The Zookeeper’s Wife (15 page)

T
HE SNOWY AUTUMN OF 1942 HIT THE ZOO WITH A SPECIAL
fury, as winds lashed wooden buildings until they moaned and whisked snowbanks into sparkling souffles. Bombing early in the war ripped up the zoo grounds, scrambling its landmarks, then snow fell heavily, hiding a bevy of new ruts, downed fences, twisted macadam, jagged fingers of metal. Below the deceptively soft snowscape, metal basilisks lurked everywhere, confining people to a maze of shoveled walks and well-trodden pastures.

Antonina's range shrank even more because she was crippled by what sounds like phlebitis (she offers few clues), a painful infection in the leg veins that made walking agonizing and meant bed rest from fall of 1942 to spring of 1943. An unusually active thirty-four-year-old, she hated being confined to her bedroom, in heavy clothes, muffled under strata of blankets and comforters ("I felt so embarrassed and useless," she moaned in ink), when there was a large household to manage. She was the top matryoshka, after all, and not just symbolically, since she was also pregnant. It's hard to know if blood clots did form in her legs—from pregnancy, smoking, varicose veins, heredity? Certainly not inactivity or obesity. But phlebitis can be dangerous; in its severest form, deep vein thrombosis, a blood clot travels to the heart or lungs, causing death. Even mild phlebitis, or possibly rheumatoid arthritis (an inflammation of the joints), creates red swollen legs and requires bed rest, so, having no alternative, she held court in her bedroom, with family, friends, and staff alike paying calls.

In June of 1942, the Polish Underground received a letter, written in code, telling of an extermination camp at Treblinka, a town not far from Warsaw. Here's part of its warning:

Historian Emanuel Ringelblum (who wrote
Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War
while hiding in a Warsaw bunker) and other members of the Underground knew exactly what the letter meant. The cryptic last sentence referred to the Passover instructions in Exodus 12:10: any leftovers of the sacrificial lamb were to be
burnt
. Soon news came from Chełmno of Jews being gassed in vans, and refugees from Wilno told of massacres in other towns as well. Such atrocities still seemed impossible to believe until a man who had escaped the gas chamber and hidden in a freight car all the way to Warsaw told people in the Ghetto what he'd witnessed. Even though the Underground then spread news of Treblinka, some people argued the Nazis wouldn't visit the same bestiality on a city as important as Warsaw.

On July 22, 1942, the liquidation of the Ghetto began on Stawki Street, with 7,000 people herded to the train station, loaded into chlorinated red cattle cars, and delivered to the gas chambers at Majdanek. For this so-called "resettlement in the east," they were allowed to pack three days' worth of food, all their valuables, and thirty-three pounds of personal luggage. Between July and September of 1942, the Nazis shipped 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka, leaving only 55,000 behind in the Ghetto, where a Jewish Fighting Organization, known as ZOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), arose and prepared for combat. To still the doomed as long as possible, the train station at Treblinka posted arrival and departure times for trains, though no prisoners ever left. "With great precision, they started to reach their insane goal," Antonina wrote. "What looked at first like one individual's bloodsucking instinct soon became a well-designed method to destroy whole nations."

Another neighbor of theirs who, like Szymon Tenenbaum and Rabbi Shapira, chose to stay in the Ghetto when offered escape, was pediatrician Henryk Goldszmit (pen name: Janusz Korczak), who wrote autobiographical novels and books for parents and teachers with such titles as
How to Love a Child
and
The Child's Right to Respect.
To the amazement of his friends, fans, and disciples, Korczak abandoned both his literary and medical careers in 1912 to found a progressive orphanage for boys and girls, ages seven to fourteen, at 92 Krochmalna Street.

In 1940, when Jews were ordered into the Ghetto, the orphanage moved to an abandoned businessmen's club in the "district of the damned," as he described it in a diary written on blue rice-paper pages that he filled with details of daily life in the orphanage, imaginative forays, philosophical contemplations, and soul-searching. It's the reliquary of an impossible predicament, revealing "how a spiritual and moral man struggled to shield innocent children from the atrocities of the adult world during one of history's darkest times." Reportedly shy and awkward with adults, he created an ideal democracy with the orphans, who called him "Pan Doctor."

There, with wit, imagination, and self-deprecating humor, he devoted himself to a "children's republic" complete with its own parliament, newspaper, and court system. Instead of punching one another, children learned to yell "I'll sue you!" And every Saturday morning court cases were judged by five children who weren't being sued that week. All rulings rested on Korczak's "Code of Laws," the first hundred of which parsed forgiveness. He once confided to a friend: "I am a doctor by training, a pedagogue by chance, a writer by passion, and a psychologist by necessity."

At night, lying on his infirmary cot, with remnants of vodka and black bread tucked under his bed, he would escape to his own private planet, Ro, where an imaginary astronomer friend, Zi, had finally succeeded in building a machine to convert radiant sunlight into moral strength. Using it to waft peace throughout the universe, Zi complained that it worked everywhere except on "that restless spark, Planet Earth," and they debated whether Zi should destroy bloody, warmongering Earth, with Doctor Pan pleading for compassion given the planet's youth.

His blue pages stitched together sensations, fancies, and marauding ideas alike, but he didn't relate sinister Ghetto events, for example, the deportations to the death camps that began on July 22, his sixty-fourth birthday. Instead of all the clangor and mayhem on that day, he wrote only of "a marvellous big moon" shining above the destitute in "this unfortunate, insane quarter."

By then, as photographs show, his goatee and mustache had grayed, bags terraced beneath intense dark eyes, and though he often endured "adhesions, aches, ruptures, scars," he refused to escape from the Ghetto, leaving the children behind, despite many offers of help from disciples on the Aryan side. It creased him to hear the starving and suffering children compare their ills "like old people in a sanitarium," he wrote in his diary. They needed ways to transcend pain, and so he encouraged prayers like this one: "Thank you, Merciful Lord, for having arranged to provide flowers with fragrance, glow worms with their glow, and to make the stars in the sky sparkle." By example, he taught them the mental salve of mindful chores, like the slow attentive picking up of bowls, spoons, and plates after a meal:

Inventing both silly games and the ramparts of deeper play, he decided one day to stage a drama inspired by his affection for Eastern religion,
The Post Office
, by the Indian author Rabindranath Tagore. That production now assumes the potency of symbol, opening as it did on July 18, just three weeks before the children were shipped to Treblinka. In the play, a bedridden boy named Amal suffers in a claustrophobic room and dreams of flying to a land where a king's doctor can cure him. By the play's end the royal doctor appears, heals him, flings open the doors and windows, and Amal beholds a circus of stars. Korczak said he chose the play to help the trapped, terrified children accept death more serenely.

Anticipating their calamity and fright when deportation day came (August 6, 1942), he joined them aboard the train bound for Treblinka, because, he said, he knew his presence would calm them—"You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this." A photograph taken at the Umschlagplatz (Transshipment Square) shows him marching, hatless, in military boots, hand in hand with several children, while 192 other children and ten staff members follow, four abreast, escorted by German soldiers. Korczak and the children boarded red boxcars not much larger than chicken coops, usually stuffed with seventy-five vertical adults, though all the children easily fit. In Joshua Perle's eyewitness account in
The Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto
, he describes the scene: "A miracle occurred, two hundred pure souls, condemned to death, did not weep. Not one of them ran away. None tried to hide. Like stricken swallows they clung to their teacher and mentor, to their father and brother, Janusz Korczak."

In 1971, the Russians named a newly discovered asteroid after him,
2163 Korczak
, but maybe they should have named it
Ro
, the planet he dreamed of. The Poles claim Korczak as a martyr, and the Israelis revere him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men, whose pure souls make possible the world's salvation. According to Jewish legend, these few, through their good hearts and good deeds, keep the too-wicked world from being destroyed. For their sake alone, all of humanity is spared. The legend tells that they are ordinary people, not flawless or magical, and that most of them remain unrecognized throughout their lives, while they choose to perpetuate goodness, even in the midst of inferno.

A
FTER THE GREAT DEPORTATIONS OF JULY 1942, THE SHAPE
and nature of the Ghetto changed from a congested city of ever-crowded streets into a labor camp full of German workshops policed by the SS. In its large, vastly depopulated southern neighborhood known as "the wild Ghetto," a special corps, the
Werterfassung
, busily salvaged what it could from abandoned belongings and remodeled the deserted homes for German use, while the remaining 35,000 or so Jews were resettled in housing blocks near the shops and escorted to and from work by guards. In reality, another 20,000 to 30,000 "wild" Jews lived in hiding in the Ghetto, staying out of sight, traveling through a maze of subterranean tunnels that led between buildings, and surviving as part of a labyrinthine economy.

Autumn of 1942 also heralded a new Underground group the Żabíńskis found immensely helpful: Zegota, cryptonym for the Council to Aid the Jews, a cell founded by Zofia Kossak and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz, with the mission of helping Jews hidden in Polish homes. Although its formal name was the Konrad Zegota committee, there was no Konrad Zegota. Zofia Kossak (code name "Weronika"), a noted author and conservative nationalist, mingled freely with the upper classes, especially the landed gentry, and had close friends in the Catholic clergy. In contrast, Krahelska-Filipowicz, editor of the art magazine
Arkady
, was a Socialist activist, wife of a former ambassador to the United States, and well acquainted with military and political leaders of the Underground. Between them, they knew scores of people, and the others they recruited also had a wide network of professional, political, or social contacts. That was the point, to create a human lattice from all corners of society. Aleksander Kamiński, for example, figured in the popular Polish Scouts Association before the war, Henryk Wolinski belonged to the Polish Bar Association, and left-wing Zionist Party member and psychologist Adolf Berman headed Centos, a child welfare organization in the Ghetto. The Writers' Union, the Underground Journalists Association, the Democratic Doctors' Committee, and labor unions comprising railway, tramway, and sanitation department workers all aided Zegota. As Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski point out in
Zegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland
: "The people of Zegota were not just idealists but activists, and activists are, by nature, people who know people."

Drawing together a consortium of Polish Catholic and political groups, Zegota's sole purpose was rescue, not sabotage or fighting, and, as such, it was the only organization of its kind in occupied Europe during the war, one that historians credit with saving 28,000 Jews in Warsaw. Its headquarters at 24 Zurawia Street, run by Eugenia W
sowska (a bookbinder and printer) and lawyer Janina Raabe, kept office hours twice a week and also provided temporary shelter for some people on the run. Conspiring with the Polish Underground and Resistance, it supplied the Żabíńskis' villa with money and false documents, and scoured outlying towns for houses where the zoo's Guests could ride out the war. Keeping one person alive often required putting a great many in jeopardy, and it tested them nonstop, as they resisted both propaganda and death threats. Yet 70,000–90,000 people in Warsaw and the suburbs, or about one-twelfth of the city's population, risked their lives to help neighbors escape. Besides the rescuers and Underground helpers, there were maids, postmen, milkmen, and many others who didn't inquire about extra faces or extra mouths to feed.

When Marceli Lemi-Łebkowski, a well-known lawyer and activist, arrived at the zoo with false documents provided by the Underground and "important clandestine missions to fulfill," he and his family pretended to be refugees from the east who wanted to rent two rooms, one for his sick wife, and one for their two daughters, Nunia and Ewa. Marceli would have to live in another safe house and visit them from time to time, because a new man about the villa might be hard to explain—not so a sick woman and her daughters. Their rent bought coke to heat the upstairs bedrooms, which meant more people could lodge in the villa, among them Marek and Dziuś, two young boys serving in the Underground army's Youth Sabotage Group. The boys had left memorial flowers at sites German soldiers frequently used for shooting Poles, and scrawled on walls and fences "Hitler will lose the war! Germany will die!"—deadly offenses.

That winter, some trustworthy legal tenants paid rent, but mainly the villa embraced people lost between worlds and on the run from the Gestapo. In time, the Guests included Irena Mayzel, Kazio and Ludwinia Kramsztyk, Dr. Ludwig Hirszfeld (a specialist in communicable diseases), Dr. Roza Anzelówna from the National Hygiene Institute, the Lemi-Łebkowski family, Mrs. Poznańska, Dr. Lonia Tenenbaum, Mrs. Weiss (wife of a lawyer), the Keller family, Marysia Aszer, journalist Maria Aszerówna, Rachela Auerbach, the Kenigswein family, Drs. Anzelm and Kinszerbaum, Eugienia "Genia" Sylkes, Magdalena Gross, Maurycy Fraenkel, and Irene Sendler, among many others—according to Jan, about three hundred in all.

As if invisible ink ran through their veins, Jewish and Polish outlaws only appeared indoors, after hours, where Guests and tenants fused into a single family. As a result, Antonina's daily chores increased, but she also had more helpers, and she enjoyed having the two young Lemi-Łebkowska girls around, quickly discovering how little they knew about housework, and schooling them "rigorously" in the wifely trades.

A zoo without animals equaled a waste of land to the Nazis, who decided to build a fur farm on the grounds. Not only would the fur warm German soldiers fighting on the eastern front (they'd already confiscated all fur from the Ghetto Jews for this purpose), extras could be sold to help finance the war. For efficiency they put a Pole in charge of it: Witold Wroblewski, an elderly bachelor used to living alone with fur farm animals. Like the outcast in Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
, he would enviously watch those inside the warm, comfortable villa, "full of light and the smell of baking bread," he later told Antonina. One day, to Jan and Antonina's surprise and distress, he arrived at their door and, without any niceties or discussion, declared that he was moving in.

Luck favored the Żabíńskis, who soon discovered that "Fox Man," as they came to call him, was a Pole raised in Germany who felt sympathy for their mission and could be trusted. By far the most eccentric human in the villa, he arrived with a female cat, Balbina, and what Antonina referred to as "several inseparable parakeets," but nothing else, no personal belongings. That made quick work of moving him into Jan's old study, and he paid with badly needed coke and coal to heat the house. Though it surely impeded his life as a businessman, Fox Man couldn't abide calendars or clocks, street names or numbers; and sometimes he slept on the floor between his desk and his bed, as if fatigue simply overtook him and he hadn't the energy to lurch a step farther. When housemates learned that he had played piano professionally before the war, he entered the Żabíńskis' inner circle, because, as Magdalena liked to say: "The House Under a Crazy Star respects artists above all." Though everyone nagged him to play piano, he kept refusing, then one day, at exactly 1
A.M
., he emerged from his bedroom, padded quietly to the piano, and suddenly began playing nonstop until morning. After that, Magdalena organized regular piano recitals in the evenings, after curfew, and his Chopin and Rachmaninoff made a wonderful change from the frantic bars of "Go, go, go to Crete!"

Antonina often wrote about Fox Man's gray cat, Balbina, whom she described as appropriately sluttish ("always getting married like a good, normal cat"). But every time Balbina had kittens, Fox Man would snatch them from the basket and replace them with newborn foxes for her to nurse. Antonina doesn't say what became of the kittens, which he may have fed to the fur farm's omnivorous raccoon dogs (ranched for their gray fur with raccoon-like markings). According to breeders, a female fox should only nurse a few pups at one time, to ensure all grow thick, healthy coats; using Balbina as a wet nurse for the extra pups struck him as an ideal if somewhat impish solution. "The first day was always the hardest for her," Antonina noted, "she could swear that she gave birth to kittens, but on the second day she knew it was only her imagination."

Understandably confused by their odd scent and snarls, the cat discovered the baby foxes had ravenous appetites, and after lots of licking and feeding they finally began to smell like her, though her repeated attempts to school them in the feline arts mainly failed. Meowing around them in "a quite distinguished tone of voice. . .to teach them how normal cats should speak," she never did persuade them to meow back, and their loud barking constantly startled her. "In her cat's heart, she was ashamed that they barked," Antonina mused, adding that the offspring were loudmouths with "high tempers." But they did master an agile cat-leap onto tables, cabinets, and tall bookcases, and villa-ites often found a baby fox, curled up like a Bavarian soup tureen, napping atop the piano or a chest of drawers.

Favoring live food, Balbina hunted outside each day to feed her brood, diligently dragging home birds, rabbits, meadow mice, and rats, though, as she soon discovered, she needed to hunt nonstop to still their lidless hunger. Outside, she led the way—a small, thin tabby followed by offspring three times her size with long snouts and fluffy black tails ending in white flowers. She taught them how to stalk prey while crouching low like a sphinx, how to pounce on game, and if one strayed, she meowed harshly until the young fox dutifully trotted back to the fold. Whenever the fox pups spied a chicken, they stalked it, crawling fast on their bellies, then pouncing with sharp teeth to rip it apart, snarling as they fed, while Balbina kept her distance and watched.

After "giving birth" to several broods of baby foxes, tiring and confusing as that was, Balbina finally got used to their alien ways, and they became half-cat, she half-vixen. Praising the cat's good-citizenry of never attacking housemates, Antonina wrote: "It's as if she has her own moral code." She spared Fox Man's parakeets, even when he released them from their cage; Wicek the rabbit didn't tempt her, nor did Kuba the chick; she didn't bother hunting the invading mouse or two; and if a stray bird flew into the house (a bad omen), she'd eye it lazily. But one new arrival did rekindle Balbina's feral instincts.

In the spring, a neighbor brought a strange orphan for Ryś's royal zoo—a paunchy baby muskrat with glossy brown fur, yellow-beige belly, long scaly tail, and tiny black eyes. Webbed front paws with fingers help muskrats build lodges, hold food, or dig burrows; when they swim, fringed hind feet make strong canoe-paddle sweeps. Oddest of all, perhaps, four sharp chisel-like front teeth protrude beyond the cheeks and lips, so that a muskrat can eat stems and roots, bulrushes and cattails while underwater, without opening its mouth.

Antonina found the creature fascinating and gave it a large cage on the porch, adding a glass developing tray from an old darkroom as wading pool, since muskrats are native-born swimmers. Ryś named it Szczurcio (Little Rat), and soon it learned its name and adapted to life in the three-ring villa, spending its days sleeping, eating, or wallowing. Wild muskrats don't tame easily, but in a few weeks Szczurcio let Ryś open the cage, carry him around, and pet or scratch his fur. While Szczurcio slept, Balbina would circle the cage like a mountain lion, searching for a way in. Awake, he tormented her by playing in the little tub incessantly and splashing her with water, which she hated. No one knew why the muskrat tempted Balbina so, but whoever fed Szczurcio or cleaned his cage had to lock the door afterward with small twists of wire.

Antonina enjoyed watching the muskrat's "exquisite toilette"—each morning, Szczurcio would dunk his face in the pan of water and snort heartily, blow air out his nose, then splash his face with wet paws like a man preparing to shave, and wash for a long time. After that he would climb into the tub and stretch out on his belly, turn onto his back, and roll over several times. Finally he left the bathtub and shook his fur like a dog, splashing mightily. Strangely enough, he often climbed the wall of the cage and sat on the perch like the cage's previous occupant, Koko the cockatoo. There, using his fingers, he would carefully comb water through his fur. Visitors found it a little odd to see a muskrat perching and preening like a bird, but the villa held a bizarre crew even at the quietest times, and he was Ryś's new favorite pet. After his morning ablutions, Szczurcio would eat a carrot, potato, dandelions, bread, or grain, though he no doubt craved the branches, bark, and marsh weeds on which wild muskrats thrive.

When he outgrew the little tub of water, Antonina replaced it with a giant jar Jan had once used in a cockroach study. Szczurcio leapt into the jar when it arrived and splashed with such abandon that Antonina moved his cage into the kitchen, where the floor was ceramic tile and fresh water lay closer to hand.