The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 3

ONE DAY ON HIS BICYCLE ROUNDS OF THE ZOO, JAN LEFT ADAM the elk to graze on the lawn and shrubbery and entered the warm birdhouse, redolent with moist hay and lime. There, a petite woman stood close to a cage, moving her elbows in mimicry of the birds as they preened and posed. With her dark wavy hair, compact body, and thin legs sticking out from the hem of her smock, she almost qualified for enclosure herself. Bobbing on a trapeze overhead, a walleyed parrot screeched: “What’s your name? What’s your name?” And in a melodious voice, the woman piped back: “What’s your name? What’s your name?” The parrot leaned down and eyed her hard, then turned its head and fixed her with the other eye.

“Good day,” Jan said. Dzień dobry. It’s the way Poles began most polite verbal exchanges. She introduced herself as Magdalena Gross, a name Jan knew well, since Gross’s sculptures were commissioned by wealthy Poles and international admirers alike.[4] He didn’t know she sculpted animals, but then neither did she before that day. Later she’d tell Antonina that when she first visited the zoo she’d been so captivated that her hands had started molding air, so she decided to bring her tools and go on safari, and fate led her to that enclosure with birds streamlined like futuristic trains. Jan kissed her hand lightly according to Polish custom, said it would honor him if she considered the zoo her open-air studio and the animals her fidgety models.

By all accounts, tall, slender, fair Antonina looked like a Valkyrie at rest, and short, dark, Jewish Magdalena vibrated with energy. Antonina saw Magdalena as a winning array of contradictions: emphatic yet vulnerable, daring but modest, zany yet highly disciplined, someone excited by life—which may be what appealed most to Antonina, who wasn’t as stoic or solemn as Jan. The two women shared a passion for art and music, as well as a similar sense of humor, were close in age, and had friends in common—thus began what would become an important friendship. What would Antonina have served when Magdalena joined her for tea? Most Warsawians offer black tea and sweets to guests, and Antonina raised roses and jarred a lot of preserves, so at some point she’s bound to have prepared the traditional Polish pastry of soft doughnuts filled with a layer of pink rose-petal jam and coated in an orange glaze that smells of fire.

Magdalena confided that she’d been feeling stale and uninspired, her creative attic empty, when she happened by the zoo one day and saw a shocking flock of flamingos strutting by. Beyond them roamed a dream-panoply of even stranger animals—fabulous shapes, and hues more subtle than any painter could mix. The spectacle hit her with all the power of revelation, and inspired a series of animal sculptures that would win international acclaim.

THE ZOO LOOKED MAGNIFICENT by the summer of 1939, and Antonina began making elaborate plans for the following spring, when she and Jan would have the honor of hosting the International Association of Zoo Directors’ annual meeting in Warsaw. However, that meant pushing to the rim of awareness such seismic fears as: if our world’s still intact. Nearly a year earlier, in September 1938, when Hitler had seized Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany and populated mainly by Germans, France and Britain had acquiesced, but Poles worried about their own borderlands. German territory ceded to Poland during 1918–22 included eastern Silesia and the region formerly known as the Pomeranian Corridor, an act that effectively separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany. The important German Baltic port of Gdańsk had been declared a “Free City,” open to both Germans and Poles.

A month after he invaded Czechoslovakia, Hitler demanded the return of Gdańsk and the right to build an extraterritorial road through the Corridor. Diplomatic wrangling in early 1939 led to antagonism by March, when Hitler secretly ordered his generals to “deal with the Polish question.” Relations between Poland and Germany gradually disintegrated and Poles awoke to omens of war, a horrifying thought but not a new one. Germany had occupied Poland so often since the Middle Ages, most recently in 1915–18, that Slavs fighting Teutons had achieved the status of patriotic tradition. Cursed by its strategic location in eastern Europe, Poland had been invaded, sacked, and carved up many times, its borders ebbing and flowing; some village children learned five languages just to speak with neighbors. War wasn’t something Antonina wanted to think about, especially since her last experience of war stole both of her parents, so she assured herself, as most Poles did, of their solid alliance with France, keeper of a powerful army, and Britain’s sworn protection. Optimistic by nature, she concentrated on her fortunate life. After all, in 1939, not many Polish women could be thankful for a good marriage, a healthy son, and a satisfying career, let alone a wealth of animals she regarded as stepchildren. Feeling blessed and high-spirited, Antonina took Ryś, his aged nanny, and Zośka the St. Bernard to the small popular vacation village of Rejentówka in early August, while Jan stayed in Warsaw to oversee the zoo. She also decided to include Koko, an elderly pink cockatoo prone to dizziness who often fell off her perch. Because Koko had a nervous habit of plucking out her breast feathers, Antonina dressed her in a metal collar that acted like a megaphone for squawks, and hoped “the fresh forest air, getting to eat wild roots and twigs,” might cure her ills and return her colorful plumage. The by now full-grown lynxes stayed behind, but she carted along a new arrival, a baby badger named Borsunio (Little Badger), too young to leave unattended. Most of all, she wanted to spirit Ryś away from Warsaw, rife with talk of war, for one last summer of innocent play in the countryside, his and hers both.

The Żabińskis’ country cottage nestled in a forest hollow four miles from a wide gall in the Bug River, and only minutes from its small tributary, the Rządzą.[5] Antonina and Ryś arrived on a hot summer day, with the smell of pine resin in the air and waves of acacias and petunias in bloom, the last rays of sunlight lighting the tips of old trees and darkness already fallen in the lower reaches of the forest, where the shrill rib-music of cicadas mixed with the descending calls of cuckoos and the whine of hungry female mosquitos.

A moment later, on one of the small verandas, she could submerge in the shadow of a scented grapevine “smelling of its faint, hardly perceptible flowers, but nicer than a rose, than lilac and jasmine, than the sweetest smell—golden lupin from the field,” while “only a few steps through the overgrown grass stood… the forest wall, towering, young-green from the oak, slashed with white birch here and there….” She and Ryś sank into the green quiet that seemed light-years from Warsaw, a huge, internal, personal distance, not just miles. Without even a radio in the cottage, nature provided the lessons, news, and games. One popular local pastime involved going into the forest and counting the aspens.

Each summer the cottage awaited them with dishes, pots, a washtub, sheets, and a large surplus of dry provisions, and they provided the ensemble of human and animal characters that transformed it from bungalow to burlesque. After they settled the large birdcage stand on the veranda and fed the cockatoo bits of orange, Ryś attached a halter to the badger and tried to persuade it to walk on a leash, which it did, but only in reverse, pulling Ryś along at speed. Like the other animals in her circle, Badger warmed to Antonina, who referred to him as her “foster child” and taught him to come to his name, paddle with them in the river, and climb up onto her bed to nurse from a bottle. Badger taught himself to scratch at the front door to be let out for toileting, and he bathed sitting back in a washtub, human style, while splashing sudsy water against his chest with both arms. In her diary, she noted how Badger’s instincts mixed with human customs and his own one-of-a-kind personality. Scrupulous about toileting, for instance, he dug one toilet hole on each side of the house and galloped home from long walks just to use them. But one day, when she couldn’t find Badger, she checked all of his usual daytime napping places—a drawer in the linen closet, between her bed’s sheet and duvet cover, in Ryś’s nanny’s suitcase—with no success. In Ryś’s bedroom, she stooped to look under the bed and glimpsed Badger pushing Ryś’s training potty out into the open, climbing onto the white enamel bowl, and using it as it was intended.

Near the end of summer vacation, Ryś’s friends Marek and Zbyszek (sons of a doctor who lived on the other side of Praski Park) stopped by on their way home from Hel Peninsula on the Baltic Sea, full of chatter about the many ships moored in Gdynia harbor, the smoked fish and sailing trips, and all the changes to the waterfront. Sitting in the dimly lit living room while night slipped around her, Antonina overheard the boys on the porch steps talking about their summer adventures, and she realized that for Ryś the Baltic Sea he’d visited three years earlier probably existed only as a hazy memory that included the crashing surf and the glassy heat of noon sand.

“You won’t believe how they’ve dug up the beach! Next year there won’t be a civilian on it,” Marek said.

“But why?” Ryś asked.

“To build fortifications, for war!”

His older brother eyed him hard, and Marek wrapped an arm around Ryś’s shoulder and said dismissively: “But who cares about the beach. Tell us about Badger instead.”

And so Ryś began, stuttering a little at first, then developing animation and speed, to tell of forest pirates and the shenanigans of Badger, culminating in the night Badger spilled a bedside bucket of cold water onto a sleeping neighbor lady he’d crawled into bed with, and the boys fell together, twitching with laughter.

“It feels good to hear them laughing,” Antonina thought, “but this perpetual splinter poking into Ryś—the war—it’s still a murky idea to him. He only associates words like torpedo and fortifications with toys, the beautiful ships he floats in bays surrounding the sand forts he builds along the shore of the Rządzą. And there’s his enchanting game of cowboys and Indians when he shoots pinecones with bow and arrow… but the other possibility, of a real war, that he doesn’t understand yet, thank heavens.”

The older boys believed, as Antonina did, that war belonged to the world of adults, not children. She sensed that Ryś yearned to grill them with questions, though he didn’t want to look stupid or, worse, like a little kid, so he kept quiet about the invisible hand grenade lying at his feet that everyone feared might explode.

“What a subject to be broached by the innocent lips of children,” Antonina reflected, glancing at the sun-bronzed faces of the three boys, glistening in the light cast by a large oil lamp. “Grazed by sadness” about their safety, she wondered yet again: “What will become of them, if war begins?” It was a question she’d been denying, sidestepping, and rewording for months. “Our animal republic,” she finally admitted to herself, “exists in the busiest and most buzzing Polish city, as a small autonomous state defended by the capital. Living behind its gates, as if on an island cut off from the rest of the world, it seems impossible the waves of evil spilling across Europe could overwhelm our little island as well.” As darkness began seeping into everything, erasing edges, a free-floating anxiety plagued her; eager as she was to mend the fabric of her son’s life the instant holes formed, she could only await the unraveling.

She meant the last idylls of summer to be well spent, so the next morning she organized a mushroom-hunting brigade, with prizes and honors for whoever bagged the most saffron milk-cap, boletus, and button mushrooms, which she planned to jar. If war did erupt, spreading mushroom marinade on bread in winter would fill everyone with cottage memories of river swims, Badger’s antics, and better days. They hiked four miles to the Bug River, with Ryś carried piggyback at times, Zośka trotting alongside, and Badger riding in a knapsack. Stopping by meadows along the way, they picnicked and played soccer, with Badger and Zośka serving as goalies, though Badger battled fiercely over the leather ball once he latched onto it with teeth and claws.

Most summer weekends, Antonina left Ryś with his nanny in the country and returned to Warsaw to spend a few days alone with Jan. On Thursday, August 24, 1939, the same day Britain renewed its pledge to aid Poland if Germany invaded, Antonina made her usual visit to Warsaw, where, to her shock, she saw antiaircraft sites ringing the city, civilians digging trenches and erecting barricades, and, most disturbing of all, posters that announced an imminent draft. Only the day before, foreign ministers Ribbentrop and Molotov had stunned the world by revealing that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact.

“The only thing dividing Berlin from Moscow is Poland,” she thought.

Neither she nor Jan knew of the pact’s secret clauses, already hacking up Poland after a two-stage invasion and divvying up its desirable farmlands.

“Diplomats are cagey. This might only be a bluff,” she thought.

Jan knew Poland hadn’t the planes, weapons, or war equipment to compete with Germany, and so they started talking seriously about sending Ryś somewhere safer, to a town of no military interest, if such a place existed.

Antonina felt as though she were “waking from a long dream, or entering a nightmare,” either way a psychic earthquake. Vacationing far from the political clatter of Warsaw, cocooned in “the calm, level order of the farmer’s life, the harmony of white sand dunes and weeping willows,” with each day enlivened by eccentric animals and a little boy’s adventures, it had been nearly possible to ignore world events, or at least stay optimistic about them, even stubbornly naïve.