; afterward Wicek kept trying to steal back into Ryś’s room, only to be turned away at the door.

“Now you live in Jędrek and Zbyszek’s apartment, you silly creature!” Ryś said. “Why don’t you want to understand this simple thing?”

Antonina watched the rabbit listening to Ryś, moving his ears and looking at Ryś “as if he understood perfectly well,” but the minute Ryś carried him into the hallway between the apartments, set him down, and closed the door behind him, Wicek began scratching at the door to return.

Depression scathed Antonina once more, which she matter-of-factly recorded, without fuss or details, as if it were just another form of weather. The trip had been so depleting that, “like someone in a trance,” she pushed herself to secure food and help for her small tribe of women and children. Somehow she finagled potatoes, sugar, flour, and wheat from a woman in the village; peat to use as fuel from a man down the road; and half a liter of milk a day from the county.

The spirited Warsaw Uprising collapsed after sixty-three days of ferocious street-to-street fighting, with much of the city in rubble, when what was left of Warsaw’s Home Army surrendered, in exchange for the promise of humane treatment as prisoners of war, not partisans. (Nonetheless, most survivors were shipped off to slave labor camps.) Overflowing hospitals were burned with patients still in them, and women and children were roped onto tanks to prevent ambush from snipers. Hitler celebrated by ordering Germany’s churches to ring their bells for a week solid.

The roads streamed with refugees seeking shelter in the neighborhood of Łowicz and Marywil, a countryside dotted with feudal estates, complete with manor houses, small poor farms, hamlets the landowners helped support, and many locals employed at the manors. Day by day, more people swarmed into the region, until farmers, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of hungry, frightened people landing in their fields and on their doorsteps, begged local officials to relocate them elsewhere.

When Antonina and her family had first arrived at the schoolhouse, they tried to lie low, in case the Gestapo might be chasing them, but as days passed quietly, they began to relax, and after a few weeks in Marywil, following Warsaw’s capitulation, they started angling for news of family and friends. Antonina awaited word of Jan, convinced he’d magically appear one day, “having moved heaven and earth” to find her, as he had with Dr. Müller’s help in 1939. She knew nothing of Jan’s bizarre luck during the early days of the Uprising, when he was shot through the neck and rushed to the hospital on Chmielna Street, to die, everyone thought, since it’s nearly impossible for a bullet to fly through someone’s neck without hitting the esophagus, spine, veins, or arteries. Years later, Antonina met the doctor who had treated him. “If I had anesthetized him,” Dr. Kenig recalled in amazement, “and tried to re-create the route of that bullet, I couldn’t do it!” When Germans captured the hospital, he was shipped to a POW camp for officers, where he mended from the bullet wound only to battle hunger and exhaustion.

Antonina sent a letter to a family friend, who agreed to relay messages for her; and Nunia, who, instead of joining her own parents, had stayed with Antonina and Ryś to help look after things and act as messenger, rose before dawn one morning, waited hours for the horse and wagon that served as a “bus,” and traveled to Warsaw by way of Łowicz. All along the route, she tacked up small pieces of paper asking about Jan Żabiński and giving Antonina’s address; she pinned them to trees, electric poles, fences, buildings, train station walls, in what had become a public lost and found bureau. Stefan Korboński remembers how on the fences of all the stations were hundreds of notices and the addresses of husbands searching for their wives, parents searching for their children, and people in general announcing where they were. Large crowds stood in front of these “forwarding offices,” from morning till night.[91]

Soon Antonina started receiving letters with clues: from the nurse at the hospital where Jan was treated for his neck wound, a mailman in Warecki Square, a guard at the Zoological Museum on Wilcza Street. All wrote to tell of Jan and give her hope, and when she learned he’d been shipped to a German POW camp, she and Nunia wrote dozens of letters to all the camps that imprisoned officers, fishing for leads.