The Zookeeper’s Wife (5 page)

Watching from the front porch, Antonina had a good view across the grounds to where Polish soldiers gathered beside a well, with several zoo workers crowding around them, one crying, the others grim and silent.

"How many animals have they already killed?" she asked herself.

Events were unfolding without time to protest or grieve, and the surviving animals needed help, so she and Jan joined the keepers in feeding, doctoring, and calming animals as best they could.

"At least humans can pack their essentials, keep moving, keep improvising," Antonina thought. "If Germany occupies Poland, what will become of the delicate life-form of the zoo?. . .The zoo animals are in a much worse situation than we are," she lamented, "because they're totally dependent on us. Moving the zoo to a different location is unimaginable; it's too complex an organism." Even if war should erupt and end fast, the aftermath would be costly, she told herself. Where would they find food and money to keep the zoo afloat? Trying not to picture the worst scenario, she and Jan nonetheless bought extra supplies of hay, barley, dried fruits, flour, dried bread, coal, and wood.

On September 7, a Polish officer knocked at the front door and formally ordered all able-bodied men to join the army fighting on a northwestern front—which included forty-two-year-old Jan—and all civilians to vacate the zoo at once. Antonina packed quickly and traveled with Ryś back across the river, this time to stay with her sister-in-law in the west part of the city, in a fourth-floor apartment at No. 3 Kapucyńska Street.

A
T NIGHT, IN THE SMALL FLAT ON KAPUCYŃSKA STREET, SHE
learned a new noise: the anvil blows of German artillery. Somewhere else, women her age were slinking into nightclubs and dancing to the music of Glenn Miller, bouncy tunes with names like "String of Pearls" and "Little Brown Jug." Others were dancing to the newly invented jukebox at roadside joints. Couples were hiring babysitters and going to the cinema to see 1939's new releases: Greta Garbo in
Ninotchka
, Jean Renoir's
The Rules of the Game
, Judy Garland in
The Wizard of Oz
. Families were driving through the countryside to view the fall leaves and eat apple cake and corn fritters at harvest festivals. For many Poles, life had become residue, what remains after evaporation drains the juice from the original. During occupation, everyone lost the many seasonings of daily life, trapped in a reality where only the basics mattered and those bled most of one's energy, time, money, and thoughts.

Like other animal mothers, she grew desperate to find a safe hiding place for her young, "but unlike them," she wrote in her diary, "I can't carry Ryś in my jaws to a safe nest." Nor could she remain in her sister-in-law's fourth-floor apartment—"What if the building collapses and we can't escape?" Maybe it was best, she decided, to resettle downstairs, where a small store sold lampshades—that is, if she could persuade the owners to take her in.

Gathering up Ryś, she climbed down the four flights of dark stairs and knocked on a door which opened to reveal two elderly women, Mrs. Caderska and Mrs. Stokowska.

"Come in, come in." They glanced around the hallway after her and quickly fastened the door.

A strange new continent, half coral reef, half planetarium, veered into view as she entered a cluttered shop redolent with the odors of fabric, glue, paint, sweat, and cooking oatmeal. A bazaar of lampshades hung from the ceiling, nested together in ziggurats or huddled like exotic kites. Wooden shelves held strudel-like bolts of fabric, brass frames, hand tools, screws, rivets, and gleaming trays of finials separated by substance: glass, plastic, wood, metal. In such shops of the era, women sewed new fabric shades by hand, repaired old shades, and sold some made by others.

As Antonina's eyes traveled the room, she would have seen fixtures popular during the 1930s, a time when Baltic decor ran from Victorian to Art Deco and modernist, and included shades such as these: tulip-shaped rose silk decorated with chrysanthemum brocade; green chiffon with lace inset panels of white sateen; geometrically shaped pleated ivory; bright yellow panels in the shape of Napoleon's hat; eight-sided perforated metal with faceted faux jewels inserted around the skirt; dark amber mica crowning a plaster globe embossed with Art Nouveau archers pursuing a stag; a dome of orange-red glass bumpy as gooseflesh, skirted with crystal pendants, below which hung a brass gondola embossed with ivy scrolling. That fashionable red glass, known as
gorge-de-pigeon
, and often used in European wine goblets in Antonina's time, shone sour-cherry red when dark, and when lit, cast a glow the color of freshly peeled blood oranges. It was dyed with pigeon blood, an elixir also used to grade high-quality rubies (with the best stones resembling the freshest blood).

Ryś drew her attention to the far side of the room where, to her surprise, disheveled women and children from the neighborhood sat hedged in by shades.

"Dzień dobry, dzień dobry, dzień dobry,"
Antonina greeted each woman in turn.

Something about the cozy atmosphere of the lampshade store drew the displaced and bone-chilled to this shop run by grandmotherly ladies willing to share their pantry, coal, and bedding. As Antonina noted,

Antonina marveled as their wrinkled hands passed out food (mainly oatmeal), sweets, a postcard album, and little games. Every night when people chose their spot to sleep, she lay a mattress under a sturdy doorframe and sheltered Ryś with her body, snatching sleep as though falling down a well, as her past grew more idyllic and floated farther away. She had had so many plans for the coming year; now she wondered if she and Ryś would survive the night, if she'd live to see Jan again, if her son would celebrate another birthday. "Every day of our life was full of thoughts of the horrible present, and even our own death," she wrote in her memoirs, adding:

When Britain and France declared war on Germany, Poles rejoiced and radio stations played the French and British national anthems endlessly for days, but mid-September brought no relief from the relentless bombing and heavy artillery. "Living in a city under siege," Antonina wrote disbelievingly in her memoirs, a city full of whistling bombs, jarring explosions, the dry thunder of collapse, and hungry people. First routine comforts like water and gas disappeared, then radio and newspapers. Whoever dared the streets only did so at a run, and people risked their lives to stand in line for a little horsemeat or bread. For three weeks she heard shells zinging over rooftops by day and bombs pounding on walls of darkness at night. Chilling whistles preceded horrible booms, and Antonina found herself listening for each whistle to end, fearing the worst, then letting her breath out when she heard someone else's life exploding. Without trying, she gauged the distance and felt relief that she wasn't the bomb's target, then almost at once came the next whistle, the next blast.

On the rare occasions she ventured out, she entered a film-like war, with yellow smoke, pyramids of rubble, jagged stone cliffs where buildings once stood, wind-chased letters and medicine vials, wounded people, and dead horses with oddly angled legs. But nothing more unreal than this: hovering overhead, what looked at first like snow but didn't move like snowflakes, something delicately rising and falling without landing. Eerier than a blizzard, a bizarre soft cloud of down feathers from the city's pillows and comforters gently swirled above the buildings. Once, long ago, a Polish king repelled invading Turks by attaching large feathered hoops to each soldier's back. As they galloped into battle, the wind coursed through the false wings with a loud tornadic whirring that spooked the enemy's horses, which dug in their hooves and refused to advance. For many Warsawians, this feather storm may have conjured up the slaughter of those knights, the city's guardian angels.

One day, after a live shell plunged into her building and stuck in the fourth-floor ceiling, she waited for an explosion that never came. That night, while bombs sprayed smoke ropes across the sky, she moved Ryś to the basement of a nearby church. Then, "in the strangled silence of the morning," she moved Rhyś back again to the lampshade store. "I'm just like our lioness," she told the others, "fearfully moving my cub from one side of the cage to the other."

No news came of Jan, and the worry allowed her little sleep, but she told herself that she would fail him if she didn't save the zoo's remaining animals. Were they even alive, she wondered, and could the teenage boys left in charge really look after them? There seemed no choice: though queasy from fear, she left Ryś with her sister-in-law and forced herself to cross the river amid gunfire and shells. "This is how a hunted animal feels," she thought, caught in the melee, "not like a heroine, just madly driven to get home safely at any cost." She remembered the death of Jaś and the big cats, shot point-blank by Polish soldiers. Visions of their last moments tortured her, and perhaps a fright harder to dispel: What if they turned out to be the lucky ones?

N
AZI BOMBERS ATTACKED WARSAW IN 1150 SORTIES, DEVASTATING
the zoo, which happened to lie near antiaircraft guns. On that clear day, the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart. Wooden buildings collapsed, sucked down by heat. Glass and metal shards mutilated skin, feathers, hooves, and scales indiscriminately as wounded zebras ran, ribboned with blood, terrified howler monkeys and orangutans dashed caterwauling into the trees and bushes, snakes slithered loose, and crocodiles pushed onto their toes and trotted at speed. Bullets ripped open the aviary nets and parrots spiraled upward like Aztec gods and plummeted straight down, other tropicals hid in the shrubs and trees or tried to fly with singed wings. Some animals, hiding in their cages and basins, became engulfed by rolling waves of flame. Two giraffes lay dead on the ground, legs twisted, shockingly horizontal. The clotted air hurt to breathe and stank of burning wood, straw, and flesh. The monkeys and birds, screeching infernally, created an otherworldly chorus backed by a crackling timpani of bullets and bomb blasts. Echoing around the zoo, the tumult surely sounded like ten thousand Furies scratching up from hell to unhinge the world.

Antonina and a handful of keepers ran through the grounds, trying to rescue some animals and release others, while dodging injury themselves. Running from one cage to the next, she also worried about her husband, fighting at the front, "a brave man, a man of conscience; if even innocent animals aren't safe, what hope has he?" And when he returned, what would he find? Then another thought collided: Where was Kasia, the mother elephant, one of their favorites? At last she arrived at Kasia's enclosure, only to discover it leveled and her gone (already killed by a shell, Antonina would later learn), but she could hear two-year-old baby Tuzinka trumpeting in the distance. Many monkeys had died in a pavilion fire or were shot, and others hooted wildly as they scampered through the shrubs and trees.

Miraculously, some animals survived at the zoo and many escaped across the bridge, entering Old Town while the capital burned. People brave enough to stand by their windows, or unlucky enough to be outside, watched a biblical hallucination unfolding as the zoo emptied into Warsaw's streets. Seals waddled along the banks of the Vistula, camels and llamas wandered down alleyways, hooves skidding on cobblestone, ostriches and antelope trotted beside foxes and wolves, anteaters called out
hatchee, hatchee
as they scuttled over bricks. Locals saw blurs of fur and hide bolting past factories and apartment houses, racing to outlying fields of oats, buckwheat, and flax, scrambling into creeks, hiding in stairwells and sheds. Submerged in their wallows, the hippos, otters, and beavers survived. Somehow the bears, bison, Przywalski horses, camels, zebras, lynxes, peacocks and other birds, monkeys, and reptiles survived, too.

Antonina wrote of stopping a young soldier near the villa and asking: "Have you seen a large badger?"

He said: "Some badger banged and scratched on the villa door for a long time, but when we didn't let it in, it disappeared through the bushes."

"Poor Badger," she lamented as she pictured the family pet's frightened appeals at the door. After a moment, "I hope he managed to escape" clouded her mind, the heat and smoke resumed, her legs returned, and she ran to check on the bristlemaned horses from Mongolia. The other horses and donkeys—including her son's pony, Figlarz (Prankster)—lay dead in the streets, but somehow the rare Przywalski horses trembled upright in their pasture.

Antonia finally left the zoo and crossed Praski Park, between rows of linden trees haloed in fire, and headed back to the lampshade store downtown where she and her son sheltered. Blurred and drained, she tried to describe the plumes of smoke, the uprooted trees and grass, the blood-splattered buildings and carcasses. Then, when she felt a little calmer, she made her way to a stone building at No. 1 Miodowa Street and climbed the stairs to a small office crammed with agitated people and cascading piles of documents, one of the Resistance's secret lairs, where she met an old friend, Adam Englert.

"Any news?"

"Apparently, our army is out of ammunition and supplies, and discussing official surrender," he said bleakly.

In her memoirs, she wrote that she heard him speak, but his words floated away from her; it was as if her brain, already choked by the day's horrors, had issued a
non serviam
and refused to absorb any more.

Sitting down heavily on a couch, she felt glued in place. Until this moment, she hadn't let herself believe that her country might really lose its independence. Again. If occupation wasn't new, neither was ousting the enemy, but it had been twenty-one years since the last war with Germany, most of Antonina's life, and the prospect stunned her. For ten years, the zoo had seemed a principality all its own, protected by the moat of the Vistula, with daily life a jigsaw-puzzle fit for her avid sensibility.

Back at the lampshade store, she told everyone the sorry news she'd heard from Englert, which didn't agree with Polish Mayor Starzyński's upbeat radio broadcasts, in which he denounced the Nazis, offered hope, and rallied everyone to defend the capital at all costs.

"While speaking to you now," he had said on one occasion, "I can see it through the window in its greatness and glory, shrouded in smoke, red in flames: glorious, invincible, fighting Warsaw!"

Puzzled, they wondered whom to believe: the mayor in a public speech or members of the Resistance. Surely the latter. In another broadcast, Starzyński had used the past tense at one point: "I wanted Warsaw to be a great city. I believed that it would be great. My associates and I drew up plans and made sketches of a great Warsaw of the future." In light of Starzyński's tense (was it a slip?), Antonina's news rang truer and everyone's mood fell, as the owners edged among the tables, switching on small lamps.

Several days later, after Warsaw's surrender, Antonina sat at a table with the others, hungry but too depressed to eat the little food in front of her, when she heard a crisp knock at the door. No one visited anymore, no one bought lamps or fixed broken lampshades. Anxiously, the owners opened the door a crack, and to her astonishment there stood Jan, looking exhausted and relieved. Hugs and kisses followed, then he sat down at the table and told them his story.

When Jan and his friends had left Warsaw weeks before, on the evening of September 7, they followed the river and walked toward Brześć on Bug, as part of a phantom army, looking for a unit to join. Not finding one, they finally split up, and on September 25, Jan overnighted in Mienie, at a farm whose owners he knew from summers at the Rejentówka cottage. The following morning, the housekeeper woke him to ask if he'd translate for her with a German officer who had arrived during the night. Any encounter with a Nazi was dangerous, and as Jan dressed he tried to prepare himself for trouble and rehearse possible scenarios. Taking the stairs with the feigned confidence of a legitimate houseguest, he kept his eye on the Wehrmacht officer standing in the living room, discussing provisions with the owners. As the Nazi turned to face him, disbelief washed over Jan, and he wondered if he were seeing something churned up by his jumpy heart. But in the same instant the officer's face flashed surprise and he smiled. There stood Dr. Müller, a fellow member of the International Association of Zoo Directors, who directed the zoo at Królewiec (in eastern Prussia, and known as Königsberg before the war).

Laughing, Müller said: "I know only one Pole well,
you
, my friend, and I meet you here! How did this happen?" A supply officer, Müller had come to the farm seeking food for his troops. When he told Jan of Warsaw's catastrophe and the zoo's, Jan wanted to return immediately, and Müller offered to help, but warned that Polish men of Jan's age weren't safe on the roads. The best plan, he suggested, was to arrest Jan and drive to Warsaw with him as a prisoner; and despite their past cordiality, Jan worried if Müller could be trusted. But, true to his word, Müller returned when Warsaw surrendered and drove Jan as deep into the city as he dared. Hoping to meet in happier days, they said goodbye, and Jan slid through the ruins of the city, wondering if he'd ever reach Kapucyńska Street, Antonina, and Ryś—if they were even alive. At last he found the four-story building, and when his first knock brought no response, he "nearly toppled from dread."

In the following days, Warsaw's fierce quiet grew unnerving, so Jan and Antonina decided to steal across the bridge to the zoo, this time with no shells or snipers peppering them. Several of the old keepers had also returned and taken up their usual chores as a sort of ghost brigade working in a half-massacred village where the guardhouse and quarters now were charred hills, and the workshops, elephant house, whole habitats and enclosures had also burned or collapsed. Strangest of all, many cage bars had melted into grotesque shapes that looked like the work of avant-garde welders. Jan and Antonina walked to the villa, shocked by a scene that looked even more Surrealist than before. Although the villa had survived, its tall windows were shattered by bomb blasts, and fine particles of glass lay everywhere like sand, mixed with crushed straw from when Polish soldiers had sheltered there during air raids. Everything needed fixing, especially the windows, and because panes of glass were a rare commodity, they decided to use plywood for a while, though it meant sealing themselves off even more.

But first they began a quest for wounded animals, combing the grounds, searching in even unlikely hiding places; a cheer rose whenever someone found an animal, trapped beneath debris, confused and hungry but alive. According to Antonina, many of the army's dead horses lay with swollen bellies, grinning teeth, eyes frozen wide open in fear. All the corpses needed to be buried or butchered (with antelope, deer, and horse meat distributed to the city's hungry), not something Jan and Antonina could face, so they left it to the keepers and at nightfall, exhausted and depressed, the villa uninhabitable, they returned to Kapucyńska Street.

The next day General Rommel spoke on the radio, urging Warsaw's soldiers and citizens to accept surrender with dignity and stay calm while the German army marched into their fallen city. His broadcast ended with: "I rely on the population of Warsaw, which stood bravely in its defense and displayed its profound patriotism, to accept the entry of the German forces quietly, honorably, and calmly."

"Maybe it's good news," Antonina told herself, "maybe it's peace at last and the chance to rebuild."

After a rainy morning, thick cloud banks shifted and a warm October sunlight began streaming through as German soldiers patrolled each neighborhood, filling the streets with the clop of heavy bootheels and gabble in a foreign tongue. Then different sounds filtered into the lampshade store, more sibilant and transparent: crowd voices of Polish men and women. Antonina saw "one large organism flowing slowly" downtown and people trickling out of buildings to join it.

"Where do you suppose they're heading?"

The radio told them where Hitler was preparing to review his troops, and she and Jan felt the same osmotic force tugging them outside. Everywhere Antonina looked lay destruction. In her jottings, she described "buildings guillotined by the war—their roofs gone, sitting in misshapen poses somewhere in nearby backyards. Other buildings looked sad, ripped up by bombs from top to basement." They reminded her of "people embarrassed by their wounds, looking for a way to cover the openings in their abdomens."

Next Antonina and Jan passed rain-soaked buildings missing their plaster, with exposed blood-red bricks steaming in the warm sunshine. Fires still burned, the entrails of homes still smoldered, filling the air with enough smoke to make eyes tear and throats tighten. Hypnotized, the swelling crowd flowed to the center of the city, and in archival films one can see them lining the main streets, down which conquering German soldiers march in a steady torrent of gunmetal-gray uniforms, their steps echoing like ropes walloping hardwood.

Jan turned to Antonina, who looked faint.

"I can't breathe," she said. "I feel like I'm drowning in a gray sea, like they're flooding the whole city, washing away our past and people, dashing everything from the face of the earth."

Jammed inside the crowd, they watched gleaming tanks and guns stream by, and ruddy-faced soldiers, some with stares Jan found so provocative that he had to turn away. Puppet theater, a popular art form in Poland, wasn't just for children but often grappled with satiric and political subjects, as it had in ancient Rome. Old films show what locals may have found ironic: a loud brass band heralding waves of glossy cavalry and strutting battalions, and Hitler reigning on a platform farther down the avenue, reviewing the troops with one hand held aloft like a puppeteer twitching invisible strings.

Delegates from Poland's main political parties were already meeting in the strong room of a savings bank to refine the Underground, which nearly began with success: explosives planted beneath Hitler's platform were supposed to blow him to crumbs, but at the last minute a German official moved the bomber to another spot and he couldn't light the fuse.

The city quickly spasmed into German hands, banks closed, salaries dried up. Antonina and Jan moved back to the villa, but stripped of money and supplies, they scavenged for food left by the Polish soldiers who had billeted there. The new German colony was ruled by Hitler's personal lawyer, Hans Frank, an early member of the Nazi Party and a leading jurist busy revising German laws according to Nazi philosophy, especially racist laws and those aimed at the Resistance. During his first month in office, Governor-General Frank declared that "any Jews leaving the district to which they have been confined" would be killed, as would "people who deliberately offer a hiding place to such Jews. . .. Instigators and helpers are subject to the same punishment as perpetrators; an attempted act will be punished in the same way as a completed act."