The Zookeeper’s Wife

  "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."

  "In Warsaw the Ghetto was no longer anything but an organized form of death" (106): Michael Mazor, The Vanished City: Everyday Life in the Warsaw Ghetto, trans. David Jacobson (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1993), p. 19.

  "mere mention of a threat" (106): Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, pp. 46–47.

  Chapter 14

  "just to facilitate your research, [and] to let you know what we think of you" (122): After Karski, p. 267, quoted in Davies, Rising '44,p. 185.

  Chapter 15

  president of Warsaw (126): The president of Warsaw is equivalent to the mayor of a city.

  any excuse to visit friends "to keep up their spirits and smuggle in food and news" (128): See Rostal, "In the Cage of the Pheasant."

  "a period of political repression, censorship, and infringement on personal liberties" (130): Milton Cross, Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music, Doubleday, 1962, pp. 560–61.

  the Warsaw Ghetto's Labor Bureau (131): Workers deported to Germany by the Arbeitsamt had to wear a purple P on their sleeve, and were denied church, cultural pursuits, and public transportation. Sex with a German was punishable by death. (Davies, Rising '44, p. 106)

  "when he saw the beautiful beetles and butterflies, he forgot all about the world" (135): Polacy z pomocŻydom (Poles Helping Poles), 2nd edition (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1969), pp. 39–45.

  "The creation, existence, and destruction of the Ghetto" (136): Philip Boehm, introduction to Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, p. 3.

  "Frankenstein was a short, bull-legged, creepy-looking man" (137): Jack Klajman with Ed Klajman, Out of the Ghetto (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000), pp. 21, 22.

  Chapter 16

  "I wanted to tell Jan—'Let's run.'" (150): Lonia Tenenbaum, in Polacy z pomocŻydom (Poles Helping Poles).

  about half of the full collection, which Jan told a journalist ran to four hundred boxes (151): Jan E. Rostal, "In the Cage of the Pheasant," Nowiny i Courier, October 1, 1965.

  Chapter 17

  "doctrine of blood and soil" (153): Karl Friederichs quoted in Deichmann, Biologists Under Hitler, p. 160.

  Epidemics Resulting from Wars (154): Friedrich Prinzing, Epidemics Resulting from Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916).

  "Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing" (154): speech to SS officers, April 24, 1943, Kharkov, Ukraine; reprinted in United States Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), vol. 4, pp. 572–78, 574.

  he was "seized by the wish not to have a face" (155): Hannah Krall, Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (New York: Henry Holt, 1977), p. 15.

  the slogan "jews—lice—typhus" (155): report by Ludwig Fischer quoted in Gutman, Resistance, p. 89.

  "when the three horsemen of the Apocalypse" (156): Stefan Ernest quoted in Grynberg, Words to Outlive Us, p. 45.

  "When you eat and drink" (157): Alexander Susskind, quoted in Daniel C. Matt, ed., The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995; translated from Dov Baer, Maggid Devarav l'Ya'aquov), p. 71.

  "One hears the [Teaching's] voice" (159): Nehemia Polen, The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 163.

  one Ghetto inhabitant (159): Marek Edelman in Krall, Shielding the Flame. After the war Edelman became a cardiologist, commenting that "when one knows death so well, one has more responsibility for life."

  Chapter 18

  "The personality of animals will develop" (165): postwar interview by Danka Harnish, in Israel, translated from Hebrew by Haviva Lapkin of the Lorraine and Jack N. Friedman Commission for Jewish Education, West Palm Beach, Florida, April 2006.

  "Consisting of 28,000 Jews" (173): Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 5.

  "Tenants visited each other" (173): Alicja Kaczyńska, Obok piekła (Gdansk: Marpress, 1993), p. 48; quoted in Paulsson, Secret City, pp. 109–10.

  Chapter 20

  "Uncle is planning (God preserve us) to hold a wedding" (181): from Ruta Sakowska, ed., Listy o Zagladzie (Letters About Extermination) (Warsaw: PWN, 1997). Jenny Robertson, Don't Go to Uncle's Wedding: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto (London: Azure, 2000).

  "district of the damned" (183): Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. x.

  "adhesions, aches, ruptures, scars" (184): Ghetto Diary, p. 9.

  "Thank you, Merciful Lord" (184): Ghetto Diary, p. 8.

  "When I collect the dishes myself" (184): Ghetto Diary, p.107.

  whose pure souls make possible the world's salvation (186): Betty Jean Lifton, introduction to Ghetto Diary, p. vii.

  Chapter 21

  "The people of Zegota were not just idealists but activists, and activists are, by nature, people who know people" (188): Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski, Zegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland (Montreal, Canada: Price-Patterson Ltd., 1994).

  70,000–90,000 people (189): from Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 163.

  a giant jar Jan had once used in a cockroach study (194): Jan Żabíński, "The Growth of Blackbeetles and of Cockroaches on Artificial and on Incomplete Diets," Journal of Experimental Biology (Company of Biologists, Cambridge, UK), vol. 6(1929): pp. 360–86.

  Chapter 23

  Surprisingly, sketchy telephone service continued (202): Emanuel Ringelblu
m, Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War (New York: Howard Festig, 1976), pp. 89–91.

  "a husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203): Michael Wex, Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93.

  Yiddish's famous curses. . ."May you piss green worms!" (209): Wex, Born to Kvetch, pp. 117, 132, 137.