In her new book, The Zookeeper’s Wife, Diane Ackerman spins the kind of sensuous web we have come to expect from the author of such non-fiction works as A Natural History of the Senses. This time her subject is Antonina Zabinski, wife of the Warsaw Zoo director during the German occupation of Poland. This true tale begins as Antonina, her husband Jan and their young son watch Luftwaffe bombs rain down, killing and wounding terrified zoo animals. Shortly thereafter, Antonina and Jan receive a visit from Lutz Heck, a notorious Nazi and director of the Berlin Zoo. Heck loots the surviving animals for German zoos and then invites the SS to slaughter the remainder in a bloody New Year’s shooting-fest. That night, Antonina wonders in her diary, “How many humans will die like this in the coming months?”
Playing on Heck’s pride (and his prurient interest in the tall, blonde Antonina, who “looked like a Valkyrie at rest”), the Zabinskis persuade him to let them turn the zoo into a large pig farm to produce pork for German soldiers. Unbeknownst to the Nazis, the zoo is base of operations for the Polish Underground and Jan is one of its leaders. Under the pretense of collecting scraps for his pigs, Jan regularly visits the Warsaw Ghetto, smuggling food in and Jews out, some 300 in all, who are welcomed and fiercely protected by Antonina. Living together in the Zabinskis’ crowded villa, Jews and Christians cook, converse and hold musical evenings around the piano and, when necessary, hide in closets and abandoned animal habitats.
Ackerman’s book is more than an account of love and human dignity thriving amid danger. A naturalist, poet and granddaughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, she zeroes in on the Nazi obsession with bringing back extinct “Aryan” species such as tarpans and forest bison. Juxtaposed alongside Antonina’s heroic ability to keep evil at bay is the Nazis’ wild-eyed attempt to forcefully change the course of evolution—not only of humans but of animals as well.
—Nadine Epstein
How did a naturalist come to write about the Holocaust?
Long ago, I learned of the Bialowieza primeval forest that skirts the Polish border with Belarus. I heard that it was the home of some living fossils—ancient horses and bison. The horses, called tarpans, were beautiful, short and mouse-colored, with black stripes down their backs. They looked like the animals painted by cavemen 17,000 years ago, the magical animals one sees looming out of the darkness in the famous caves of Lascaux, France. I also heard that they had something to do with Nazi perversity. And although I didn’t get the chance to visit Poland then, I remained fascinated by the animals.
Years later you returned to the subject and traveled to the Bialowieza preserve in Poland. How did your trip lead you to Antonina?
The horses and bison there were actually look-alikes genetically re-created by Lutz Heck. I wanted to know more about how they got there. And, as it turns out, Jan was the world’s expert on bison, and Antonina used to adopt orphan animals from Bialowieza and hand-raise them in their home.
What exactly did the Nazis hope to gain by recreating extinct species?
Nazism was born of a turn-of-the-century mystical cult. They believed that their ancestors were part of a strong, heroic race that lived in Atlantis, then spread to various parts of the world. They wanted to gather together the people who showed most physical characteristics of the ancient people so they could genetically produce the original heroic Aryans. They essentially tried to do the same thing with the tarpans and the forest bison and some other animals. So for decades leading up to World War II, German zoologists pursued the fantastic goal of resurrecting extinct species.
Did the Nazis actually manage to recreate the tarpans and bison?
Genetic engineering wouldn’t emerge until the 1970s, but Lutz Heck decided to use a traditional method of breeding animals to emphasize specific traits. Heck’s reasoning went like this: An animal inherits 50 percent of its genes from each parent, and even an extinct animal’s genes remain in the living gene pool. So if Heck concentrated the genes by breeding animals that most resembled their extinct antecedents, in time he would arrive at their purebred ancestor. The war gave him an excuse to loot East European zoos for the best specimens to mate with several wild strains.
Why was Heck so interested in Poland?
The animals Lutz was after were native to Poland, and Bialowieza was in Poland. Heck stole the best specimens, but before the war ended, he shipped many of his backbred, look-alike tarpans to idyllic Bialowieza, where he pictured Hitler’s inner circle hunting in the new millennium.
What was it that made you want to tell Antonina’s story?
What first drew me to Antonina was her exceptional empathy and alert senses. She had a mysterious gift for calming ornery animals and people, including German soldiers. She considered animals alter-egos or cousins, and in her children’s books she often writes from the perspective of a mother lynx or other animal. I felt very close to her even though we differ in many ways. She was a Catholic, a Pole born in Russia, orphaned as a child, tall and blonde, a gifted pianist. But she was also a naturalist who observed the world in great sensory detail. Despite unbelievable evidence to the contrary, she believed in the basic goodness of people. Maybe the most remarkable thing about her was her determination to include play and wonder and the arts and even innocence in a household where everyone was terrified of the dangers outside. That takes a special kind of courage, which is rarely celebrated in wartime.
Is the story of the Zabinskis well known?
I don’t think a lot of people knew what was happening at the zoo. After the war, Antonina and Jan were honored in Israel as Righteous Gentiles. When the Polish translation of my book comes out in 2008, I think it will surprise many Poles.
Your book shows the Poles of that era in a very positive light, contrary to a common belief that most of them were anti-Semites.
I know that there was appalling anti-Semitism in Poland at that time, but there were also many thousands of Christians, in Warsaw alone, who helped Jews escape. My book only focuses on two remarkable Christian rescuers, the people and organizations that helped them, and the people that they saved. They shouldn’t be overlooked.
