The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 33

^{DECEMBER 1944}

WITH WINTER, THE ENDLESS MUD PUDDLES FROZE OVER AND the land grew firm and fibrous again under a slather of white as Antonina prepared a Christmas starkly unlike those before the war. On Christmas Eve, Poles traditionally served a twelve-dish meatless dinner before exchanging gifts, and the zoo’s Christmas Eve used to include a special bounty. Antonina remembered how “a wagon drove into the zoo full of unsold Christmas trees; it was a gift for the zoo animals: ravens, bears, foxes, and many other animals liked to chew or peck at the aromatic bark or needles of evergreens. Christmas trees went to different aviaries, cages, or animal units, and the holiday season officially started in the Warsaw Zoo.”

All night, comets of lantern light would orbit the grounds: one man dutifully guarding the exotic animals section, checking the heat in buildings, and adding coal to the furnaces; several men carrying extra hay to barns and open shelters; others tucking extra straw into the aviaries where the tropical birds burrowed in to stay warm. It had been a scene of refuge and dancing lights.

This Christmas Eve, 1944, as Ryś headed for the woods with Zbyszek, he announced to Antonina that “children should have a little fun.” Later the boys returned dragging two small fir trees.

Following rural custom, trees were decorated during the daylight and lit when the first planet appeared (to honor the Star of Bethlehem), then dinner was served with extra places set for absent family members. Antonina wrote of arranging the small tree on a stool, where baby Teresa found it a source of hand-clapping delight, which she babbled to as the family embellished shiny branches with “three small apples, a few gingerbread cookies, six candles, and several straw peacock-eye ornaments that Ryś had made.”

Over the holidays, Genia surprised Antonina with a visit; risking arrest because of her Underground activities, she took the train, then walked through gusty cold for four miles, to bring money, food, and messages from friends. Antonina and Ryś still had no word from Jan. One day, Mrs. Kokot biked to the post office as usual, and they watched her returning, as usual: a tiny figurine growing larger and more defined as she pedaled nearer. This time she was waving a letter. Ryś ran out to meet her in his shirtsleeves, grabbed the letter, and dashed indoors with Mrs. Kokot following, smiling.

“Finally,” was all she said.

After Antonina and Ryś read the letter several times, Ryś rushed away to share the news with Mr. Kokot; according to Antonina, Ryś rarely spoke of his phantom father, whom he could now risk mentioning at last.

In the modern Warsaw Zoo’s archive, along with photographs donated by the family, there’s a wonderful oddity: a card Jan sent to them from the POW camp, with no writing on it except the address. On the back, a good caricature of Jan wears a baggy uniform with two stars on each epaulet, and a dark scarf knotted around his neck and flowing down past his waist. He’s captured himself with stubbly beard, pouchy eyes and long lashes, heavily wrinkled brow, three wisps of hair poking up from his bald crown, a cigarette stub dangling from his mouth, and a look of boredom and disdain on his face. Nothing written, nothing incriminating, just a drawing that exists somewhere between pathos and humor, which depicts him as whipped but not defeated.

The Red Army finally entered Warsaw on January 17, long after the city’s surrender and too late to help. In theory, the Russians were supposed to drive out the Germans, but for political, strategic, and practical reasons (among them, losing 123,000 men en route), they had camped on the east side of the Vistula River and complacently watched the bloodshed for two months solid, as thousands of Poles were massacred, thousands more sent to camps, and the city extinguished.

Halina and her first cousin, Irena Nawrocka (an Olympic fencing champion who had traveled widely before the war), and three other girl messengers were arrested by the Germans and ordered to march with a large bedraggled herd of guards and captives from Warsaw to a labor camp in Ożarów. Darting in from the fields, farm workers handed the girls work clothes to slip on and tools to carry, then pulled them from the crowd, between the rows of flax, before the exhausted guards noticed. Blending in with the field hands, the girls escaped to Zakopane (in the Tatra Mountains), where they hid for several months until the war ended.