The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

CHAPTER 7

WITH AUTUMN, COLD BEGAN SEEPING UNDER DOORS AND through tiny cracks, and at night hoarse winds dashed across the villa’s flat roof, billowed any plywood shutters that had warped, and squalled around the walled terrace. Despite its disheveled buildings and lawns, the zoo bedded down its few remaining animals for winter, but nothing looked the way it had before the war, least of all the seasonal tableaux of zoo life. The tempo of the days used to change dramatically as the zoo entered its own period of hibernation: boulevards, normally crowded with as many as ten thousand people during the summer holiday, would grow almost deserted; a few people would visit the Monkey House, the elephants, the predators’ islands, or the seal pool. But the long columns of schoolchildren waiting in line to ride llamas, ponies, camels, or little pedal cars would evaporate. Delicate animals like flamingos and pelicans, venturing outside for a short constitutional each day, would march gingerly in single file over frozen ground. As the days shortened and tree branches grew bare, most animals would stay indoors, while the tone of the zoo paled from raucous to mumbling during what’s known in the trade as the dead season, a time of animal rest and human repair.

Even in its reduced wartime state, the zoo endured as a complex living machine, where one wobbly screw or stripped gear could trigger a catastrophe, and a zoo director couldn’t afford to miss a rusty bolt or a monkey’s runny nose, forget to lock or adjust the warmth in a building, overlook a bison’s badly matted beard. All this became doubly serious during windstorm, rain, or frost.

Missing now were all the women who used to rake fallen leaves, the men who insulated the roofs and stable walls with straw, the gardeners who wreathed the roses and ornamental shrubs to protect them from frost. Other blue-uniformed helpers should have been cellaring beets, onions, and carrots, and topping off the silos with fodder, so that wintering animals would have plenty of vitamins (a word coined in 1912 by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk). The barns should have been brimming with hay, the storerooms and pantries with oats, flour, buckwheat, sunflower seeds, pumpkins, ant eggs, and other essentials. Trucks should have been carting in coal and coke, and the blacksmith fixing broken tools, weaving wire, and oiling padlocks. In the carpentry shop, men should have been repairing the fences, tables, benches, and shelves, and crafting doors and windows for added buildings when the ground softened in spring.

Normally, Antonina and Jan would have been preparing the budget for the coming year, awaiting the arrival of new animals, and reading reports in offices angled to view the river and the steeply roofed houses of Old Town. The press department would have been organizing talks and concerts, lab researchers would have been smearing slides and running tests.

Dead season, though never an easy time of year, usually offered gated asylum in a world private and protected, where they banked on a well-stocked larder, standing orders for foodstuffs, and a belief in self-reliance. The war undermined all three.

“The wounded city is trying to feed their animals,” Antonina reassured Jan one morning as she heard a clop-and-clatter, then saw two wagons creaking up to the gate with leftover fruit and vegetable peelings from kitchens, restaurants, and houses. “At least we’re not alone.”

“No. Warsawians know it’s important to save their identity,” Jan replied, “all the elements of life that elevate and define them—and, fortunately, that includes the zoo.”

Still, Antonina wrote that she felt the ground disappearing beneath her when the occupation government decided to move the capital to Kraków, noting that, as a provincial city, Warsaw no longer needed a zoo. All she could do was await the liquidation, a loathsome word suggesting a meltdown of creatures her family knew as individuals, not as a collective mass of fur, wings, and hooves.

Only Antonina, Jan, and Ryś remained at the villa, with not much food at any price, little money, and no jobs. Antonina baked bread every day, and relied on vegetables from the summer garden and preserves made from rooks, crows, mushrooms, and berries. Friends and relatives in outlying hamlets periodically sent food, sometimes even bacon and butter, luxuries seldom seen in the devastated city; and the man who delivered horsemeat to the zoo before the war procured a little meat for them now.

One day in late September, a familiar face appeared at their front door in German uniform: an old guard from the Berlin Zoo.

“I’ve been sent directly by Director Lutz Heck with his greetings and a message,” he said formally. “He wishes to offer you help, and awaits my call.”

Antonina and Jan looked at one another, surprised, not quite sure what to think. They knew Lutz Heck from the annual meetings of the International Association of Zoo Directors, a small clique of altruists, pragmatists, evangelists, and scoundrels. In the early twentieth century, there were two main schools of thought about how to keep exotic animals. One believed in creating natural habitats, the landscape and climate each animal would find in its homeland. The zealous proponents of this view were Professor Ludwig Heck of the Berlin Zoo and his older son, Lutz Heck. The opposing view held that, left to their own devices, exotic animals would adapt to a new environment, regardless of where the zoo was located. The leader of this opposing camp was Professor Lutz’s younger son, Heinz, director of the Munich Zoo.[14] Influenced by the Hecks, the Warsaw Zoo was designed to help animals acclimatize, and it also provided inviting habitats. It was the first Polish zoo that didn’t cramp animals into small cages; instead, Jan tried to fit each enclosure to the animal, and as much as possible reproduce how it would live in the wild. The zoo also boasted a good natural water source (artesian wells), elaborate drainage systems, and a trained, dedicated staff.

At the annual meetings, ideologies sometimes soured into feuds, but zookeeping families all gloried in their zoos and juggled similar concerns and passions, and thus a freemasonry of shared wisdom and well-being prevailed, despite the language barriers. Other directors didn’t speak Polish, Jan didn’t speak fluent German, Antonina spoke Polish and some Russian, French, and German. But a sort of Esperanto (a Polish invention)[15] arose that relied heavily on German and English, accompanied by photographs, freehand drawings, animal calls, and pantomime. Annual meetings felt like reunions, and as the youngest zookeeper’s wife, Antonina captivated them with her smarts and willowy looks; and they regarded Jan as an energetic and determined director whose zoo was thriving and blessed with rare offspring.

Heck had always been cordial, to Antonina especially. But in his zoo work and now in his politics, he was obsessed with bloodlines, Aryan included, and from what they had heard, he’d become an ardent and powerful Nazi, with Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as frequent houseguests and hunting companions.

“We are grateful for Professor Heck’s offer,” Antonina replied politely. “Please thank him, and tell him that we do not need help, since the zoo is destined to be liquidated.” She knew full well that, as the highest-ranking zoologist in Hitler’s government, Heck might be the very man in charge of the liquidation.

The following day, to their surprise, the guard returned and said that Heck planned a visit soon, and when the guard left they wondered what to do. They didn’t trust Heck, but on the other hand, he was sweet on Antonina, and in theory, as a fellow zookeeper, he should be sympathetic to their situation. In an occupied country where survival often depended on having friends in high places, cultivating Heck made sense. Antonina thought Heck relished the idea of being her patron, a medieval knight like Parsifal, some romantic ideal to win her heart and prove his nobility. As she wondered if his overture signaled help or harm, her mind filled with feline battery: “For all we know he may just be playing with us. Big cats need little mice to toy with.”

Jan made a case for Heck’s possible goodwill: as a zookeeper himself, Heck loved animals, spent his life protecting them, and undoubtedly sympathized with fellow zookeepers’ losses. And so, poised between hope and fear, they passed the night before Lutz Heck’s first visit.

After curfew, Poles could no longer stroll under a canopy of stars. They could still watch August’s Perseids, followed by the autumn meteor showers—the Draconids, Orionids, and Leonids—from their windows and balconies, but thanks to all the shelling and dust, most days became cloudy with tumultuous sunsets and a drizzle before dawn. Ironically, the far-ranging warfare that created grotesque battlefields and pollution also inspired gorgeous sky effects. Now, fast-falling meteors at night, however kitelike their tails, conjured up images of gunfire and bombs. Once meteors had figured in a category of mind remote from anything technological, as wayfarers from distant realms where stars sparkled like ice-coated barbed wire. Long ago, the Catholic Church had christened the Perseids the tears of Saint Lawrence because they occurred near his feast day, but the more scientific image of dirty snowballs pulled by invisible waves from the rim of the solar system, then yanked down to earth, evokes its own saintly magic.