The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 36

^{BIAŁOWIEŻA, 2005}

AT THE EDGE OF A PRIMEVAL FOREST IN NORTHEASTERN Poland, time seems to evaporate, as two dozen horses graze on the marsh grass beneath colossal pine trees and a dazzling blue sky. On frosty mornings they browse inside bubbles of steam and leave a sweet leathery odor behind them when they go. Their body-fog travels with them, but their scent can remain for hours as invisible clouds above jumbled hoofprints, and sometimes, on a gravel path or leaf-strewn trail, where no hoofprints tell, one enters a pocket of gamy air and is suddenly surrounded by essence of wild horse.

Spring through fall, the horses live unaided by humans, wading in the ponds and grazing on bushes, tree branches, algae, and grass. Snow falls in mid-October and remains until May. In winter, they hungrily paw through the snow to find dry grass or rotting apples, and rangers of the mounted Horse Guard sometimes provide hay and salt. Blessed with bolt-and-leap muscle, they have little fat to insulate them on icy days, so they grow shaggy coats that mat easily. It’s then that they most resemble the horses painted on the cave walls at prehistoric sites throughout the Loire Valley.

How startling it is to shed the here and now and watch what might be ancient horses browsing at the forest-edge meadows just as humans did millennia ago. They’re strikingly beautiful creatures: dun with a black stripe down the back and a dark mane (sometimes a foal will be born with black face and fetlocks and a zebra-striped leg or two). Although they have long ears and large thick necks, they’re lightly built and fast. Unlike domestic horses, they turn white in winter, just as ermine and arctic hares do, blending in with the landscape. Then ice clots like marbles in coarse manes and tails, and as they stomp their hooves build up platforms of snow. Still, they thrive on harsh weather and poor diet; and although the stallions battle fiercely, with bared teeth and thwacking necks, they heal fast as a shaman’s spell. “In a world older and more complete than ours they move,” Henry Beston writes of wild animals in The Outermost House, “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.”

In Białowieża, one can also find re-created aurochsen, a favorite game animal of Julius Caesar, who described them to friends back in Rome as savage black bulls “a little less than elephants in size,” strong and fast. “They spare neither man nor beast,” he wrote. “They cannot be brought to endure the sight of men, nor be tamed, even when taken young.” Apparently, men of the Black Forest trained rigorously to hunt aurochsen bulls (the cows were left to breed), and those “who have killed a great number—the horns being publicly exhibited in evidence of the fact—obtain great honour. The horns… are much sought after; and after having been edged with silver… are used for drinking vessels at great feasts.” Some of those silver-tipped horns remain in museums. But by 1627, the last true aurochsen had been killed.

Yet here tarpans, bison, and aurochsen apparently graze, roaming the closely guarded nature preserve on the Polish-Belorussian border that’s been a royal favorite since the 1400s, a realm of magic and monsters that inspired many European fairy tales and myths. King Kazimierz IV found it so enchanting that he spent seven years (1485–92) living in a simple forester’s lodge and managing affairs of state from his sylvan home.

What’s so awe-inspiring about this landscape that it could bewitch people from many cultures and eras, including Lutz Heck, Göring, and Hitler? For starters, it contains five-hundred-year-old oak trees, as well as soaring pine, spruce, and elm rising like citadels hundreds of feet tall. It boasts 12,000 species of animal, from one-celled protozoa to such large mammals as boar, lynx, wolf, and moose; and, of course, there are its bands of throwback aurochsen, tarpans, and bison. Beavers, martens, weasels, badgers, and ermine glide through the marshes and ponds, while Pomeranian eagles share the skies with bats, goshawks, tawny owls, and black storks. On any given day, one is likely to encounter more elk than humans. The air smells of balsam and pine needles, sphagnum moss and heather, berries and mushrooms, marshy meadows and peat bogs. Small wonder Poland has chosen the preserve as its only natural national monument, and that it also merits the honor of being a World Heritage Site.

Because the preserve is closed to hunters, loggers, and motorized vehicles of any sort, it’s the last refuge of unique flora and fauna, and for that reason, park rangers guide tiny groups of hikers along designated paths, where they’re forbidden to litter, smoke, or speak above a whisper. Nothing may be removed, not even a leaf or stone as souvenir. All traces of humankind, especially noise, are discouraged, and if a ranger needs to carry something into the park he transports it by rubber-tired horse cart; if he needs to move a fallen tree, he must use a handsaw and a team of workhorses.

In what’s known as the “strict preserve,” one sees many fallen, dead, and decaying trees which, oddly enough, create the backbone and great strength of the forest, which is why activists vigorously defend its dead wood. Wind-thrown trees, fallen naturally and rotting, provide home to a throng of creatures: 3,000 species of fungi, 250 species of mosses, 350 species of lichen, 8,791 species of insects, mammals, and birds. Guides and a museum with dioramas teach the park’s ecology and history, but few visitors realize how richly it appealed both to Nazi racism and romanticism.

As twilight descends on the marshes of Białowieża, hundreds of starlings fly up all at once and create a great funnel, then the flock descends to find shelter for the night among the pond grasses. I’m reminded of Antonina’s love of starlings, and of Magdalena “the Starling,” and of Lutz Heck, too, who fancied “the little iridescent green glossy starling [which] warbled its little song with wide open beak, its small body literally shaking under the force of its notes.”[96] The eugenics and breeding experiments that thrived with Heck’s ambitions, Göring’s lust for game, and Nazi philosophy, in the end, ironically, helped to save scores of rare plants and endangered animals.

Understandably bitter about the Hecks’ Nazi ties and motives, some Polish patriots were (and still are) quick to contend that these animals may resemble their ancient ancestors but are, nonetheless, technically counterfeits. Cloning wasn’t available in the days of the Heck brothers, or they would surely have mastered it. Some zoologists, who prefer to call them “near tarpans” and “near aurochsen,” associate them with political agendas. The horses, “although not truly wild animals, are big, exotic creatures which have a history coloured with drama, dedication and skullduggery,” biologist Piotr Daszkiewicz and journalist Jean Aikhenbaum declare in Aurochs, le retour… d’une supercherie nazie (1999). They paint the Hecks as con men who staged a colossal Nazi hoax—by creating a new species, not resurrecting an extinct one. Herman Reichenbach, reviewing their book in International Zoo News, counters that Daszkiewicz and Aikhenbaum’s book is short on facts and essentially “what the French call a polemique… and the Americans a ‘hatchet job’… [but] [p]erhaps the Hecks deserve it; after the war both were less than candid about their association with the Nazi dictatorship…. [R]ecreating an ancient Germanic environment (within park borders) was as much Nazi ideology as getting back Alsace again.”[97]

However, Reichenbach envisions an important role for the Hecks’ creations: “They can still help preserve a natural environment of mixed forest and meadows…. And as a feral type of cattle, the aurochsen may also be able to enhance the gene pool of a domestic animal that has become impoverished genetically during the last decades. Attempting to back-breed the aurochs may have been a folly, but it was not a crime.” Professor Z. Pucek of the Białowieża Nature Preserve denounces the Heck cattle as “the biggest scientific swindle of the twentieth century.” And so the controversy continues, debated in journals and online, with a passage from American C. William Beebe often cited. In The Bird: Its Form and Function (1906), Beebe writes: “The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

There are many forms of obsession, some diabolical, some fortuitous. Strolling through Białowieża’s mass of life, one would never guess the role it played in Lutz Heck’s ambitions, the Warsaw Zoo’s fate, and the altruistic opportunism of Jan and Antonina, who capitalized on the Nazis’ obsession with prehistoric animals and a forest primeval to rescue scores of endangered neighbors and friends.

WARSAW TODAY IS A SPACIOUS GREEN CITY WITH ACRES OF sky, in which tree-lined avenues flow down to the river, ruins mix with new trends, and everywhere tall old trees offer scent and shade. In the zoo district, Praski Park still teems with cloyingly sweet lindens and, in summer, honeying bees; and across the river, where the Jewish Ghetto once stood, a park of chestnut trees surrounds a plaza and stark monument. After the defeat of Communism in 1989, with characteristic humor the Poles turned the former Gestapo headquarters into the Ministry of Education, the former KGB headquarters into the Ministry of Justice, the Communist Party headquarters into the Stock Exchange, and so on. But the architecture of Old Town is a visual hymn, rebuilt after the war in Vistula Gothic, based on old drawings and paintings by seventeenth-century Venetian Bernardo Bellotto—a feat organized by Emilia Hizowa (who invented Zegota’s push-button sliding walls). Some buildings show recycled rubble from the bombed city embedded in their facades. Dozens of statues and monuments grace Warsaw’s streets, because Poland is a country half submerged in its heavily invaded past, fed by progress, but always partly in mourning.

Retracing Antonina’s footsteps from the downtown apartment where she lodged with relatives during the siege of Warsaw, I walked to Miodowa Street, crossed the old moat, and slipped through the crumbling brick walls encircling Old Town. As one enters a world of tightly knit row houses, shoes slide over cobblestones and the body continuously balances itself in tiny increments until the stones grow larger, smoothed by centuries of footsteps. In rebuilding the city after the war, planners used as many of the original stones as possible, and in The Street of Crocodiles, Antonina’s contemporary Bruno Schulz describes the same colorful mosaic underfoot that exists today: “some of the pale pink of human skin, some golden, some blue-gray, all flat, warm and velvety in the sun, like sundials trodden to the point of obliteration, into blessed nothingness.”[98]

On such narrow streets, electric streetlamps (once gas) sprout from corner buildings and double-sashed windows stand open like an Advent calendar. Black stovepipe gutters underscore the terra-cotta rooftops, and some of the painted stucco walls have chipped to reveal the flesh-red brick foundations underneath.

I turned down Ulica Piekarska (Bakers Street), as cobblestones fanned and eddied like a petrified creek bed, then turned left into Piwna (Beer) Street, past a shrine recessed into the second story of a housefront and filled with a wooden saint flanked by floral offerings. Next I passed Karola Beyera, the coin collectors’ club, and three short wooden doors leading into courtyards, then turned left at the pyramidal wall of a corner building, and finally entered the large open Market Square. In the early days of the war, when Antonina shopped there, few vendors risked setting up, the amber and antiques stores stayed closed, patrician homes locked their doors, and the fortune-telling parrot of the 1930s was nowhere to be seen.

Leaving the square, I strolled toward the old fortifications to visit the closest well, following a wall of sooty bricks that curves around to medieval towers with funnel-capped lookouts and narrow slits that once hid archers. In summer, the mock orange trees along this walk froth with white flowers visited by fat black-and-white magpies. Floating above the wall, the canopies of crab apple trees scramble for sun. On Rycerka (Knight) Street, I reached a small square and a black pillar emblazoned with a mermaid wielding a sword—Warsaw’s symbol. It’s a chimera I think Antonina would have identified with: a defender half woman, half animal. On both sides of the pillar, a bearded god spills water from his mouth, and it’s easy to picture Antonina setting down her basket, angling a jug under a spout, and waiting as life gurgled up from the earth.