The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 2

“ADOLF HAS TO BE STOPPED,” ONE OF THE KEEPERS INSISTED. Jan knew he didn’t mean Hitler but “Adolf the Kidnapper,” a nickname given to the ringleader of the rhesus monkeys, who had been waging war with the oldest female, Marta, whose son Adolf had stolen and given to his favorite mate, Nelly, who already had one baby of her own. “It’s not right. Each mother should feed her own baby, and why deprive Marta of her baby just to give Nelly two?”

Other keepers offered health bulletins about the zoo’s best-known animals, like Rose the giraffe, Mary the African hunting dog, Sahib the petting-zoo colt, who had been sneaking into the pasture with the skittish Przywalski horses. Elephants sometimes develop herpes on their trunks, and in captive settings, an avian retrovirus or an illness like tuberculosis passes easily from humans to parrots, elephants, cheetahs, and other animals, and back again to humans—especially in Jan’s preantibiotic era, when serious infection could savage a population, animal or human. That meant calling the zoo vet, Dr. Lopatynski, who always arrived on his spluttering motorcycle wearing a leather jacket, big hat with long waving earflaps, cheeks whisked red by the wind, and pince-nez glasses perched on his nose.

What else might have been discussed at the daily meetings? In an old zoo photograph, Jan stands beside a large half-excavated hippo enclosure that’s partly braced with heavy wooden ribs, the sort that flex ship hulls. The background vegetation suggests summer, and all digging had to be finished before the ground hardened, which can happen as early as October in Poland, so it’s likely he demanded progress reports and chivvied the foreman. Thievery posed another worry, and since the exotic animal trade flourished, armed guards patrolled day and night.[1]

Jan’s grand vision of the zoo shines through his many books and broadcasts; he hoped that one day his zoo might achieve an illusion of native habitats, where natural enemies could share enclosures without conflict. For that mirage of a primal truce one needs to recruit acres of land, dig interlocking moats, and install creative plumbing. Jan planned an innovative zoo of world importance at the heart of Warsaw’s life, both social and cultural, and at one point he even thought of adding an amusement park.

Basic concerns for zoos both antique and modern include keeping the animals healthy, sane, safe, and above all contained. Zoos have always faced ingenious escape artists, leggy lightning bolts like klipspringers, which can leap right over a man’s head and land on a rock ledge the size of a quarter. Powerful and stocky with an arched back, these nervous little antelopes only weigh forty pounds, but they’re agile and jump on the tips of their vertical hooves like ballet dancers performing on their toenails. Startle them and they will bounce around the enclosure and possibly leap the fence, and, like all antelopes, they pronk. Legend has it that, in 1919, a Burmese man invented the closest human equivalent to pronking—a hopping stick for his daughter, Pogo, to use crossing puddles on her way to school.[2]

After the jaguar nearly cleared its moat at the current Warsaw Zoo, Dr. Rembiszewski planted an electric fence of the sort farmers use to jolt deer from their crops, only custom-built and much higher. Electric fences were available to Jan, who may well have priced one and discussed its feasibility given the layout of the big cats’ enclosure.

After breakfast each day, Antonina walked to the zoo office building and awaited VIP visitors, because besides running the household and nursing sick animals, she greeted distinguished guests from Poland and abroad and welcomed press or government officials. Guiding people round, Antonina amused them with anecdotes and curiosities absorbed from books, Jan’s talks, or observed firsthand. As they strolled through the zoo, they glimpsed versions of wetlands, deserts, woods, meadows, and steppes. Some areas stayed shaded, others swam in sunlight, and strategically arranged trees, shrubs, and rocks offered shelter from winter’s hammering winds that could claw the roof off a barn.

She began at the main gate on Ratuszowa Street, facing a long straight boulevard flanked by enclosures where the first thing to catch a visitor’s eye was a wobbly pink pond—pale flamingos strutting with backward-bent red knees,[3] their mouths black change-purses. Not as vivid as wild flamingos, tinted coral pink from eating crustaceans, they were eye-catching enough to be the zoo’s receptionists, and full of raucous growls, grunts, and honking. Just beyond them one met cages of birds from all over the world: noisy, colorfully plumed exotics like mynas, macaws, marabous, and crowned cranes; as well as native birds like the diminutive pygmy owl, or the giant eagle owl that can snatch up a rabbit in its talons.

Peacocks and small deer roamed the zoo as they pleased, trotting away when people approached, as if pushed by an invisible wave. Atop a small grassy mound, a female cheetah sunned herself while her speckled kittens leapt and wrestled nearby, occasionally distracted by the free-range deer and peacocks. Tantalizing as loose prey must have been for caged lions, hyenas, wolves, and other predators, it also kept their senses keen and added a carnal edge to their day. Black swans, pelicans, and other marsh and water birds floated on a dragon-shaped pond. To the left, open enclosures revealed grazing forest bison, antelopes, zebras, ostriches, camels, and rhinos. To the right, visitors viewed tigers, lions, and hippos. Then, following the gravel path, they circled back past the giraffes, reptiles, elephants, monkeys, seals, and bears. The villa lay nearly hidden among the trees, within hooting distance of the aviaries, just before one got to the chimps, due east of the penguins.

The grasslands habitats included African wild dogs, excitable long-legged canines always on the run, swinging their wide heads and sniffing suspiciously as they swiveled large stiff ears. Their scientific name, Canis pictus (painted dog), suggests the beauty of their fur, randomly splotched with yellow, black, and red. But not their ferocity or endurance: they could drag down a bolting zebra or chase an antelope for miles. The zoo boasted the first in Europe, a real prize, even if in Africa farmers regarded them as vicious pests. In Warsaw they were picturesque showmen, no two patterned the same, and a crowd always formed in front of them. The zoo also bred the first Grewyi zebras, native to Abyssinia, which look familiar at first until you realize that, unlike textbook zebras, they’re taller and more heavily striped, with narrow bars that converge vertically around the body and run horizontally down the legs, striping all the way to the hooves.

And then there was Tuzinka, still covered in baby fuzz, one of only twelve elephants ever born in captivity. Hence her name, from tuzin, the Polish word for a dozen. Antonina had midwifed Kasia when she gave birth to Tuzinka, at 3:30 A.M. on a cool April morning. In her diary she described Tuzinka as a giant bundle, the largest baby animal she’d ever seen, weighing in at 242 pounds, standing a little over three feet tall, with blue eyes, a down of black hair, large pansy-like ears, a tail that seemed too long for her body—a wobbly confused newborn dropping into life’s sensory bazaar. Her blue eyes flickered with the same surprise Antonina beheld in the eyes of other newborn animals—gawking, fascinated, yet baffled by all the shine and clangor.

To nurse, Tuzinka stood beneath her mother, back knees bent, reaching up with her soft mouth. The look in her eyes signaled that nothing existed but the flow of warm milk and the drum of her mother’s reassuring heartbeat. That’s how photographers captured her, in 1937, for a black-and-white postcard that proved a popular souvenir, as did a stuffed cloth baby elephant. Old photographs show delighted visitors reaching out to Tuzinka and her mother, who is reaching back with an extended trunk, across a small moat edged with short metal spikes. Since elephants don’t jump, a six-foot-deep trench that’s six feet wide at the top and narrower at the bottom will trap them, provided the elephants don’t fill the trench in with mud and wade across, as some have been known to do.

Animal smells created the zoo’s olfactory landscape, some subtle, some almost sickening at first. Especially the scent signposts of hyenas, which turn their anal pouches inside out and ooze a stinky paste known in the trade as “hyena butter.” Each foul-smelling ad lasts a month or so, broadcasting news, and a mature male paints about a hundred fifty a year. Then there’s the hippo’s dominance display of defecating while propelling its little tail, flinging dung everywhere. Male musk oxen habitually sprinkle themselves with their own urine, and because sea lions trap rotting food between the teeth, their breath reeks a yard away. The kakapo, a black-feathered flightless parrot with a shocking white eye and orange beak, smells like an old clarinet case. During mating season, male elephants dribble a powerful sweet musth from a little gland near each eye. The crested auklet’s feathers smell of tangerine, especially during breeding season, when courting auklets poke their beaks into each other’s pungent neck-ruff. All the animals telegraph scent codes as distinctive as calls, and after a while, Antonina grew used to the thick aroma of their agendas—biological threats, come-ons, and news reports.

Antonina felt convinced that people needed to connect more with their animal nature, but also that animals “long for human company, reach out for human attention,” with a yearning that’s somehow reciprocal. Her imaginary transits into the Umwelt of animals banished the human world for a spell, a realm of saber-rattling and strife where parents suddenly vanish. Playing chase and tumble games with the lynx kittens, feeding them by hand, releasing herself to the sandy lick of warm tongues on her fingers and the insistent kneading of paws, as the no-man’s-land between tame and wild softened even more, helped her forge a bond with the zoo she described as “everlasting.”

The zoo also offered Antonina a pulpit for conservation, a sort of walking ministry, evangelism beside the Vistula as a tour of lesser gods, and she offered visitors a unique bridge to nature. But first they had to cross the cagelike bridge spanning the river and enter the woolier side of town. When she told them absorbing stories about lynxes and other animals, the earth’s vast green blur reeled into focus briefly as a single face or motive, a named being. She and Jan also encouraged directors to stage film, music, and theater events at the zoo, and loaned animals for roles in shows when asked—lion cubs being the most popular. “Our zoo was full of life,” she wrote. “We had lots of visitors: young people, animal lovers, and just visitors. We had many partners: universities in Poland and abroad, the Polish Health Department, and even the Academy of Fine Arts.” Local artists crafted the zoo’s stylized Art Deco posters, and the Żabińskis invited artists of all stripes to come and uncage their imaginations.