The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 6

NAZI BOMBERS ATTACKED WARSAW IN 1150 SORTIES, DEVASTATING the zoo, which happened to lie near antiaircraft guns. On that clear day, the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart. Wooden buildings collapsed, sucked down by heat. Glass and metal shards mutilated skin, feathers, hooves, and scales indiscriminately as wounded zebras ran, ribboned with blood, terrified howler monkeys and orangutans dashed caterwauling into the trees and bushes, snakes slithered loose, and crocodiles pushed onto their toes and trotted at speed. Bullets ripped open the aviary nets and parrots spiraled upward like Aztec gods and plummeted straight down, other tropicals hid in the shrubs and trees or tried to fly with singed wings. Some animals, hiding in their cages and basins, became engulfed by rolling waves of flame. Two giraffes lay dead on the ground, legs twisted, shockingly horizontal. The clotted air hurt to breathe and stank of burning wood, straw, and flesh. The monkeys and birds, screeching infernally, created an otherworldly chorus backed by a crackling timpani of bullets and bomb blasts. Echoing around the zoo, the tumult surely sounded like ten thousand Furies scratching up from hell to unhinge the world.

Antonina and a handful of keepers ran through the grounds, trying to rescue some animals and release others, while dodging injury themselves. Running from one cage to the next, she also worried about her husband, fighting at the front, “a brave man, a man of conscience; if even innocent animals aren’t safe, what hope has he?” And when he returned, what would he find? Then another thought collided: Where was Kasia, the mother elephant, one of their favorites? At last she arrived at Kasia’s enclosure, only to discover it leveled and her gone (already killed by a shell, Antonina would later learn), but she could hear two-year-old baby Tuzinka trumpeting in the distance. Many monkeys had died in a pavilion fire or were shot, and others hooted wildly as they scampered through the shrubs and trees.

Miraculously, some animals survived at the zoo and many escaped across the bridge, entering Old Town while the capital burned. People brave enough to stand by their windows, or unlucky enough to be outside, watched a biblical hallucination unfolding as the zoo emptied into Warsaw’s streets. Seals waddled along the banks of the Vistula, camels and llamas wandered down alleyways, hooves skidding on cobblestone, ostriches and antelope trotted beside foxes and wolves, anteaters called out hatchee, hatchee as they scuttled over bricks. Locals saw blurs of fur and hide bolting past factories and apartment houses, racing to outlying fields of oats, buckwheat, and flax, scrambling into creeks, hiding in stairwells and sheds. Submerged in their wallows, the hippos, otters, and beavers survived. Somehow the bears, bison, Przywalski horses, camels, zebras, lynxes, peacocks and other birds, monkeys, and reptiles survived, too.

Antonina wrote of stopping a young soldier near the villa and asking: “Have you seen a large badger?”

He said: “Some badger banged and scratched on the villa door for a long time, but when we didn’t let it in, it disappeared through the bushes.”

“Poor Badger,” she lamented as she pictured the family pet’s frightened appeals at the door. After a moment, “I hope he managed to escape” clouded her mind, the heat and smoke resumed, her legs returned, and she ran to check on the bristlemaned horses from Mongolia. The other horses and donkeys—including her son’s pony, Figlarz (Prankster)—lay dead in the streets, but somehow the rare Przywalski horses trembled upright in their pasture.

Antonia finally left the zoo and crossed Praski Park, between rows of linden trees haloed in fire, and headed back to the lampshade store downtown where she and her son sheltered. Blurred and drained, she tried to describe the plumes of smoke, the uprooted trees and grass, the blood-splattered buildings and carcasses. Then, when she felt a little calmer, she made her way to a stone building at No. 1 Miodowa Street and climbed the stairs to a small office crammed with agitated people and cascading piles of documents, one of the Resistance’s secret lairs, where she met an old friend, Adam Englert.

“Any news?”

“Apparently, our army is out of ammunition and supplies, and discussing official surrender,” he said bleakly.

In her memoirs, she wrote that she heard him speak, but his words floated away from her; it was as if her brain, already choked by the day’s horrors, had issued a non serviam and refused to absorb any more.

Sitting down heavily on a couch, she felt glued in place. Until this moment, she hadn’t let herself believe that her country might really lose its independence. Again. If occupation wasn’t new, neither was ousting the enemy, but it had been twenty-one years since the last war with Germany, most of Antonina’s life, and the prospect stunned her. For ten years, the zoo had seemed a principality all its own, protected by the moat of the Vistula, with daily life a jigsaw-puzzle fit for her avid sensibility.

Back at the lampshade store, she told everyone the sorry news she’d heard from Englert, which didn’t agree with Polish Mayor Starzyński’s upbeat radio broadcasts, in which he denounced the Nazis, offered hope, and rallied everyone to defend the capital at all costs.

“While speaking to you now,” he had said on one occasion, “I can see it through the window in its greatness and glory, shrouded in smoke, red in flames: glorious, invincible, fighting Warsaw!”[9]

Puzzled, they wondered whom to believe: the mayor in a public speech or members of the Resistance. Surely the latter. In another broadcast, Starzyński had used the past tense at one point: “I wanted Warsaw to be a great city. I believed that it would be great. My associates and I drew up plans and made sketches of a great Warsaw of the future.” In light of Starzyński’s tense (was it a slip?), Antonina’s news rang truer and everyone’s mood fell, as the owners edged among the tables, switching on small lamps.

Several days later, after Warsaw’s surrender, Antonina sat at a table with the others, hungry but too depressed to eat the little food in front of her, when she heard a crisp knock at the door. No one visited anymore, no one bought lamps or fixed broken lampshades. Anxiously, the owners opened the door a crack, and to her astonishment there stood Jan, looking exhausted and relieved. Hugs and kisses followed, then he sat down at the table and told them his story.

When Jan and his friends had left Warsaw weeks before, on the evening of September 7, they followed the river and walked toward Brześć on Bug, as part of a phantom army, looking for a unit to join. Not finding one, they finally split up, and on September 25, Jan overnighted in Mienie, at a farm whose owners he knew from summers at the Rejentówka cottage. The following morning, the housekeeper woke him to ask if he’d translate for her with a German officer who had arrived during the night. Any encounter with a Nazi was dangerous, and as Jan dressed he tried to prepare himself for trouble and rehearse possible scenarios. Taking the stairs with the feigned confidence of a legitimate houseguest, he kept his eye on the Wehrmacht officer standing in the living room, discussing provisions with the owners. As the Nazi turned to face him, disbelief washed over Jan, and he wondered if he were seeing something churned up by his jumpy heart. But in the same instant the officer’s face flashed surprise and he smiled. There stood Dr. Müller, a fellow member of the International Association of Zoo Directors, who directed the zoo at Królewiec (in eastern Prussia, and known as Königsberg before the war).

Laughing, Müller said: “I know only one Pole well, you, my friend, and I meet you here! How did this happen?” A supply officer, Müller had come to the farm seeking food for his troops. When he told Jan of Warsaw’s catastrophe and the zoo’s, Jan wanted to return immediately, and Müller offered to help, but warned that Polish men of Jan’s age weren’t safe on the roads. The best plan, he suggested, was to arrest Jan and drive to Warsaw with him as a prisoner; and despite their past cordiality, Jan worried if Müller could be trusted. But, true to his word, Müller returned when Warsaw surrendered and drove Jan as deep into the city as he dared. Hoping to meet in happier days, they said goodbye, and Jan slid through the ruins of the city, wondering if he’d ever reach Kapucyńska Street, Antonina, and Ryś—if they were even alive. At last he found the four-story building, and when his first knock brought no response, he “nearly toppled from dread.”

In the following days, Warsaw’s fierce quiet grew unnerving, so Jan and Antonina decided to steal across the bridge to the zoo, this time with no shells or snipers peppering them. Several of the old keepers had also returned and taken up their usual chores as a sort of ghost brigade working in a half-massacred village where the guardhouse and quarters now were charred hills, and the workshops, elephant house, whole habitats and enclosures had also burned or collapsed. Strangest of all, many cage bars had melted into grotesque shapes that looked like the work of avant-garde welders. Jan and Antonina walked to the villa, shocked by a scene that looked even more Surrealist than before. Although the villa had survived, its tall windows were shattered by bomb blasts, and fine particles of glass lay everywhere like sand, mixed with crushed straw from when Polish soldiers had sheltered there during air raids. Everything needed fixing, especially the windows, and because panes of glass were a rare commodity, they decided to use plywood for a while, though it meant sealing themselves off even more.

But first they began a quest for wounded animals, combing the grounds, searching in even unlikely hiding places; a cheer rose whenever someone found an animal, trapped beneath debris, confused and hungry but alive. According to Antonina, many of the army’s dead horses lay with swollen bellies, grinning teeth, eyes frozen wide open in fear. All the corpses needed to be buried or butchered (with antelope, deer, and horse meat distributed to the city’s hungry), not something Jan and Antonina could face, so they left it to the keepers and at nightfall, exhausted and depressed, the villa uninhabitable, they returned to Kapucyńska Street.

The next day General Rommel spoke on the radio, urging Warsaw’s soldiers and citizens to accept surrender with dignity and stay calm while the German army marched into their fallen city. His broadcast ended with: “I rely on the population of Warsaw, which stood bravely in its defense and displayed its profound patriotism, to accept the entry of the German forces quietly, honorably, and calmly.”[10]

“Maybe it’s good news,” Antonina told herself, “maybe it’s peace at last and the chance to rebuild.”

After a rainy morning, thick cloud banks shifted and a warm October sunlight began streaming through as German soldiers patrolled each neighborhood, filling the streets with the clop of heavy bootheels and gabble in a foreign tongue. Then different sounds filtered into the lampshade store, more sibilant and transparent: crowd voices of Polish men and women. Antonina saw “one large organism flowing slowly” downtown and people trickling out of buildings to join it.

“Where do you suppose they’re heading?”

The radio told them where Hitler was preparing to review his troops, and she and Jan felt the same osmotic force tugging them outside. Everywhere Antonina looked lay destruction. In her jottings, she described “buildings guillotined by the war—their roofs gone, sitting in misshapen poses somewhere in nearby backyards. Other buildings looked sad, ripped up by bombs from top to basement.” They reminded her of “people embarrassed by their wounds, looking for a way to cover the openings in their abdomens.”

Next Antonina and Jan passed rain-soaked buildings missing their plaster, with exposed blood-red bricks steaming in the warm sunshine. Fires still burned, the entrails of homes still smoldered, filling the air with enough smoke to make eyes tear and throats tighten. Hypnotized, the swelling crowd flowed to the center of the city, and in archival films one can see them lining the main streets, down which conquering German soldiers march in a steady torrent of gunmetal-gray uniforms, their steps echoing like ropes walloping hardwood.

Jan turned to Antonina, who looked faint.

“I can’t breathe,” she said. “I feel like I’m drowning in a gray sea, like they’re flooding the whole city, washing away our past and people, dashing everything from the face of the earth.”

Jammed inside the crowd, they watched gleaming tanks and guns stream by, and ruddy-faced soldiers, some with stares Jan found so provocative that he had to turn away. Puppet theater, a popular art form in Poland, wasn’t just for children but often grappled with satiric and political subjects, as it had in ancient Rome. Old films show what locals may have found ironic: a loud brass band heralding waves of glossy cavalry and strutting battalions, and Hitler reigning on a platform farther down the avenue, reviewing the troops with one hand held aloft like a puppeteer twitching invisible strings.

Delegates from Poland’s main political parties were already meeting in the strong room of a savings bank to refine the Underground, which nearly began with success: explosives planted beneath Hitler’s platform were supposed to blow him to crumbs, but at the last minute a German official moved the bomber to another spot and he couldn’t light the fuse.

The city quickly spasmed into German hands, banks closed, salaries dried up. Antonina and Jan moved back to the villa, but stripped of money and supplies, they scavenged for food left by the Polish soldiers who had billeted there. The new German colony was ruled by Hitler’s personal lawyer, Hans Frank, an early member of the Nazi Party and a leading jurist busy revising German laws according to Nazi philosophy, especially racist laws and those aimed at the Resistance. During his first month in office, Governor-General Frank declared that “any Jews leaving the district to which they have been confined” would be killed, as would “people who deliberately offer a hiding place to such Jews…. Instigators and helpers are subject to the same punishment as perpetrators; an attempted act will be punished in the same way as a completed act.”

Soon afterward, he issued the “Decree for the Combating of Violent Acts,” which imposed death on anyone disobeying German authority, mounting acts of sabotage or arson, owning a gun or other weapons, attacking a German, violating curfew, owning a radio, trading on the black market, having Underground leaflets in the home—or failing to report scofflaws who did. Breaking laws or failing to report lawbreakers, both acting or observing, were equally punishable offenses. Human nature being what it is, most people didn’t wish to get involved, so few people were denounced, and fewer still denounced for not denouncing others… in what could quickly have become an absurdist chain of disinclination and inaction. Somewhere between doing and not doing, everyone’s conscience finds its own level; most Poles didn’t risk their lives for fugitives but didn’t denounce them either.

Hitler authorized Frank to “ruthlessly exploit this region as a war zone and booty country, and reduce to a heap of rubble its economic, social, cultural, and political structure.”[11] One of Frank’s key tasks was to kill all people of influence, such as teachers, priests, landowners, politicians, lawyers, and artists. Then he began rearranging huge masses of the population: over a span of five years, 860,000 Poles would be uprooted and resettled; 75,000 Germans would take over their lands; 1,300,000 Poles would be shipped to Germany as slave labor; and 330,000 would simply be shot.[12]

With courage and ingenuity, the Polish Resistance would sabotage German equipment, derail trains, blow up bridges, print over 1,100 periodicals, make radio broadcasts, teach in covert high schools and colleges (attended by 100,000 students), aid Jews in hiding, supply arms, make bombs, assassinate Gestapo agents, rescue prisoners, stage secret plays, publish books, lead feats of civil resistance, hold its own law courts, and run couriers to and from the London-based government-in-exile. Its military wing, the Home Army, at its height included 380,000 soldiers—among them, Jan Żabiński, who later told interviewers, “from the very beginning, I was connected to the Home Army in the area of the zoo.”[13] Confusing as life during occupation must have been, the clandestine Polish state, linked by language rather than territory, would fight nonstop for six years.

A key to the Underground’s strength was its no-contact-upward policy and the unflagging use of pseudonyms and cryptonyms. If no one knew his superior, capture wouldn’t endanger the core; and if no one knew anyone’s real name, saboteurs proved hard to find. Underground headquarters floated around the city, and schools migrated from one church or apartment to another, while a band of couriers and illegal printshops kept everyone informed. The Underground Peasant Movement adopted the slogan of “As little, as late, and as bad as possible,” and set about sabotaging deliveries to Germans and diverting supplies to people in the cities, repeatedly claiming delivery of the same grain or livestock, overstating receipts, conveniently losing, destroying, or hiding provisions. Forced laborers in the secret German rocket program at Peenemünde urinated on the electronics to corrode them, crippling the rockets. The Resistance encompassed so many cells that anyone could find a niche, regardless of age, education, or nerve. Jan had a penchant for risk, which he later told a reporter he found exciting, adding in his understated way that its pulse-revving gamble felt rather “like playing chess—either I win or I lose.”