The Zookeeper’s Wife (22 page)

Terrified, she and the others left the house and waited in the garden, not knowing what to expect but fearing the worst.

"Hands high," they yelled. Antonina noticed the men's first fingers cupping triggers.

Holding her baby in her arms, she could only raise one hand, and her brain had trouble "registering their vulgar, brutal sentences" as they bellowed:

"You'll pay for the deaths of our heroic German soldiers being slaughtered by your husbands and sons. Your children"—they pointed to Ryś and Teresa—"suck in hatred for the German people along with their mother's milk. Up till now we let you behave that way, but enough is enough! From now on, one thousand Poles will be killed for every dead German."

"Surely this is the end," she thought. Hugging her baby tight, mind darting to think up a plan, she felt her heart caged in her ribs, and her legs became too heavy to move. It wasn't the first time she literally froze in fear. On this occasion, although she couldn't move, she knew she had to say something, anything, and stay calm, talk to them the way she used to soothe angry animals and gain their trust. Her mouth filled with German words she didn't think she knew, and she began talking about ancient tribes and the grandeur of German culture. As she hugged the baby tighter, words streamed from her mouth, and, in another chamber of mind, she concentrated hard and repeated over and over the command:
Calm down! Put the guns down! Calm down! Put the guns down! Calm down! Put the guns down!

The Germans continued yelling, which she didn't hear, and they never lowered their guns, but in a spill of cobbled thoughts she kept talking while issuing silent commands.

Suddenly a soldier looked at Fox Man's fifteen-year-old helper and barked at him to go behind the shed in the garden. The boy started walking, followed by an SS man who reached into his pocket, pulling out a revolver as they disappeared from view. A single gunshot.

The other German told Ryś: "You're next!"

Antonina saw her son's face shriek with fear, the blood drain out of it, and his lips turn a light purple. She couldn't move and risk their killing her and Teresa, too. Ryś raised his hands and started to walk slowly, robotically, "as if life had already left his little body," she remembered later. Watching until he disappeared from view, she continued following him in her mind's eye: "Now he'll be close to the hollyhocks," she thought, "now he'll be near the study window." A second shot. It felt like "a bayonet plunged into my heart. . .and we heard the third shot. . .I couldn't see anything; my vision became blank, then dark. I felt so weak, I was close to fainting."

"You sit down on the bench," one German told her. "It's difficult to stand up with a child in your arms." A moment later the same man called:

"Hey, boys! Bring me that rooster! Get him from the bushes!"

Both boys ran out from the shrubs, shaking with fear. Ryś was holding his dead chicken, Kuba, by its wing, and Antonina stared fixated at big drops of blood dripping from Kuba's bullet wounds.

"We've played such a funny joke!" a soldier said. Antonina saw their marble faces loosen into laughter as they left the garden, carrying the dead chicken, and she watched Ryś slink low while trying hard not to cry, until it was no use and tears flooded him. What could a mother do to comfort a child after that?

Later, when she calmed down, she tried to diagnose the behavior of the SS soldiers—did they ever consider shooting them, or was it always a sick game of power and fear? Certainly they hadn't known about Kuba, so they must have been improvising as they went along. She couldn't fathom their sudden tenderheartedness in urging her to sit down. Were they really worried that she might collapse holding her newborn? "If so," she thought, "maybe their monstrous hearts contain
some
human feeling; and if that's so, then pure evil doesn't really exist."

She'd been so sure the gunshots had killed the boys, that Ryś lay crumpled on the ground with a bullet in his head. A mother's nervous system derails at such a time, and even though they'd all survived, she found herself sinking into a savage depression, which she berated herself for in her diary: "My weakness shamed me," at precisely the time "I needed to be a leader of my little group."

In the days that followed, she also suffered headaches from the infernal racket of the German army amassing rows of rocket launchers, mortars, and heavy artillery near the zoo. The seismic ructions of bombs followed, with shells of every caliber and shape delivering their own fiendish din: whistling, blasting, crackling, banging, crashing, scraping, thundering. Then there were the
screaming meemies
, army slang (inspired by French girls named Mimi) for a type of German shell that made a shrieking noise in flight, a term extended, in time, to battle fatigue caused by long exposure to enemy fire.

The Germans also shot mine-throwers known as "bellowing cows," which yowled six times in a row as six mines cranked into position before a series of six explosions.

"I will never forget that sound to the end of my days," wrote Jacek Fedorowicz, who was seven years old during the Warsaw Uprising. "After the cranking there was nothing one could do. If one heard the explosion, it meant one had not been killed. . .. I had a good ear for discerning the death-dealing sounds." He managed to escape with the "remnants of my family's fortune. . .sewn inside [my teddy bear] in the form of 'piglets,' or gold five-rouble coins. Apart from him, the only things I managed to salvage after the Uprising were a drinking glass and a copy of
Dr. Dolittle
."

Airplanes bombed the fighters in Old Town; soldiers machine-gunned Polish civilians in the streets; demolition crews torched and bombed huge buildings. The air filled with dust, fire, and sulfur. When it grew dark, Antonina heard an even scarier rumble from the direction of Kierbedź Bridge, the growl of a giant machine. Some people said the Germans had built a crematorium to burn the bodies of the dead, to protect Warsaw from plague, while others thought the Germans had unleashed a huge radioactive weapon. The river water reflected a pale green fluorescent light so brilliant she could see people standing at their windows on the other side of the river, and after sunset, the otherworldly rumble was joined by invisible choruses of drunken soldiers who sang late into the night.

According to Antonina, she lay awake all that night, scared cold, aware of the tiny hairs stiffening on the back of her neck. As it turned out, the weird light was far less sophisticated than she had imagined; in Praski Park, the Germans had installed a generator that drove colossal reflector lamps to dazzle the enemy.

Even after the battle moved out of the zoo district, soldiers invaded the zoo to prowl and pillage. One day a gang of Russians arrived with "wild eyes," and busily began searching the cupboards, walls, and floors for anything they could steal, including picture frames and carpets. When she approached them and silently stood her ground, she sensed scavengers darting around her "like hyenas" racing into the rooms. "If they guess my fear, they'll devour me," she thought. Their leader, a man with Asian features and icy eyes, walked up close and stared hard at her, while Teresa slept nearby in a tiny wicker cradle. Antonina resolved not to look away or move. Suddenly, he grabbed the small gold medallion she always wore around her neck, "and flashed his white teeth." Slowly, gently, she pointed to the baby, then, defrosting the Russian of her childhood, commanded in a loud, stern voice:

"Not allowed! Your mother! Your wife! Your sister! Do you understand?"

When she placed her hand on his shoulder, he looked surprised, and she saw the manic fury draining from his eyes, his mouth relaxing, as if she'd smoothed the fabric of his face with a hot iron. Her mind-whispering had worked again, she thought. Next he placed his hand into the back pocket of his pants, and for a horrible instant she remembered the German soldier with his revolver aimed at Ryś. Instead, he withdrew his hand and opened it to reveal several dirty pink hard candies.

"For the baby!" he said, pointing to the cradle.

As Antonina shook his hand in thanks, he smiled at her admiringly and glanced at her ringless hands, then made a pitiful face, took a ring off his own finger, and offered it to her.

"It's for you," he said. "Take it! Put it on your finger!"

Her heart "shook" as she slipped on the ring, because it bore a silver eagle, a Polish emblem, which meant he'd probably ripped it off the finger of a dead Polish soldier. "Whose ring was it?" she wondered.

Then, loudly summoning his soldiers, he ordered: "Leave everything you took! I will kill you like dogs if you don't obey me!"

Surprised, his men dropped all the furniture and loot they'd gathered and dragged small items out of their pockets.

"Let's go now—don't touch anything!" he said.

With that, she watched his men "shrink in size as they left one at a time like muzzled dogs."

When they'd gone, she sat down at the table and looked again at the ring with the silver eagle and thought: "If felt words like
mother, wife, sister
, have the power to change a bastard's spirit and conquer his murderous instincts, maybe there's some hope for the future of humanity after all."

From time to time, other soldiers visited the zoo, without incident, and then one day a car pulled up with several German clerks who managed Third Reich fur farms and knew Fox Man from his days in Grójec. Fox Man reported that the animals still survived with luxuriant fur, and they gave him permission to move both animals and employees to Germany. Packing up so many animals would take time, which meant everyone could stay in the villa for a while longer, possibly even until the Uprising triumphed and the Germans deserted Warsaw. Then no one would have to leave the zoo at all.

In the meantime, trying to weaken the Resistance, German airplanes kept dropping notes urging Warsaw's civilians to abandon the city before it was gutted. Soon afterward, the German army trucked even more heavy artillery into Praski Park, hiding it among the trees and bushes near the river. Stationed so close, German soldiers often stopped by for a drink of water, a cup of soup, or some cooked potatoes. One evening, a tall young officer expressed concern about civilians living too close to the battlefield, and Antonina explained that she and the others were running a high-priority Wehrmacht fur farm, which they couldn't leave because it was an inauspicious time for the raccoon dogs, which develop soft dense coats by molting in summer and then regrowing a winter pelage during September, October, and November. Tamper with their schedule by boxing them up, stressing them, and shipping them to a different climate, she warned, and their prized winter coats wouldn't grow back soon. That seemed to satisfy him.

Thunder had never frightened her before, she wrote—"After all, it's only sound filling the vacuum created by streaks of lightning"—but the artillery flared without letup, the air didn't grow moist as a prelude to storm, no rain fell, and the dry thunder jangled her nerves. One afternoon, the artillery suddenly paused, and during that rare lull the women of the house lay down and rested, soaking in the quiet. Jan's mother, Nunia, and Ewa all took a nap in their bedrooms, and Antonina nursed Teresa downstairs, on a sweltering day, with all the doors and windows open. Suddenly the kitchen door squeaked and a German officer strode into the room. He stopped for a moment when he saw her with the baby, and as he edged closer Antonina smelled alcohol on his breath. Snooping around suspiciously, he wandered into Jan's study.

"Oooh! A piano—sheet music! Do you play?" he asked excitedly.

"A little," she replied.

Paging through some Bach, he paused and started to whistle a fugue with tuneful expertise. She figured him for a professional musician.

"You seem to have a perfect ear for music," she said.

When he asked her to play for him, she sat down at the piano, though something didn't feel quite right. Tempted to grab Teresa and make a run for it, she feared he'd shoot her if she tried, so instead she began playing "Ständchen," a romantic song by Schubert, hoping that this German favorite might calm him with sentimental memories.

"No, not that! Not that!" he screamed. "Why are you playing
that
?!"

Antonina's fingers sprang from the keys. Clearly a wrong choice, but why? She'd heard and played the German serenade so often. As he strode to the bookshelf to page through sheet music, she glanced down and read the lyrics to "Ständchen":

A broken heart, that would rattle anyone, she thought. Suddenly his face lit up as he opened a collection of national anthems, through which he searched, looking eagerly for something, which he finally found.

Placing the open book on the piano, he said: "Please, play this for me."

As she started to play, the German officer sang along, pronouncing the English words in a heavy accent, and she wondered what the soldiers in Praski Park must be thinking as he belted out "The Star-Spangled Banner." Occasionally she peeked up at his half-closed eyes. When she finished with a flourish, he saluted her and quietly left the villa.