The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 34

¹⁹⁴⁵

FLOCKS OF CROWS CIRCLED THE SKY BEFORE LANDING IN THE snow-covered fields, on one of those claggy, warm January mornings when dark tree branches glisten through fog and just breathing feels like inhaling cotton. The morning bristled with signs. Antonina heard the rumble of heavily armed trucks, the grinding of airplanes and distant explosions, then people shouting: “The Germans are running away!” Soon the Polish and Soviet armies appeared, walking together, and as a long caravan of Soviet tanks crawled by, locals quickly hoisted red flags to welcome the liberators. Suddenly a huge flock of white pigeons flew up the sky and soared above the soldiers, reassembled as a single cloud and swerved even higher. “The timing was perfect,” Antonina wrote. “Surely some movie director arranged this symbolic scene.”

Although she nourished hope of Jan’s release, she decided to pass the rest of the winter in Marywil, because traveling to Warsaw with small children seemed risky. However, local children itched to return to school, their own private timekeeping, which meant Antonina’s group had to leave the schoolhouse for another temporary shelter. When her food money ran out and she needed to buy milk for the baby, the manor house took pity on her and sent provisions. Fortunately, she had saved a few gold “piglets” (rubles) for buying their passage back to Warsaw, a trip she knew might be costly. Once again, refugees clogged the roads, this time desperate for home, even though they’d heard their apartments lay in ruins. Nunia hurried on ahead to scout, and brought back news that she’d found friends still living in the zoo district, with whom they could stay, and she reported that the villa, though blasted and looted, still stood.

Needing a large truck, a scarce commodity, Antonina prevailed upon soldiers traveling east with a load of potatoes, who agreed to carry her group part of the way. On travel day it was zero degrees, and only the baby, swaddled in a small down blanket, didn’t shiver as the truck shambled along, pausing frequently to be searched by soldiers on patrol. Dropped off in Włochy, they secured a ride with a Russian pilot, who agreed to share his open truck, into which they piled.

As they finally entered Warsaw’s city limits, a wave of filthy snow and sand splashed the sides of the truck, the snow stank, the sand irritated their eyes, and they huddled to keep warm. What she saw “dazed and sickened” her, she wrote, because, despite rumors, warnings, and eyewitness reports, she still wasn’t prepared for a city in tatters. Archival photographs and films show charred window and door frames standing like sky portals, tall office buildings reduced to a hive of open cells, apartment houses and churches calving like glaciers, all the trees felled, the parks heaped with rubble, and surreal streets lined with facades thin as tombstones. In some shots, a sickly pale winter sun oozes into the crevices of pockmarked buildings, over raw metal cables, weirdly twisted pipes and iron. With 85 percent of the buildings destroyed, the once-ornate city looked like a colossal refuse heap and cemetery, everything rendered down to its constituent molecules, all the palaces, squares, museums, neighborhoods, and landmarks reduced to classless chunks of debris. Captions read: “dead city,” “a wilderness of ruins,” “mountains of rubble.”[92] Cold as the day was, Antonina wrote that she began sweating, and that night, mired in shock and exhaustion, they stayed with Nunia’s friends.

After breakfast the next morning, Antonina and Ryś hurried to the zoo, where Ryś rushed ahead, then circled back, pink-cheeked from the cold.

“Mom, our house survived!” he said excitedly. “The people who said it was destroyed lied to us! It’s damaged, there are no doors or floors and all our belongings were stolen, but there’s a roof and walls! Mom! And stairs!”

A layer of snow masked the ground, and most of the trees had been sheared off by shells, but some delicate black branches still loomed against the blue sky, as did the Monkey House, the villa, and the ruins of several other buildings. One of the villa’s upstairs rooms had completely disappeared, and all the wooden parts on the first floor were missing—doors, closets, window frames, floors—she assumed they’d been burned for warmth during the winter. The underground corridor leading between the basement and the Pheasant House, where they’d stored valuables, had not simply caved in but dematerialized (and there are no reports of anyone unearthing it after the war). A thick pastiche of damp papers and book pages littered the floor, which they couldn’t avoid walking on and crushing even more. Together they dug through the sediment, collecting scraps of dirty documents and yellowed photographs, which Antonina stowed carefully in her purse.

Despite the cold, they inspected the garden, gouged from bombs and shells, and surveyed the grounds, a scene of barricades, deep antitank ditches, pieces of iron, barbed wire, and unexploded shells. She didn’t venture any farther for fear of land mines.

It looked and smelled like “the war just left this place.” While she planned renovations, Ryś “tested his memory” of the villa he grew up in against the barren world he now found. Antonina checked where they had planted vegetables the year before, and in one tiny spot where the wind had blown off a lid of snow, she saw a small strawberry plant near the ground. “An omen of new life,” she thought. Just then something moved in a basement window.

“A rat?” Ryś suggested.

“Too big for a rat,” Antonina said.

“A cat!” Ryś yelled. “It ran into the bushes and it’s watching us!”

A thin gray cat crouched warily in a corner, and Antonina wondered if people had tried to capture it for the stew pot.

“Balbina? Old cat! Dear cat! Balbina, come here!” Ryś called as he crept closer, calling her name over and over until she calmed down and seemed suddenly to remember, flying to Ryś like a fur-fledged arrow and jumping into his open arms.

“Mom, we have to take her home to Stalowa Street!” Ryś pleaded. “We can’t leave her here! Please!”

As Ryś walked toward the gate, the cat fidgeted to jump down.

“It’s just like last summer,” Ryś sulked. “She’s running away!”

“Let her go,” Antonina said softly. “She must have an important reason for staying, one we don’t understand.”

Ryś released her and she darted into the bushes, then stopped and looked back with her scrawny, half-starved face. She meowed, which Ryś translated as: “I’m going back home. What about you?”

For Antonina there was no going back to her previous life. Gone were the gaggling geese, squawking cormorants, whimpering gulls, the peacocks fanning iridescent tails as they strolled in sunlight, the Jericho-wall-tumbling groans of the lions and tigers, the trilling monkeys swinging on rope vines, the polar bears soaking in their pool, the blooming roses and jasmine, and the two “nice little happy otters which became best friends with our lynxes—instead of sleeping in their own basket… they napped in the soft fur of the lynxes, sucking on their ears.” Gone were the days when the lynx cubs, otters, and puppies all lived indoors and played endless chase games together in the garden. She and Ryś staged a private ritual—they formally promised all the broken and abandoned objects that they “would remember them and return soon to help.”