The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

1

A few years back, burglars broke into the Warsaw Zoo’s aviary and stole various owls, a raven, and a condor, and officials assumed they nabbed the owls and raven to mislead, their real target being the condor, whose black-market value had soared. On another occasion a robber stole a baby penguin. Zoo abductions happen everywhere, usually commissioned by breeders or laboratories, but sometimes by individual collectors. Notably, a beautiful cockatoo stolen from the Duisburg Zoo was later found dead and stuffed, in the apartment of a couple who had received it as an anniversary present.

2

Pogo sticks, all the rage of the 1920s, were actually patented by the American George Hansburg.

3

Flamingos look like they have backward-facing knees, but those are actually their ankles. Their knees float higher up, hidden by feathers.

4

In 2003, Magdalena Gross’s sculpture Chicken was auctioned by the Piasecki Foundation to help raise money for autism research in Poland.

5

Many of these details come from Helena Boguszewska, who owned a neighboring property.

6

Antonina’s recollection is matched by that of Wiktor Okulicz-Kozaryn, a retired engineer, who watched the same scene as a boy, and remembers “German aircraft flying low over the crowd, shooting and killing many people… [and] two Polish planes attacking a German bomber above a field, the plane flaming, then one parachute floating down near some trees.”

7

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols (1899).

8

Jukeboxes were invented in the 1930s, to supply music in back-road jooks—Carolina creole for joints that were a combination of bawdy house, gambling den, and dance shack.

9

Stefan Starzyński, quoted in Warsaw and Ghetto (Warsaw: B. M. Potyralsey, 1964).

10

Rommel quoted in Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 12.

11

Proceedings of the Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, vol. 290, ND 2233-PS; quoted in Anthony Read, The Devil’s Disciplines: Hitler’s Inner Circle (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 3.

12

Adam Zamoyski, The Polish War: A Thousand Year History of the Poles and Their Culture (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994), p. 358.

13

Jan Żabiński quoted in a Yiddish newspaper, in Israel, on the occasion of the Żabińskis being honored by Yad Vashem as “Righteous Among Nations.” Newspaper article provided by Ryszard Żabiński.

14

Heinz Heck became director of the Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich in 1928, where he remained until 1969.

15

Esperanto was invented in 1887 in Białystok by Dr. Ludovic Lazar Zamenhof, an eye doctor, who chose the pseudonym of “Doktoro Esperanto” (Dr. Hope). Immersed in Białystok’s polyglot world, he noted how much distrust and misunderstanding between ethnic groups stemmed from language barriers, so he designed a neutral lingua franca.

16

Lutz Heck, Animals—My Adventure, trans. E. W. Dickies (London: Methuen, 1954), p. 60.

17

Though Polish scientist Tadeusz Vetulani had tried the same back-breeding process years before without success, Heck stole Vetulani’s research and, ultimately, thirty animals, which he sent to Germany, later installing them in Rominten and then Białowieża.

18

Much as Hitler publicly championed a fit, vigorous Aryan race, Goebbels had a clubfoot, Göring was obese and addicted to morphine, and Hitler himself seems to have been suffering from third-stage syphilis by the end of the war, addiction to uppers and downers, and quite possibly Parkinson’s. Hitler’s doctor, Theo Morell, a renowned specialist in syphilis, accompanied him everywhere, syringe and gold-foil-wrapped vitamins at the ready. Rare film footage shows Hitler using his steady right hand to shake hands with a line of boys, while his left, hidden behind his back, displays Parkinson’s distinctive tremor.

What were his so-called vitamins? According to criminologist Wolf Kemper (Nazis on Speed: Drogen im 3. Reich [2002]), the Wehrmacht commissioned an array of drugs that would increase focus, stamina, and risk-taking, while reducing pain, hunger, and fatigue. Between April and July of 1940, troops received over 35 million 3-milligram doses of the addictive and mood-altering amphetamines Pervitin and Isophan.

In a letter dated May 20, 1940, twenty-two-year-old Heinrich Böll, then stationed in occupied Poland, despite his “unconquerable (and still unconquered) aversion to the Nazis,” wrote his mother in Cologne to rush him extra doses of Pervitin, which German civilians were buying over the counter for their own use. (Leonard L. Heston and Renate Heston, The Medical Casebook of Adolf Hitler [London: William Kimber, 1979], pp. 127–29.)

19

Josef Mengele grew up in a family of Bavarian industrialists, and declared his religion as Catholic on official forms (instead of “believer in God,” as Nazism preferred). Genetic abnormalities fascinated him, and “Dr. Auschwitz,” as he came to be known, had an ample pool of children on whom to do experiments which the Frankfurt court would later denounce as “hideous crimes” performed “willfully and with bloodlust,” which often included vivisection or murder. “He was brutal but in a gentlemanly, depraved way,” one prisoner reported, and others described him as “very playful,” “a Rudolph Valentino type,” always smelling of eau de cologne. (Quoted in Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide [New York: Basic Books, 1986], p. 343.) “In selecting for death or in killing people himself, the essence of Mengele was flamboyant detachment—one might say disinterestedness—and efficiency,” Lifton concludes (p. 347).

As new prisoners arrived, guards marched up and down the lines calling out “Zwillinge, zwillinge!” as they hunted twins for Mengele to tamper with in gruesome ways. Changing eye color became his favorite line of research, and on one wall of his office, he displayed an array of surgically removed eyes pinned up like a collection of moths.

20

Konrad Lorenz quoted in Ute Deichmann, Biologists Under Hitler, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 187.

21

Konrad Lorenz, “Durch Domestikation verursachte Störungen artewigen Verhaltens,” Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und Charaklerunde, vol. 59 (1940), p. 69.

22

As part of Hitler’s inner circle, he quickly rose to “air minister,” as well as “Master of the German Hunt” and “Master of German Forests.” More than just an avid huntsman—he once had a stag from his estate flown to him in France so that he could track and shoot it—Göring identified hunting with life at his boyhood castle, and dreamt of returning Germany to its lost greatness (“Our time will come again!” he would proclaim). Weekends he spent in the forests, and seizing any excuse to combine politics and hunting, he hosted haute cuisine shooting parties. Hitler didn’t hunt, though he often wore hunter’s garb, especially at his lodge in the Alps, as if at any moment he might release a falcon or leap into the saddle and chase a candelabra-horned stag.

Fascinated by boar hunting, Göring prized a custom-made fifty-inch boar spear with a leaf-shaped blade of blue steel, a dark mahogany grip, and a steel shaft with two hollow pleated spheres that rattled to scare his prey from the underbrush.

Göring took dozens of hunting trips with friends, foreign dignitaries, and members of the German high command from the mid-1930s to late 1943; and documents show that even in January and February of 1943, while Germany was losing on the Russian front, Göring was at his castle, hunting Rominten wild boar and Prussian royal stags. (During this same period he also introduced ballroom dancing lessons for Luftwaffe officers.)

23

It continues to this day, though it’s now issued in Poland. No bloodline information is kept on the wild bison, which rangers simply keep an eye on and count.

For good discussions of the motif, see Piotr Daszkiewicz and Jean Aikhenbaum, Aurochs, le retour… d’une supercherie nazie (Paris: HSTES, 1999), and Frank Fox, “Zagrożone gatunki: Żydzi i żubry” (Endangered Species: Jews and Buffalo), Zwoje, January 29, 2002.

24

Heck, Animals, p. 89.

25

This curse of closely knit species also applies to our dairy cows, now almost clones of one another; an illness that kills one can kill all.

26

“The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event”: Doron M. Behar, Ene Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild, Alessandro Achilli, Yarin Hadid, Shay Tzur, Luisa Pereira, Antonio Amorim, Lluís Quintana-Murci, Kari Majamaa, Corinna Herrnstadt, Neil Howell, Oleg Balanovsky, Ildus Kutuev, Andrey Pshenichnov, David Gurwitz, Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, Antonio Torroni, Richard Villems, and Karl Skorecki. American Journal of Human Genetics, March 2006.

27

That person didn’t live all alone on the planet; it’s simply that no one else’s offspring survived.

28

Pierre Lecomte du Noüy, La dignite humaine (1944).

29

Norman Davies, Rising ’44: The Battle for Warsaw (London: Pan Books, 2003), p. 183.

30

So many excellent books have been written about daily life in the Ghetto, the Jew roundups, and the horrors of the death camps, that I don’t linger on them. A particularly vivid account of the Uprising that comes to mind is A Fragment of the Diary of the Rubbish Men, by Leon Najberg, who fought with armed stragglers among the ruins until the end of September.

31

From a transcript read at the Nuremberg trials, reported in “The Fallen Eagles,” Time, December 3, 1945.

32

Out of its prewar population of 36 million, Poland lost 22 percent, more than any other country in Europe. After the war, Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the State Tribunal of Israel, detailed some of Christian Poland’s ordeal, and how, in addition to the 6 million Jews killed, 3 million Catholics died, “but what is even worse, it lost especially its educated classes, youth and any elements which could in the future oppose one or the other of the two totalitarian regimes…. According to the German plan, Poles were to become a people without education, slaves for the German overlords.”

33

Michał Grynberg, ed., Words to Outlive Us: Eyewitness Accounts from the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. Philip Boehm (London: Granta Books, 2003), p. 46.

At one point Himmler invited Werner Heisenberg to establish an institute to study icy stars because, according to the cosmology of Welteislehre, based on the observations of the Austrian Hanns Hörbiger (author of Glazial-Kosmogonie [1913]), most bodies in the solar system, our moon included, are giant icebergs. A refrigeration engineer, Hörbiger was persuaded by how shiny the moon and planets appeared at night, and also by Norse mythology, in which the solar system emerged from a gigantic collision between fire and ice, with ice winning. Hörbiger died in 1931, but his theory became popular among Nazi scientists and Hitler swore that the unusually cold winters in the 1940s proved the reality of Welteislehre. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism explores the influence of such magnetic lunatics as Karl Maria Wiligut, “the Private Magus of Heinrich Himmler,” whose doctrines influenced SS ideology, logos, ceremonies, and the image of its members as latter-day Knights Templars and future breeding stock for the coming Aryan utopia. To this end, Himmler founded Ahnenerbe, an institute for the study of German prehistory, archaeology, and race, whose staff wore SS uniforms. Himmler also acquired Wewelsburg Castle in Westphalia to use immediately for SS education and pseudoreligious ceremonies, and remodel into a future site altogether more ambitious, “creating an SS Vatican on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich.”

34

Michael Mazor, The Vanished City: Everyday Life in the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1993), p. 19.

35

Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, pp. 46–47.

36

After Karski, p. 267, quoted in Davies, Rising ’44, p. 185.

37

The president of Warsaw is equivalent to the mayor of a city.

38

See Rostal, “In the Cage of the Pheasant.”

39

Milton Cross, Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music, Doubleday, 1962, pp. 560–61.

40

Workers deported to Germany by the Arbeitsamt had to wear a purple P on their sleeve, and were denied church, cultural pursuits, and public transportation. Sex with a German was punishable by death. (Davies, Rising ’44, p. 106)

41

Polacy z pomocą Żydom (Poles Helping Poles), 2nd edition (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1969), pp. 39–45.

42

Philip Boehm, introduction to Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, p. 3.

43

Jack Klajman with Ed Klajman, Out of the Ghetto (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000), pp. 21, 22.

44

Lonia Tenenbaum, in Polacy z pomocą Żydom (Poles Helping Poles).

45

Jan E. Rostal, “In the Cage of the Pheasant,” Nowiny i Courier, October 1, 1965.

46

Karl Friederichs quoted in Deichmann, Biologists Under Hitler, p. 160.

47

Friedrich Prinzing, Epidemics Resulting from Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916).

48

speech to SS officers, April 24, 1943, Kharkov, Ukraine; reprinted in United States Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), vol. 4, pp. 572–78, 574.

49

report by Ludwig Fischer quoted in Gutman, Resistance, p. 89.

50

Hannah Krall, Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Henry Holt, 1977), p. 15.

51

Stefan Ernest quoted in Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, p. 45.

52

Alexander Susskind, quoted in Daniel C. Matt, ed., The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995; translated from Dov Baer, Maggid Devarav l’Ya’aquov), p. 71.

53

Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 163.

54

Marek Edelman in Krall, Shielding the Flame. After the war Edelman became a cardiologist, commenting that “when one knows death so well, one has more responsibility for life.”

55

Postwar interview by Danka Harnish, in Israel, translated from Hebrew by Haviva Lapkin of the Lorraine and Jack N. Friedman Commission for Jewish Education, West Palm Beach, Florida, April 2006.

56

Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 5.

57

Alicja Kaczyńska, Obok piekła (Gdansk: Marpress, 1993), p. 48; quoted in Paulsson, Secret City, pp. 109–10.

58

from Ruta Sakowska, ed., Listy o Zagladzie (Letters About Extermination) (Warsaw: PWN, 1997). Jenny Robertson, Don’t Go to Uncle’s Wedding: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto (London: Azure, 2000).

59

Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. x.

60

Ghetto Diary, p. 9.

61

Ghetto Diary, p. 8.

62

Ghetto Diary, p.107.

63

Betty Jean Lifton, introduction to Ghetto Diary, p. vii.

64

Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski, Zegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland (Montreal, Canada: Price-Patterson Ltd., 1994).

65

From Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 163.

66

Jan Żabiński, “The Growth of Blackbeetles and of Cockroaches on Artificial and on Incomplete Diets,” Journal of Experimental Biology (Company of Biologists, Cambridge, UK), vol. 6(1929): pp. 360–86.

67

Emanuel Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War (New York: Howard Festig, 1976), pp. 89–91.

68

Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), p. 93.

69

Wex, Born to Kvetch, pp. 117, 132, 137.

70

Judit Ringelblum, Beit Lohamei ha-Getaot (Haifa, Israel: Berman Archives); quoted in Paulsson, Secret City, p. 121.

71

Otto Strasser, Mein Kampf (Frankfurt am Main: Heinrich Heine Verlag, 1969), p. 35.

72

Cywia Lubetkin, Extermination and Uprising (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 1999); quoted in Robertson, Don’t Go to Uncle’s Wedding, p. 93.

73

Stefan Korbónski, Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State, 1939–1945 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2004), p. 261.

74

From the account of Władysław Smólski in Righteous Among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939–1945, edited by Władysław Barloszewski and Zofia Lewin (London: Earlscourt Publications Ltd., 1969), pp. 255–59.

75

Schultheiss, Dirk, M.D., et al., “Uncircumcision: A Historical Review of Preputial Restoration,” Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, vol. 101, no. 7 (June 1998): pp. 1990–98.

76

A personal reminiscence deposited with the Jewish Historical Institute after World War II, and published in Righteous Among Nations, p. 258.

77

Goodrick-Clark, The Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 161.

78

Ringelblum, Polish-Jewish Relations, p. 101.

79

Sophie Hodorowicz Knab, Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996), p. 259.

80

Janina in Righteous Among Nations, p. 502.

81

Rachela “Aniela” Auerbach, postwar testimony in Righteous Among Nations, p. 491.

82

Basia in Righteous Among Nations, p. 498.

83

May 2, 1963.

84

Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), vo1. 1, p. 466 (chap. 5, “Counsels and Maxims”).

85

In the ensuing firestorm, counting victims became impossible, though it’s now estimated that 35,000 people perished in Dresden. The rare manuscripts of eighteenth-century Italian composer Tomaso Albinoni, whose Adagio in G Minor has become synonymous with mournfulness, also vanished in flames.

86

Many Poles believed in signs and witchery. It was once common for Warsawians to read their fate in a deck of regular (not tarot) cards, or predict the future, especially marriage, by melting wax on a spoon and slowly pouring it into a bowl of cold water. Supposedly, the shape the wax took revealed one’s fate—a hammer or helmet shape told a boy he’d be soldiering soon, and a girl that she’d marry a blacksmith or soldier. If a girl dripped wax resembling a cabinet or other furniture, she’d marry a carpenter; if it looked more like wheat or a wagon, she’d marry a farmer. A violin or trumpet meant the person would become a musician.

According to Polish lore, Death appears to humans as an old woman in a white winding sheet carrying a scythe, and dogs can easily spot her. So one can glimpse Death “by stepping on a dog’s tail and looking between his ears.”

87

Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore

88

Stefan Korbónski, Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State, 1939–1945, trans. F. B. Czarnomski (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2004), p. 352.

89

Jacek Fedorowicz quoted in Davies, Rising ’44, p. 360–61.

90

The wild-eyed Russian soldiers, known as “Wlasowcy,” were soldiers of the Russian general Wlasow, who was collaborating with the Third Reich.

91

Korbónski, Fighting Warsaw, p. 406.

92

archival photographs reproduced in Davies, Rising ’44.

93

Joseph Tenenbaum, In Search of a Lost People: The Old and New Poland (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1948), pp. 297–98.

94

Davies, Rising ’44, p. 511.

95

Rostal, “In the Cage of the Pheasant.”

96

Heck, Animals, p. 61.

97

Herman Reichenbach, International Zoo News, vol. 50/6, no. 327 (September 2003).

98

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles, trans. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 27–28.