The Zookeeper’s Wife (26 page)

Chapter 2

Thievery posed another worry (30):
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.

a Burmese man invented. . .a hopping stick (30):
Pogo sticks, all the rage of the 1920s, were actually patented by the American George Hansburg.

backward-bent red knees (31):
Flamingos look like they have backward-facing knees, but those are actually their ankles. Their knees float higher up, hidden by feathers.

Chapter 3

The Żabíńskis' country cottage [in Rejentówka] (39):
Many of these details come from Helena Boguszewska, who owned a neighboring property.

Chapter 4

scenes of the dead and dying etched into memory (49):
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."

"That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger" (49):
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Twilight of the Idols
(1899).

Chapter 5

the newly invented jukebox (55):
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.

Chapter 6

"While speaking to you now, I can see it through the window in its greatness and glory" (64):
Stefan Starzyński, quoted in
Warsaw and Ghetto
(Warsaw: B. M. Potyralsey, 1964).

"I rely on the population of Warsaw. . .to accept the entry of the German forces" (67):
Rommel quoted in Israel Gutman,
Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), p. 12.

"ruthlessly exploit this region as a war zone and booty country" (70):
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.

over a span of five years (70):
Adam Zamoyski,
The Polish War: A Thousand Year History of the Poles and Their Culture
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 1994), p. 358.

"from the very beginning, I was connected to the Home Army" (70):
Jan Żabíński quoted in a Yiddish newspaper, in Israel, on the occasion of the Żabíńskis being honored by Yad Vashem as "Righteous Among Nations." Newspaper article provided by Ryszard Żabíński.

Chapter 7

director of the Munich Zoo (75):
Heinz Heck became director of the Hellabrunn Zoo in Munich in 1928, where he remained until 1969.

Esperanto (75):
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.

Chapter 8

"The campfire flickering in front of me" (79):
Lutz Heck,
Animals—My Adventure,
trans. E. W. Dickies (London: Methuen, 1954),p. 60.

back-breeding project (82):
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.

biological aims of the Nazi movement (83):
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.)

Josef Mengele (83):
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.

"a deliberate, scientifically founded race policy" (84):
Konrad Lorenz quoted in Ute Deichmann,
Biologists Under Hitler,
trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 187.

"the healthy volkish body often does not 'notice' how it is being pervaded by elements of decay" (84):
Konrad Lorenz, "Durch Domestikation verursachte Störungen artewigen Verhaltens,"
Zeitschrift für angewandte Psychologie und Charaklerunde,
vol. 59 (1940), p. 69.

Hermann Göring (85):
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.)

Chapter 9

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.

European Bison Stud Book (89):
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.

"I've been asked that a lot" (89):
Heck,
Animals,
p. 89.

Chapter 10

any illness that kills one animal threatens to wipe out all (91):
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.

A 2006 study of mitochondrial DNA (91):
"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.

some say to a man, some a woman (92):
That person didn't live all alone on the planet; it's simply that no one else's offspring survived.

"Germany's crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known"(92):
Pierre Lecomte du Noüy,
La dignite humaine
(1944).

the Underground, whose foothold in the Praga district in time reached 90 platoons with 6,000 soldiers (93)
: Norman Davies,
Rising '44: The Battle for Warsaw
(London: Pan Books, 2003),p. 183.

Chapter 11

Hitler had ordered (99):
From a transcript read at the Nuremberg trials, reported in "The Fallen Eagles,"
Time
, December 3, 1945.

all Poles drew punishment (100):
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."

Chapter 12

"constant tense clamor" (105):
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 vati-can on an enormous scale at the center of the millenarian greater Germanic Reich."