The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 5

AT NIGHT, IN THE SMALL FLAT ON KAPUCYŃSKA STREET, SHE learned a new noise: the anvil blows of German artillery. Somewhere else, women her age were slinking into nightclubs and dancing to the music of Glenn Miller, bouncy tunes with names like “String of Pearls” and “Little Brown Jug.” Others were dancing to the newly invented jukebox at roadside joints.[8] Couples were hiring babysitters and going to the cinema to see 1939’s new releases: Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. Families were driving through the countryside to view the fall leaves and eat apple cake and corn fritters at harvest festivals. For many Poles, life had become residue, what remains after evaporation drains the juice from the original. During occupation, everyone lost the many seasonings of daily life, trapped in a reality where only the basics mattered and those bled most of one’s energy, time, money, and thoughts.

Like other animal mothers, she grew desperate to find a safe hiding place for her young, “but unlike them,” she wrote in her diary, “I can’t carry Ryś in my jaws to a safe nest.” Nor could she remain in her sister-in-law’s fourth-floor apartment—“What if the building collapses and we can’t escape?” Maybe it was best, she decided, to resettle downstairs, where a small store sold lampshades—that is, if she could persuade the owners to take her in.

Gathering up Ryś, she climbed down the four flights of dark stairs and knocked on a door which opened to reveal two elderly women, Mrs. Caderska and Mrs. Stokowska.

“Come in, come in.” They glanced around the hallway after her and quickly fastened the door.

A strange new continent, half coral reef, half planetarium, veered into view as she entered a cluttered shop redolent with the odors of fabric, glue, paint, sweat, and cooking oatmeal. A bazaar of lampshades hung from the ceiling, nested together in ziggurats or huddled like exotic kites. Wooden shelves held strudel-like bolts of fabric, brass frames, hand tools, screws, rivets, and gleaming trays of finials separated by substance: glass, plastic, wood, metal. In such shops of the era, women sewed new fabric shades by hand, repaired old shades, and sold some made by others.

As Antonina’s eyes traveled the room, she would have seen fixtures popular during the 1930s, a time when Baltic decor ran from Victorian to Art Deco and modernist, and included shades such as these: tulip-shaped rose silk decorated with chrysanthemum brocade; green chiffon with lace inset panels of white sateen; geometrically shaped pleated ivory; bright yellow panels in the shape of Napoleon’s hat; eight-sided perforated metal with faceted faux jewels inserted around the skirt; dark amber mica crowning a plaster globe embossed with Art Nouveau archers pursuing a stag; a dome of orange-red glass bumpy as gooseflesh, skirted with crystal pendants, below which hung a brass gondola embossed with ivy scrolling. That fashionable red glass, known as gorge-de-pigeon, and often used in European wine goblets in Antonina’s time, shone sour-cherry red when dark, and when lit, cast a glow the color of freshly peeled blood oranges. It was dyed with pigeon blood, an elixir also used to grade high-quality rubies (with the best stones resembling the freshest blood).

Ryś drew her attention to the far side of the room where, to her surprise, disheveled women and children from the neighborhood sat hedged in by shades.

“Dzień dobry, dzień dobry, dzień dobry,” Antonina greeted each woman in turn.

Something about the cozy atmosphere of the lampshade store drew the displaced and bone-chilled to this shop run by grandmotherly ladies willing to share their pantry, coal, and bedding. As Antonina noted,

This lampshade store and workshop was like a magnet to so many people. Thanks to these two tiny lovely old ladies, who were extremely warmhearted, full of love and kindness, we survived this terrible time. They were like the warm light during the summer night, and people from upstairs, homeless people from other locations, from destroyed buildings, even from other streets, were gathering like moths attracted by the warmth around these two ladies.

Antonina marveled as their wrinkled hands passed out food (mainly oatmeal), sweets, a postcard album, and little games. Every night when people chose their spot to sleep, she lay a mattress under a sturdy doorframe and sheltered Ryś with her body, snatching sleep as though falling down a well, as her past grew more idyllic and floated farther away. She had had so many plans for the coming year; now she wondered if she and Ryś would survive the night, if she’d live to see Jan again, if her son would celebrate another birthday. “Every day of our life was full of thoughts of the horrible present, and even our own death,” she wrote in her memoirs, adding:

When Britain and France declared war on Germany, Poles rejoiced and radio stations played the French and British national anthems endlessly for days, but mid-September brought no relief from the relentless bombing and heavy artillery. “Living in a city under siege,” Antonina wrote disbelievingly in her memoirs, a city full of whistling bombs, jarring explosions, the dry thunder of collapse, and hungry people. First routine comforts like water and gas disappeared, then radio and newspapers. Whoever dared the streets only did so at a run, and people risked their lives to stand in line for a little horsemeat or bread. For three weeks she heard shells zinging over rooftops by day and bombs pounding on walls of darkness at night. Chilling whistles preceded horrible booms, and Antonina found herself listening for each whistle to end, fearing the worst, then letting her breath out when she heard someone else’s life exploding. Without trying, she gauged the distance and felt relief that she wasn’t the bomb’s target, then almost at once came the next whistle, the next blast.

On the rare occasions she ventured out, she entered a film-like war, with yellow smoke, pyramids of rubble, jagged stone cliffs where buildings once stood, wind-chased letters and medicine vials, wounded people, and dead horses with oddly angled legs. But nothing more unreal than this: hovering overhead, what looked at first like snow but didn’t move like snowflakes, something delicately rising and falling without landing. Eerier than a blizzard, a bizarre soft cloud of down feathers from the city’s pillows and comforters gently swirled above the buildings. Once, long ago, a Polish king repelled invading Turks by attaching large feathered hoops to each soldier’s back. As they galloped into battle, the wind coursed through the false wings with a loud tornadic whirring that spooked the enemy’s horses, which dug in their hooves and refused to advance. For many Warsawians, this feather storm may have conjured up the slaughter of those knights, the city’s guardian angels.

One day, after a live shell plunged into her building and stuck in the fourth-floor ceiling, she waited for an explosion that never came. That night, while bombs sprayed smoke ropes across the sky, she moved Ryś to the basement of a nearby church. Then, “in the strangled silence of the morning,” she moved Rhyś back again to the lampshade store. “I’m just like our lioness,” she told the others, “fearfully moving my cub from one side of the cage to the other.”

No news came of Jan, and the worry allowed her little sleep, but she told herself that she would fail him if she didn’t save the zoo’s remaining animals. Were they even alive, she wondered, and could the teenage boys left in charge really look after them? There seemed no choice: though queasy from fear, she left Ryś with her sister-in-law and forced herself to cross the river amid gunfire and shells. “This is how a hunted animal feels,” she thought, caught in the melee, “not like a heroine, just madly driven to get home safely at any cost.” She remembered the death of Jaś and the big cats, shot point-blank by Polish soldiers. Visions of their last moments tortured her, and perhaps a fright harder to dispel: What if they turned out to be the lucky ones?