The Zookeeper’s Wife (24 page)

DECEMBER
1944

W
ITH WINTER, THE ENDLESS MUD PUDDLES FROZE OVER AND
the land grew firm and fibrous again under a slather of white as Antonina prepared a Christmas starkly unlike those before the war. On Christmas Eve, Poles traditionally served a twelve-dish meatless dinner before exchanging gifts, and the zoo's Christmas Eve used to include a special bounty. Antonina remembered how "a wagon drove into the zoo full of unsold Christmas trees; it was a gift for the zoo animals: ravens, bears, foxes, and many other animals liked to chew or peck at the aromatic bark or needles of evergreens. Christmas trees went to different aviaries, cages, or animal units, and the holiday season officially started in the Warsaw Zoo."

All night, comets of lantern light would orbit the grounds: one man dutifully guarding the exotic animals section, checking the heat in buildings, and adding coal to the furnaces; several men carrying extra hay to barns and open shelters; others tucking extra straw into the aviaries where the tropical birds burrowed in to stay warm. It had been a scene of refuge and dancing lights.

This Christmas Eve, 1944, as Ryś headed for the woods with Zbyszek, he announced to Antonina that "children should have a little fun." Later the boys returned dragging two small fir trees.

Following rural custom, trees were decorated during the daylight and lit when the first planet appeared (to honor the Star of Bethlehem), then dinner was served with extra places set for absent family members. Antonina wrote of arranging the small tree on a stool, where baby Teresa found it a source of hand-clapping delight, which she babbled to as the family embellished shiny branches with "three small apples, a few gingerbread cookies, six candles, and several straw peacock-eye ornaments that Ryś had made."

Over the holidays, Genia surprised Antonina with a visit; risking arrest because of her Underground activities, she took the train, then walked through gusty cold for four miles, to bring money, food, and messages from friends. Antonina and Ryś still had no word from Jan. One day, Mrs. Kokot biked to the post office as usual, and they watched her returning, as usual: a tiny figurine growing larger and more defined as she pedaled nearer. This time she was waving a letter. Ryś ran out to meet her in his shirtsleeves, grabbed the letter, and dashed indoors with Mrs. Kokot following, smiling.

"Finally," was all she said.

After Antonina and Ryś read the letter several times, Ryś rushed away to share the news with Mr. Kokot; according to Antonina, Ryś rarely spoke of his phantom father, whom he could now risk mentioning at last.

In the modern Warsaw Zoo's archive, along with photographs donated by the family, there's a wonderful oddity: a card Jan sent to them from the POW camp, with no writing on it except the address. On the back, a good caricature of Jan wears a baggy uniform with two stars on each epaulet, and a dark scarf knotted around his neck and flowing down past his waist. He's captured himself with stubbly beard, pouchy eyes and long lashes, heavily wrinkled brow, three wisps of hair poking up from his bald crown, a cigarette stub dangling from his mouth, and a look of boredom and disdain on his face. Nothing written, nothing incriminating, just a drawing that exists somewhere between pathos and humor, which depicts him as whipped but not defeated.

The Red Army finally entered Warsaw on January 17, long after the city's surrender and too late to help. In theory, the Russians were supposed to drive out the Germans, but for political, strategic, and practical reasons (among them, losing 123,000 men en route), they had camped on the east side of the Vistula River and complacently watched the bloodshed for two months solid, as thousands of Poles were massacred, thousands more sent to camps, and the city extinguished.

Halina and her first cousin, Irena Nawrocka (an Olympic fencing champion who had traveled widely before the war), and three other girl messengers were arrested by the Germans and ordered to march with a large bedraggled herd of guards and captives from Warsaw to a labor camp in Ożarów. Darting in from the fields, farm workers handed the girls work clothes to slip on and tools to carry, then pulled them from the crowd, between the rows of flax, before the exhausted guards noticed. Blending in with the field hands, the girls escaped to Zakopane (in the Tatra Mountains), where they hid for several months until the war ended.

1945

F
LOCKS OF CROWS CIRCLED THE SKY BEFORE LANDING IN THE
snow-covered fields, on one of those claggy, warm January mornings when dark tree branches glisten through fog and just breathing feels like inhaling cotton. The morning bristled with signs. Antonina heard the rumble of heavily armed trucks, the grinding of airplanes and distant explosions, then people shouting: "The Germans are running away!" Soon the Polish and Soviet armies appeared, walking together, and as a long caravan of Soviet tanks crawled by, locals quickly hoisted red flags to welcome the liberators. Suddenly a huge flock of white pigeons flew up the sky and soared above the soldiers, reassembled as a single cloud and swerved even higher. "The timing was perfect," Antonina wrote. "Surely some movie director arranged this symbolic scene."

Although she nourished hope of Jan's release, she decided to pass the rest of the winter in Marywil, because traveling to Warsaw with small children seemed risky. However, local children itched to return to school, their own private timekeeping, which meant Antonina's group had to leave the schoolhouse for another temporary shelter. When her food money ran out and she needed to buy milk for the baby, the manor house took pity on her and sent provisions. Fortunately, she had saved a few gold "piglets" (rubles) for buying their passage back to Warsaw, a trip she knew might be costly. Once again, refugees clogged the roads, this time desperate for home, even though they'd heard their apartments lay in ruins. Nunia hurried on ahead to scout, and brought back news that she'd found friends still living in the zoo district, with whom they could stay, and she reported that the villa, though blasted and looted, still stood.

Needing a large truck, a scarce commodity, Antonina prevailed upon soldiers traveling east with a load of potatoes, who agreed to carry her group part of the way. On travel day it was zero degrees, and only the baby, swaddled in a small down blanket, didn't shiver as the truck shambled along, pausing frequently to be searched by soldiers on patrol. Dropped off in Włochy, they secured a ride with a Russian pilot, who agreed to share his open truck, into which they piled.

As they finally entered Warsaw's city limits, a wave of filthy snow and sand splashed the sides of the truck, the snow stank, the sand irritated their eyes, and they huddled to keep warm. What she saw "dazed and sickened" her, she wrote, because, despite rumors, warnings, and eyewitness reports, she still wasn't prepared for a city in tatters. Archival photographs and films show charred window and door frames standing like sky portals, tall office buildings reduced to a hive of open cells, apartment houses and churches calving like glaciers, all the trees felled, the parks heaped with rubble, and surreal streets lined with facades thin as tombstones. In some shots, a sickly pale winter sun oozes into the crevices of pockmarked buildings, over raw metal cables, weirdly twisted pipes and iron. With 85 percent of the buildings destroyed, the once-ornate city looked like a colossal refuse heap and cemetery, everything rendered down to its constituent molecules, all the palaces, squares, museums, neighborhoods, and landmarks reduced to classless chunks of debris. Captions read: "dead city," "a wilderness of ruins," "mountains of rubble." Cold as the day was, Antonina wrote that she began sweating, and that night, mired in shock and exhaustion, they stayed with Nunia's friends.

After breakfast the next morning, Antonina and Ryś hurried to the zoo, where Ryś rushed ahead, then circled back, pink-cheeked from the cold.

"Mom, our house survived!" he said excitedly. "The people who said it was destroyed lied to us! It's damaged, there are no doors or floors and all our belongings were stolen, but there's a roof and walls! Mom! And stairs!"

A layer of snow masked the ground, and most of the trees had been sheared off by shells, but some delicate black branches still loomed against the blue sky, as did the Monkey House, the villa, and the ruins of several other buildings. One of the villa's upstairs rooms had completely disappeared, and all the wooden parts on the first floor were missing—doors, closets, window frames, floors—she assumed they'd been burned for warmth during the winter. The underground corridor leading between the basement and the Pheasant House, where they'd stored valuables, had not simply caved in but dematerialized (and there are no reports of anyone unearthing it after the war). A thick pastiche of damp papers and book pages littered the floor, which they couldn't avoid walking on and crushing even more. Together they dug through the sediment, collecting scraps of dirty documents and yellowed photographs, which Antonina stowed carefully in her purse.

Despite the cold, they inspected the garden, gouged from bombs and shells, and surveyed the grounds, a scene of barricades, deep antitank ditches, pieces of iron, barbed wire, and unexploded shells. She didn't venture any farther for fear of land mines.

It looked and smelled like "the war just left this place." While she planned renovations, Ryś "tested his memory" of the villa he grew up in against the barren world he now found. Antonina checked where they had planted vegetables the year before, and in one tiny spot where the wind had blown off a lid of snow, she saw a small strawberry plant near the ground. "An omen of new life," she thought. Just then something moved in a basement window.

"A rat?" Ryś suggested.

"Too big for a rat," Antonina said.

"A cat!" Ryś yelled. "It ran into the bushes and it's watching us!"

A thin gray cat crouched warily in a corner, and Antonina wondered if people had tried to capture it for the stew pot.

"Balbina? Old cat! Dear cat! Balbina, come here!" Ryś called as he crept closer, calling her name over and over until she calmed down and seemed suddenly to remember, flying to Ryś like a fur-fledged arrow and jumping into his open arms.

"Mom, we have to take her home to Stalowa Street!" Ryś pleaded. "We can't leave her here! Please!"

As Ryś walked toward the gate, the cat fidgeted to jump down.

"It's just like last summer," Ryś sulked. "She's running away!"

"Let her go," Antonina said softly. "She must have an important reason for staying, one we don't understand."

Ryś released her and she darted into the bushes, then stopped and looked back with her scrawny, half-starved face. She meowed, which Ryś translated as: "
I'm
going back home. What about
you
?"

For Antonina there was no going back to her previous life. Gone were the gaggling geese, squawking cormorants, whimpering gulls, the peacocks fanning iridescent tails as they strolled in sunlight, the Jericho-wall-tumbling groans of the lions and tigers, the trilling monkeys swinging on rope vines, the polar bears soaking in their pool, the blooming roses and jasmine, and the two "nice little happy otters which became best friends with our lynxes—instead of sleeping in their own basket. . .they napped in the soft fur of the lynxes, sucking on their ears." Gone were the days when the lynx cubs, otters, and puppies all lived indoors and played endless chase games together in the garden. She and Ryś staged a private ritual—they formally promised all the broken and abandoned objects that they "would remember them and return soon to help."

AFTERMATH

W
HILE STILL IN HIDING, MAGDALENA GROSS MARRIED MAURYCY
Fraenkel (Paweł Zieliński), and after the Warsaw Uprising they moved to the eastern city of Lublin, where artists and intellectuals gathered in the Cafe Paleta. There she met the city's avant-garde art world, which included many theaters without words: music theater, dance theater, drawing theater, shadows theater, and theaters featuring paper costumes, rags, or small fires. Poland's long tradition of subversive political puppet theater had dissolved during the war, but in Lublin she joined enthusiasts who dreamt up the first puppet theater for the new Poland, and they invited her to create the puppets' heads. Instead of crafting them with the traditional bold papier-mâche features, she decided to create lifelike facial nuances and adorn the puppets in silk, pearls, and beads. The first performance took place in Lublin on December 14, 1944.

In March of 1945, Magdalena and Maurycy returned to the newly liberated Warsaw, without electricity, gas, or transportation, whose few surviving houses tilted, windowless. Longing to sculpt animals again, she asked Antonina plaintively: "When will you have animals? I have to sculpt! I've wasted so much time!" Absent the flamingos, marabous, and other exotics she preferred, she began by sculpting the only available model, a duckling, and since she was a slow artist, she had to keep revising the piece as the duckling vamped into an adult bird. Still, it was her first sculpture after the war, cause for celebration.

The Warsaw they knew before the war had contained one and a half million people; in early spring of 1946, another visitor, Dr. Joseph Tenenbaum, reported "half a million at most. As it was, I could not see living space for a tenth that number. Many still lived in crypts, caverns, cellars, and subterranean shelters," but he was greatly impressed by their morale:

Throughout the city, he heard an aria by A. Harris, the unofficial "Song of Warsaw," whistled, sung, and blared through loudspeakers in the central squares as people worked. Its lover's lyrics pledged: "Warsaw, my beloved, you are the object of my dreams and yearning. . .. I know you are not what you used to be. . .that you have lived through bloody days. . .but I shall rebuild you to your greatness again."

Jan returned from the internment camp in the spring of 1946, and in 1947 he began cleaning and repairs, and erecting new buildings and enclosures for a revived zoo, one holding only three hundred animals, all native species donated by people in Warsaw. Some of the zoo's lost animals were found, even Badger, who had tunneled out of his cage during the bombardment and swum across the Vistula (Polish soldiers returned him in a large pickle barrel). Magdalena sculpted
Rooster, Rabbit I
, and
Rabbit II
, slowing down then in poor health ("damaged by the war," Antonina reckoned), and dying on June 17, 1948, the same day she finished
Rabbit II
. Her dream had always been to create large sculptures for the zoo, and Antonina and Jan wished she'd had that chance, especially since the zoo offered an ideal backdrop for large artworks. At today's zoo, the main gates greet visitors with a life-size zebra, wearing iron bars as striped bulging ribs. Some of Magdalena's sculptures now grace the zoo director's office, as well as the Warsaw Museum of Fine Arts, just as Antonina and Jan had wished.

One day before the July 21, 1949, reopening of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan and Antonina placed Gross's sculptures
Duck
and
Rooster
near the stairs to a large fountain visitors were sure to pass. July 21 fell on a Thursday that year, and they may have wished to avoid opening on Friday the twenty-second because people still associated that unlucky date with the 1942 liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Two years later Jan suddenly retired from zookeeping, though he was only fifty-four years old. Postwar Warsaw, under Soviet rule, didn't favor people who fought with the Underground, and, at odds with government officials, he may have felt obliged to retire. Norman Davies captures the mood of that time:

Still needing to support his family, and devoted to zoology, Jan focused on his writing, producing fifty books that illuminated the lives of animals and sued for conservation; he also broadcast a popular radio program on the same topics; and he continued his efforts with the International Society for the Preservation of European Bison, which prized its small herd of bison in Białowieża Forest.

Oddly enough, those animals survived thanks in part to the efforts of Lutz Heck, who, during the war, shipped back many of the thirty bison he had stolen for Germany, along with back-bred, look-alike aurochsen and tarpans, to release in Białowieża, the idyll where he pictured Hitler's inner circle hunting after the war. When the Allies later bombed Germany, mother herds of the animals died, leaving those in Białowieża as their species' best hope.

In 1946, at the first postwar meeting of the International Association of Zoo Directors, in Rotterdam, reactivating the European Bison Stud Book fell to Jan, who began scouting the pedigrees of all bison that survived the war, including those in Germany's breeding experiments. His research documented prewar, wartime, and postwar bloodlines, and returned the program and pedigree watch to the Poles.

While Jan wrote for adults, Antonina penned children's books, raised her two children, and stayed in touch with the extended family of the Guests, who had traveled to different lands. Among those Jan personally led from the Ghetto (through the Labor Bureau building) were Kazio and Ludwinia Kramsztyk (cousins of renowned painter Roman Kramsztyk), Dr. Hirszfeld (specialist in infectious diseases), and Dr. Roza Anzelówna and her mother, who stayed in the villa for a short time, then moved to a boardinghouse on Widok Street recommended by friends of the Żabíńskis. But after a few months they were arrested by Gestapo and killed, the only Guests of the villa who didn't outlast the war.

The Kenigsweins survived the occupation and retrieved their youngest son from the orphanage, but in 1946 Samuel died of a heart attack, after which Regina and the children immigrated to Israel, where she remarried and worked on a kibbutz. She never forgot her time at the zoo. "The Żabíńskis' home was Noah's Ark," Regina told an Israeli newspaper twenty years after the war, "with so many people and animals hidden there." Rachela "Aniela" Auerbach also moved to Israel, after first traveling to London, where she delivered Jan's report about the survival of the European bison to Julian Huxley (prewar director of the London Zoo). Irena Mayzel resettled in Israel, and hosted the Żabíńskis there after the war. Genia Sylkes moved to London, too, then to New York City, where she worked for many years in the Yiddish Scientific Institute library.

Captured by the Gestapo and brutally tortured, Irena Sendler (who winkled children out of the Ghetto) escaped, thanks to friends in the Underground, and spent the rest of the war in hiding. Despite her broken legs and feet, she worked in Poland as a social worker and advocate for the handicapped. During the war, Wanda Englert would move many times; her husband, Adam, was arrested in 1943 and imprisoned in Pawiak Prison, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. Amazingly, he survived prison and the concentration camps, later reunited with his wife, and together they moved to London.

Halina and Irena, the girl messengers, still live in Warsaw today and keep in close touch, best friends for over eighty-two years. On the wall in Irena's apartment, along with her fencing medals, are photographs of her and Halina as young women, in which they're coiffed, glamorous, and all future—studio portraits taken during the war by a neighbor.

Sitting with Halina in the courtyard restaurant of the Bristol Hotel, among packed tables of tourists and businesspeople, with a buffet of delicacies on long tables just inside open doors, I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory, then she quietly sang a song she'd heard over sixty years before, one a handsome young soldier had sung to her as she walked past:

Ty jeszcze o tym nie wiesz dziewczyno,
Ze od niedawna jestes przyczyn
,
Mych snów, pięknych snów,

Halina's face flushed a little from that tall umbrella drink of memory, stored among more tragic images, as wartime memories often are, having their own special filing system, their own ecology. If other diners overheard, no one gave a sign, and as I looked around the archipelago of tables, I realized that out of fifty or so people, she was the only one old enough to harbor wartime memories.

Ryś, a civil engineer and a father himself, lives in downtown Warsaw today in an eight-story walk-up, minus pets. "A dog couldn't climb the stairs!" he explained as we lurched from landing to landing. Tall and slender, in his seventies, he appears fit from all the stair-climbing, friendly and hospitable, but also a little wary, not surprising given the war lessons ingrained from an early age. "We lived from moment to moment," Ryś said, sitting in his living room, watched over by photographs of his parents, many of their books, a framed drawing of a forest bison, and a sketch of his father. Zoo life hadn't seemed at all unusual to him as a boy, he said, because "it was all I knew." He told of watching a bomb fall near the villa and realizing that he was close enough to be killed, had it gone off. He remembered posing for Magdalena Gross, sitting for long hours while she coaxed clay, existed in it really, and he relished her chirpy attentions. I learned from him that his mother filled the villa's upstairs terrace with overflowing flower boxes in warm weather, that she especially liked pansies, the flowers with pensive faces (from the French
pensee
), that she preferred the music of Chopin, Mozart, and Rossini. No doubt he found some of my questions odd—I hoped to learn about his mother's scent, how she walked, her gestures, her tone of voice, how she wore her hair. To all such inquiries, he answered "average" or "normal," and I soon realized those were memory traces he either didn't visit or didn't wish to share. His sister Teresa, born late in the war, married and lives in Scandinavia. I invited grown-up Ryszard to visit the villa with me, and he kindly obliged. As we explored his childhood home, stepping carefully over the doorframes with decorative anvil-shaped thresholds, I was struck by the way he tested his memory, often comparing what is to what was in much the same way Antonina described him doing as a boy, when they returned to the bombed zoo at the end of the war.

In one of those twists of fate that pepper history, the Berlin Zoo was heavily bombed, just as the Warsaw Zoo had been, assailing Lutz Heck with many of the same concerns and hardships he'd imposed on the Żabíńskis. In his autobiography,
Animals—My Adventure
, he writes movingly about his fatally wounded zoo. Unlike the Żabíńskis, he knew exactly what devastation to expect, having witnessed it firsthand in Warsaw, whose zoo bombing he never mentions. His safari animals, large collection of photographs, and numerous diaries vanished by war's end. As the Soviet army advanced, Lutz left Berlin to avoid being arrested for looting Ukrainian zoos, and he spent the rest of his life in Wiesbaden, making hunting trips abroad. Lutz died in 1982, a year after his brother Heinz. Lutz's son Heinz immigrated to the Catskills in 1959, where he ran a small zoo famous for its herd of Przywalski horses, descended from those nurtured by Heinz Heck throughout the war. At one point, the Munich Zoo had assembled the largest herd of Przywalski horses outside of Mongolia (some stolen from the Warsaw Zoo).