The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 35

^AFTERMATH

WHILE STILL IN HIDING, MAGDALENA GROSS MARRIED MAURYCY Fraenkel (Paweł Zieliński), and after the Warsaw Uprising they moved to the eastern city of Lublin, where artists and intellectuals gathered in the Cafe Paleta. There she met the city’s avant-garde art world, which included many theaters without words: music theater, dance theater, drawing theater, shadows theater, and theaters featuring paper costumes, rags, or small fires. Poland’s long tradition of subversive political puppet theater had dissolved during the war, but in Lublin she joined enthusiasts who dreamt up the first puppet theater for the new Poland, and they invited her to create the puppets’ heads. Instead of crafting them with the traditional bold papier-mâche features, she decided to create lifelike facial nuances and adorn the puppets in silk, pearls, and beads. The first performance took place in Lublin on December 14, 1944.

In March of 1945, Magdalena and Maurycy returned to the newly liberated Warsaw, without electricity, gas, or transportation, whose few surviving houses tilted, windowless. Longing to sculpt animals again, she asked Antonina plaintively: “When will you have animals? I have to sculpt! I’ve wasted so much time!” Absent the flamingos, marabous, and other exotics she preferred, she began by sculpting the only available model, a duckling, and since she was a slow artist, she had to keep revising the piece as the duckling vamped into an adult bird. Still, it was her first sculpture after the war, cause for celebration.

The Warsaw they knew before the war had contained one and a half million people; in early spring of 1946, another visitor, Dr. Joseph Tenenbaum, reported “half a million at most. As it was, I could not see living space for a tenth that number. Many still lived in crypts, caverns, cellars, and subterranean shelters,” but he was greatly impressed by their morale:

Throughout the city, he heard an aria by A. Harris, the unofficial “Song of Warsaw,” whistled, sung, and blared through loudspeakers in the central squares as people worked. Its lover’s lyrics pledged: “Warsaw, my beloved, you are the object of my dreams and yearning…. I know you are not what you used to be… that you have lived through bloody days… but I shall rebuild you to your greatness again.”

Jan returned from the internment camp in the spring of 1946, and in 1947 he began cleaning and repairs, and erecting new buildings and enclosures for a revived zoo, one holding only three hundred animals, all native species donated by people in Warsaw. Some of the zoo’s lost animals were found, even Badger, who had tunneled out of his cage during the bombardment and swum across the Vistula (Polish soldiers returned him in a large pickle barrel). Magdalena sculpted Rooster, Rabbit I, and Rabbit II, slowing down then in poor health (“damaged by the war,” Antonina reckoned), and dying on June 17, 1948, the same day she finished Rabbit II. Her dream had always been to create large sculptures for the zoo, and Antonina and Jan wished she’d had that chance, especially since the zoo offered an ideal backdrop for large artworks. At today’s zoo, the main gates greet visitors with a life-size zebra, wearing iron bars as striped bulging ribs. Some of Magdalena’s sculptures now grace the zoo director’s office, as well as the Warsaw Museum of Fine Arts, just as Antonina and Jan had wished.

One day before the July 21, 1949, reopening of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan and Antonina placed Gross’s sculptures Duck and Rooster near the stairs to a large fountain visitors were sure to pass. July 21 fell on a Thursday that year, and they may have wished to avoid opening on Friday the twenty-second because people still associated that unlucky date with the 1942 liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Two years later Jan suddenly retired from zookeeping, though he was only fifty-four years old. Postwar Warsaw, under Soviet rule, didn’t favor people who fought with the Underground, and, at odds with government officials, he may have felt obliged to retire. Norman Davies captures the mood of that time:

Still needing to support his family, and devoted to zoology, Jan focused on his writing, producing fifty books that illuminated the lives of animals and sued for conservation; he also broadcast a popular radio program on the same topics; and he continued his efforts with the International Society for the Preservation of European Bison, which prized its small herd of bison in Białowieża Forest.

Oddly enough, those animals survived thanks in part to the efforts of Lutz Heck, who, during the war, shipped back many of the thirty bison he had stolen for Germany, along with back-bred, look-alike aurochsen and tarpans, to release in Białowieża, the idyll where he pictured Hitler’s inner circle hunting after the war. When the Allies later bombed Germany, mother herds of the animals died, leaving those in Białowieża as their species’ best hope.

In 1946, at the first postwar meeting of the International Association of Zoo Directors, in Rotterdam, reactivating the European Bison Stud Book fell to Jan, who began scouting the pedigrees of all bison that survived the war, including those in Germany’s breeding experiments. His research documented prewar, wartime, and postwar bloodlines, and returned the program and pedigree watch to the Poles.

While Jan wrote for adults, Antonina penned children’s books, raised her two children, and stayed in touch with the extended family of the Guests, who had traveled to different lands. Among those Jan personally led from the Ghetto (through the Labor Bureau building) were Kazio and Ludwinia Kramsztyk (cousins of renowned painter Roman Kramsztyk), Dr. Hirszfeld (specialist in infectious diseases), and Dr. Roza Anzelówna and her mother, who stayed in the villa for a short time, then moved to a boardinghouse on Widok Street recommended by friends of the Żabińskis. But after a few months they were arrested by Gestapo and killed, the only Guests of the villa who didn’t outlast the war.

The Kenigsweins survived the occupation and retrieved their youngest son from the orphanage, but in 1946 Samuel died of a heart attack, after which Regina and the children immigrated to Israel, where she remarried and worked on a kibbutz. She never forgot her time at the zoo. “The Żabińskis’ home was Noah’s Ark,” Regina told an Israeli newspaper twenty years after the war, “with so many people and animals hidden there.” Rachela “Aniela” Auerbach also moved to Israel, after first traveling to London, where she delivered Jan’s report about the survival of the European bison to Julian Huxley (prewar director of the London Zoo). Irena Mayzel resettled in Israel, and hosted the Żabińskis there after the war. Genia Sylkes moved to London, too, then to New York City, where she worked for many years in the Yiddish Scientific Institute library.

Captured by the Gestapo and brutally tortured, Irena Sendler (who winkled children out of the Ghetto) escaped, thanks to friends in the Underground, and spent the rest of the war in hiding. Despite her broken legs and feet, she worked in Poland as a social worker and advocate for the handicapped. During the war, Wanda Englert would move many times; her husband, Adam, was arrested in 1943 and imprisoned in Pawiak Prison, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. Amazingly, he survived prison and the concentration camps, later reunited with his wife, and together they moved to London.

Halina and Irena, the girl messengers, still live in Warsaw today and keep in close touch, best friends for over eighty-two years. On the wall in Irena’s apartment, along with her fencing medals, are photographs of her and Halina as young women, in which they’re coiffed, glamorous, and all future—studio portraits taken during the war by a neighbor.

Sitting with Halina in the courtyard restaurant of the Bristol Hotel, among packed tables of tourists and businesspeople, with a buffet of delicacies on long tables just inside open doors, I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory, then she quietly sang a song she’d heard over sixty years before, one a handsome young soldier had sung to her as she walked past:

Halina’s face flushed a little from that tall umbrella drink of memory, stored among more tragic images, as wartime memories often are, having their own special filing system, their own ecology. If other diners overheard, no one gave a sign, and as I looked around the archipelago of tables, I realized that out of fifty or so people, she was the only one old enough to harbor wartime memories.

Ryś, a civil engineer and a father himself, lives in downtown Warsaw today in an eight-story walk-up, minus pets. “A dog couldn’t climb the stairs!” he explained as we lurched from landing to landing. Tall and slender, in his seventies, he appears fit from all the stair-climbing, friendly and hospitable, but also a little wary, not surprising given the war lessons ingrained from an early age. “We lived from moment to moment,” Ryś said, sitting in his living room, watched over by photographs of his parents, many of their books, a framed drawing of a forest bison, and a sketch of his father. Zoo life hadn’t seemed at all unusual to him as a boy, he said, because “it was all I knew.” He told of watching a bomb fall near the villa and realizing that he was close enough to be killed, had it gone off. He remembered posing for Magdalena Gross, sitting for long hours while she coaxed clay, existed in it really, and he relished her chirpy attentions. I learned from him that his mother filled the villa’s upstairs terrace with overflowing flower boxes in warm weather, that she especially liked pansies, the flowers with pensive faces (from the French pensee), that she preferred the music of Chopin, Mozart, and Rossini. No doubt he found some of my questions odd—I hoped to learn about his mother’s scent, how she walked, her gestures, her tone of voice, how she wore her hair. To all such inquiries, he answered “average” or “normal,” and I soon realized those were memory traces he either didn’t visit or didn’t wish to share. His sister Teresa, born late in the war, married and lives in Scandinavia. I invited grown-up Ryszard to visit the villa with me, and he kindly obliged. As we explored his childhood home, stepping carefully over the doorframes with decorative anvil-shaped thresholds, I was struck by the way he tested his memory, often comparing what is to what was in much the same way Antonina described him doing as a boy, when they returned to the bombed zoo at the end of the war.

In one of those twists of fate that pepper history, the Berlin Zoo was heavily bombed, just as the Warsaw Zoo had been, assailing Lutz Heck with many of the same concerns and hardships he’d imposed on the Żabińskis. In his autobiography, Animals—My Adventure, he writes movingly about his fatally wounded zoo. Unlike the Żabińskis, he knew exactly what devastation to expect, having witnessed it firsthand in Warsaw, whose zoo bombing he never mentions. His safari animals, large collection of photographs, and numerous diaries vanished by war’s end. As the Soviet army advanced, Lutz left Berlin to avoid being arrested for looting Ukrainian zoos, and he spent the rest of his life in Wiesbaden, making hunting trips abroad. Lutz died in 1982, a year after his brother Heinz. Lutz’s son Heinz immigrated to the Catskills in 1959, where he ran a small zoo famous for its herd of Przywalski horses, descended from those nurtured by Heinz Heck throughout the war. At one point, the Munich Zoo had assembled the largest herd of Przywalski horses outside of Mongolia (some stolen from the Warsaw Zoo).

In all, around three hundred people passed through the way station of the Warsaw Zoo, en route to the rest of their nomadic lives. Jan always felt, and said publicly, that the real heroine of this saga was his wife, Antonina. “She was afraid of the possible consequences,” he said to Noah Kliger, who interviewed him for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, “she was terrified the Nazis would seek revenge against us and our young son, terrified of death, and yet she kept it to herself, and helped me [with my Underground activities] and never ever asked me to stop.”

“Antonina was a housewife,” he told Danka Narnish, of another Israeli paper, “she wasn’t involved in politics or war, and was timid, and yet despite that she played a major role in saving others and never once complained about the danger.”

“Her confidence could disarm even the most hostile,” he told an anonymous reporter, adding that her strength stemmed from her love of animals. “It wasn’t just that she identified with them,” he explained, “but from time to time she seemed to shed her own human traits and become a panther or a hyena. Then, able to adopt their fighting instinct, she arose as a fearless defender of her kind.”

To reporter Yaron Becker, he explained: “She had a very traditional Catholic upbringing and that didn’t deter her. On the contrary it strengthened her determination to be true to herself, to follow her heart, even though it meant enduring a lot of self-sacrifice.”

Intrigued by the personality of rescuers, Malka Drucker and Gay Block interviewed over a hundred, and found they shared certain key personality traits. Rescuers tended to be decisive, fast-thinking, risk-taking, independent, adventurous, openhearted, rebellious, and unusually flexible—able to switch plans, abandon habits, or change ingrained routines at a moment’s notice. They tended to be nonconformists, and though many rescuers held solemn principles worth dying for, they didn’t regard themselves as heroic. Typically, one would say, as Jan did: “I only did my duty—if you can save somebody’s life, it’s your duty to try.” Or: “We did it because it was the right thing to do.”[95]