The Zookeeper’s Wife (19 page)

"But if you want to know what I think about the
outcome
of this tragic comedy, I think the Germans found Punia's explanation for the fire that destroyed their buildings very
convenient
. It gave them an excuse not to investigate all the stealing that's been going on over there. The fire was an easy way to cover up crime. If they
really
wanted to punish someone, Punia wouldn't have had such an easy time.

"I don't want to criticize your heroine—Punia did a great job. She was very clever, and I'm glad I can trust her, but I like to look at things from a more cynical point of view."

He'd made her near nightmare sound relatively unimportant, her response cool and calculating, maybe as he imagined it would have been for him. Talented and omnicompetent as Antonina was, she revered and deferred to Jan, often felt inadequate, and was perpetually trying to live up to his expectations and gain his approval. At times Ryś, following his father's example, snarled that as a male even
he
could understand things beyond a ditzy female. Yet Antonina comes across from her diaries as someone who felt deeply loved by Jan, Ryś, and the Guests, and an important complement to her husband, whom she regarded as strict with everyone, most of all himself. She also agreed with him about the subtle ways that all animals communicate. After Jan's mini-lecture on her mind-bending, she found it hard to sleep. Such praise in front of her friends! Rare as light in a Polish winter.

"Jan was right, the German soldiers' reaction to my telepathic waves was similar to the zoo animals," Antonina reflected in her diary. There were many mystical episodes in her past when she felt certain she could build an invisible bridge with animals, make them listen to her requests, bridle their fear, trust her. According to Antonina, her first experiences of this sort happened when she was a girl and spent all her free time in the stables around high-spirited, purebred horses, but for as long as she could remember animals had calmed down around her. Maybe her unusual degree of empathy and alert senses were part of a more creatural sensibility some people inherit, one tinted and tilted by childhood experience. Also, and importantly in Antonina's case, children with insecure attachments to their parents sometimes forge a strong bond with nature itself.

That night she lay awake thinking about the thin veil between humans and other animals, only the faintest border, which people nonetheless drew as "a symbolic Chinese Wall," one that she, on the other hand, saw as shimmery, nearly invisible. "If not, why do we humanize animals and animalize humans?"

For hours, Antonina lay thinking about people and animals, and how little animal psychology had developed compared with other sciences, say chemistry or physics. "We're still walking, eyes closed, in the labyrinth of psychological enigma," she thought. "But, who knows, maybe one day we'll discover the secrets of animal behavior, and maybe one day we'll master our bleaker instincts."

Meanwhile, Antonina and Jan ran their own informal study throughout the war, living closely with mammals, reptiles, insects, birds, and an arcade of humans. Why was it, she asked herself, that "animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast"?

1943

A
S SAFETY EBBED AND FLOWED DURING THE WAR, EVEN A
quiet offhand remark could trigger a landslide of trouble. Word filtered back to Antonina and Jan that one of their Polish zoo guards had caught sight of Magdalena and gossiped that the famous sculptor hid in the villa. Though Antonina judged the guard "decent, maybe even kindhearted—after all, he hadn't called the Gestapo"—she worried lest a careless word reach the wrong ears and the villa's house of cards collapse. "Did the Gestapo already know?" she asked herself. "Was it only a matter of days?"

Grand and petty blackmail, rife in Warsaw, also posed a disabling threat. Thanks in part to the popularity of the black market before the war, and the familiar ease of smoothing one's way with small tips and bribes, Warsaw had swiftly become a city crowded with predators and prey of all sizes, including the decent and bribable, the indecently unbribable, a hard-core criminal element, opportunistic denizens, people hobbled by fear, Nazi sympathizers, and risk-takers who juggled their own and other lives like lit torches. So for the time being it seemed wisest to hide the Guests elsewhere. Mrs. Dewitzowa, who had taught school with Jan before the war, offered Magdalena and Maurycy space in her suburban home; but after only a few weeks, frightened, she sent them back, claiming that suspicious strangers had begun watching her house. Antonina wasn't so sure. "Could the suburbs be riskier than Warsaw?" she wondered. Maybe so, but she suspected something subtler than that, a symptom of how people handle living with fear and uncertainty.

Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of a "psychosis of fear" that many people felt about escaping to the Aryan side:

It is the imaginary perils, [the] supposed observation by the neighbour, porter, manager, or passer-by in the street, that constitute the main danger, because the Jew. . .gives himself away by looking around in every direction to see if anyone is watching him, by the nervous expression on his face, by the frightened look of a hunted animal, smelling danger of some kind everywhere.

Even if to others Antonina often appeared calm, her writings reveal a woman often assailed by worry and broadsided by fear. She knew the impression she created, as the villa's ballast, and she insisted that "the warm, friendly, almost therapeutic" atmosphere of the villa implied a safety that was only illusory. True, the villa provided a spacious environment for Guests, who weren't forced to live crippled up behind walls or crowded and damp underground. But as the Nazis imposed a tighter choke hold, the game of diverting eyes and cheating death became the art of making possibilities materialize and watching for signs. According to Polish folklore:

A picture falling off a wall, crunching noises beneath a window, a broom falling without cause, a clock ticking where there was none. A table that made cracking noises, a door that opened by itself—all foretold death drawing near.

To achieve safety brought many inconveniences, such as having to shop often and buy things in small quantities so as not to attract too much notice, or drying some clothes indoors because one didn't dare hang out laundry that couldn't belong to anyone in the house. Inevitably, fear raided everyone's mood. But as zookeepers, the Żabíńskis understood both vigilance and predators; in a swamp of vipers, one planned every footstep. Shaped by the gravity of wartime, it wasn't always clear who or what could be considered outside or inside, loyal or turncoat, predator or prey.

At first, no one knew about the zoo's custodial secret and they had to find extra food and improvise escapes entirely on their own. Luckily, they discovered that an old friend, Janina Buchholtz, a psychologist and devotee of the arts, was a key member of Zegota. During the occupation, Janina officially worked as a registered translator for the public notary, the office where Antonina had stopped for news after visiting the bombed-out zoo in 1939. Because she handled many documents, applications, and petitions, papers spilled from tables, mounded on shelves, rose in precarious stalagmites on the floor, and seemed ready to cascade everywhere. A bureaucrat's nightmare, the clutter camouflaged the office's real life as an Underground nerve center where Aryan documents were forged, safe apartments sought, messengers dispatched, cash distributed, sabotage planned, and letters sent to people in other ghettos. Contacts received their instructions and filed reports in her office, which meant lots of foot traffic, but like the Żabíńskis, she perfected the art of hiding things in plain sight, in this case among enough clutter to make snooping Nazis recoil, reluctant to sift through the dusty, never quite stationary piles. As one survivor recalled, the Nazis "aimed step by step, by means of interlocking decrees, to create a reporting and documentation system that would render any kind of machinations impossible and that would locate every single inhabitant of the city with appropriate precision." This necessitated elaborate false identities, documents, and provenances for people in hiding, because Polish Catholics, who mainly lived in housing blocks, could produce church and municipal records from before the war, including birth, baptism, marriage, tax, death, and inheritance documents. Fresh documents sometimes meant "solid" papers that could withstand Gestapo delving and sometimes flimsy ones (called
lipne
, from the word for linden, which later evolved into "white lies"), which wouldn't pass much scrutiny. As Gunnar Paulsson relates the process,

Setting yourself up as a
homo novus
required not only the creation of a new identity but the severing of all ties to the old, tainted ones. Therefore you had to move. Your former self could then vanish, while the new self registered in the normal way in the new quarters. . ..[Y]ou had to de-register at the registry office in the old district, receiving a coupon in return. You then registered with the building manager at the new place and again received a coupon. Both coupons then had to be taken to the local registry office, within a certain grace period, as proof of registration. . .. [T]o break the chain of evidence, it was necessary to have a forged de-registration coupon, and this needed to have backing in the files of the registry office.

Fortunately, Janina worked in the registry office, where she could confect identities and plant records to back them up. Some people claimed to have been born in the Soviet Union, or to Muslim Poles, or to have lost their papers in a church fire before 1939; others assumed the identity of a citizen living abroad or dead. All of these required forgery and finesse, generating, planting, and altering the records in long chains of evidence—hence the paper Alps in her office. In 1941, when Hans Frank decreed that identity cards (
Kennkarte
) be issued, complete with serial number and fingerprints, clerks managed to stall them until 1943, and then use the occasion to make fictitious identity cards. Hordes of people seemed suddenly to have lost their records. Greedy opportunists and Underground specialists alike crafted so many passports and other documents that by the summer of 1943 even Ziegler's office estimated 15 percent of all identity cards and 25 percent of all working papers had been forged. One cell of Zegota alone is credited with generating fifty to one hundred documents a day, papers that ran the gamut from birth and death certificates to the IDs of low-level SS and Gestapo officials. Janina pictured her clients as people "walking on quicksand."

"I am lucky. . .I can do wonders," she proudly told her friend and colleague Barbara "Basia" Temkin-Berman, while smiling and tapping a crooked finger on the cafe table to ward off bad luck.

Tall, heavyset, and elderly, Janina always wore the robelike black skirts of a prioress and a peculiar little veiled hat tied under her chin, and she carried a muff. Spectacles balanced on her long thin nose, over eyes brimming with such warmth that people typically referred to her as "the kindest person I've ever known," or "the perennial protector of the underdog."

In her double conspiracy of fighting the Germans and helping the Jews, Janina worked closely with Basia, a psychologist before the war and her physical opposite: a small, slender, nervous, volatile woman who always wore an old wine-colored coat, black beret, and veil to hide her Semitic features.

Janina and Basia conferred daily at the Miodowa Street office or at the
cat
-safe cafe at 24 Miodowa Street, and together they forged contacts among nuns and priests, railway workers, professors, market-stall owners, shopkeepers, maids, trolley drivers, farmers, beauticians, engineers, clerks and secretaries (willing to erase people from public files or issue bogus certificates). And, of course, a zoo director and his wife. One day Janina spoke with Underground leaders about Magdalena's risk at the zoo, and their decree, though disturbing, made sense to Antonina and Jan. Maurycy would remain in the villa and Magdalena would lodge with an engineer friend of Janina's who lived in Saska Kępa, on the east side of the river, in a lovely old parish complete with a park inhabited by statues:
The Dancer, Rhythm,
and nakedly voluptuous
Bather
. It was a district of neoclassical public buildings, newly built modernist houses with lots of shrubbery, and avant-garde villas of concrete and glass designed between the wars.

At first, the zoo had served only as a temporary shelter, one whistle stop in an elaborate Underground railroad, and Jan and Antonina hid only friends and acquaintances, but later, working with Janina, "things became more organized," as Jan put it in his understated way, by which he meant that, with the Underground's help, he amplified his efforts and began taking unearthly chances.

Of all the Guests to leave the villa, "high-spirited Magdalena, full of energy and laughter," was the one Antonina said she missed most. The two shared an extraordinary friendship, girlish and mature, intimate and professional. Both Jan and Antonina admired Magdalena as an artist, but they also treasured her as a buoyant, funny, generous friend. According to Antonina, losing Magdalena felt physically painful, even though her departure made room for another Guest, another life saved. Jan and Antonina promised to visit Magdalena in Saska Kępa as often as possible; and Maurycy, who couldn't travel safely through the city, wondered if their goodbye meant months, years, or forever, and "took it especially hard."

By late June of 1943, Jan and Antonina figured no one had reported them to the Gestapo, and gingerly began accepting Guests once again. Janina sent them a young friend of hers, Aniela Dobrucka, who had "good looks," as locals said, meaning strong Aryan features, which had allowed her to spend days as a street seller of bread and croissants and nights lodging with an eccentric old woman. Antonina liked the spunky young woman with dark hair, sea-blue eyes, and a temperament both "sweet-natured and a bit mischievous." Coming to Warsaw from a poor farming village, Aniela had struggled to pay her own way through Lwów University. Rachela Auerbach was her real name, but that became buried in Underground life, where identities melted and one assumed fresh names, guises, and tasks, as required.

Polish emigre Eva Hoffman writes movingly about the psychic earthquake of having to shed her name: "Nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift. The twist in our names takes them a tiny distance from us—but it is a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters." Suddenly her given name and her sister's no longer existed, even though "they were as surely us as our eyes or hands." And the new names were "identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves."

Lucky enough to leave the Ghetto before the worst of times, Aniela dedicated her life to scrounging food for famished people and working at a hospital and a library, and she was one of the elite few who knew the secret of the milk churns. In the section of the Ghetto devoted to workshops, the OBW (Ostdeutsche Bauwerkstütte) carpentry shop was managed by Germans who obliged the original Jewish owners to continue running daily operations. One of those brothers, Alexander Landau, belonged to the Underground and hired many of its members, supposedly as trained craftsmen, though their lack of basic carpentry skills wasn't always easy to hide. The Halmann carpentry shop, at 68 Nowolipki Street, employed other so-called carpenters, and the houses assigned to them became the center of the Jewish Fighting Organization. Together, these two workshops, by employing many people, kept them from deportation, housed others on the run, and became sites of schools and the hub of much Underground activity.

Only a month after the Germans occupied Poland, historian Ringelblum conceived the idea of an archive, because he felt what was happening was unprecedented in human history, and someone should accurately report the facts and bear witness to the unspeakable suffering and cruelty. Aniela aided Ringelblum with the archives, though Janina read the documents first and hid them for a while inside the upholstery of the big couch in her office. Then this secret group of archivists, code name
Oneg Shabat
(because they met on Saturdays), hid the documents in boxes and milk churns under the Halmann workshop. In 1946, survivors combing through the ruins of the Ghetto found all but one of the milk churns, filled with vividly detailed accounts written in Yiddish, Polish, or Hebrew, which now reside in the Jewish Institute in Warsaw.

In time, Aniela brought to the villa her friend Genia (Eugienia Sylkes), who had organized secret schools in the Ghetto, fought in the Underground Army, and helped plan the Ghetto Uprising. Ultimately captured and forced to board a train for Treblinka, she and her husband jumped from the train near Otwock as it slowed down at a siding to let another train pass (some cars had small windows strung with barbed wire that could be cut or doors that could be forced). In a postwar interview with London's
White Eagle-Mermaid
, Genia recalled that after the jump