The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

  Antonina wrote that she felt a wrenching inside, a tug-of-war between compassion and self-interest, and a kind of embarrassment that she could do so little for them without endangering herself and her own family. Meanwhile, where would the Kenigsweins sleep? For several days, they stayed in the Lions House, then Regina and the children moved through the Pheasant House tunnel into the villa. Antonina found a large warm sheepskin coat and a pair of boots for Samuel, and before nightfall, he stole into the wooden Pheasant House and they locked him inside. The next morning, before the housekeeper arrived, Regina and her children quietly moved upstairs to a bedroom on the second floor, where they would stay for two months. When Antonina praised the children for making so little fuss or noise, she learned that a secret Ghetto school had taught them games to play in small areas, the quietest ways to move, and how to lie down fluently in as few bends as possible.

  The fox farm employed many strangers; unknown boys sometimes stopped by the kitchen, looking for handouts; policemen often visited, too. What's more, the housekeeper couldn't really be trusted, nor could the Żabíńskis tell her why their appetites suddenly swelled. Because they couldn't steal food from the kitchen without her noticing, they went to her looking ravenous, empty plate in hand, asking for seconds, thirds, fourths. As a servant, it wasn't her place to comment on their robust change in eating habits, but now and then Antonina heard her muttering: "I can't believe how much they eat! I've never seen anything like it!" When she wasn't looking, Ryś sneaked plates and bowls upstairs and downstairs, one after the other. Sometimes Jan or Antonina would tell him: "The lions need to be fed," or the "pheasants," "peacocks," and so on, and Ryś would carry food to the caged Guests. But to play it safe, Antonina fired the housekeeper, replacing her with a woman named Franciszka, the sister-in-law of an old friend of Jan's, someone they trusted, though even she never knew all the planes of existence and resistance in the three-dimensional chess game of villa life.

  CHAPTER 25

  1943

  IN THE MIDDLE OF DECEMBER, JAN SECURED FRESH LODGINGS for the Kenigsweins with engineer and former career officer Feliks Cywiński, who had fought beside Jan during World War I and now worked closely with him in the Underground. Married with two children, Cywiński hid many people in his apartments at 19 and 21 Sapieżyńska Street, at his sister's flat, his parents', and in the upholstery shop of a friend (who closed it for a while, supposedly for renovations). There, he fed as many as seventeen people, providing separate pots and dishes for those who kept kosher, and bringing in medicine and an Underground doctor when necessary. A secret "Coordinating Committee of Democratic and Socialist Doctors," set up in 1940, included over fifty physicians who cared for the sick or wounded, and they also published their own monthly periodical, in which they debunked Nazi propaganda about racial purity and disease. Once a month, Cywiński would move the Jews hiding with him to the zoo or some other safe house, so that he could invite neighbors and friends to his home, proving he'd nothing to hide. When his money ran out, Feliks went into debt, sold his own home, and used the profits to rent and furnish four more apartments for hiding Jews. Like the Kenigsweins, his charges often arrived from the zoo and stayed only a day or two, while documents were procured and other homes found.

  Moving the Kenigsweins created a new problem for Antonina and Jan—how to transfer so many people without attracting notice. Antonina decided to lessen the risk by bleaching their black hair blond, since many Germans and Poles, too, assumed all blonds came from Scandinavian stock and all Jews had dark hair. This fallacy endured, even when jokes circulated about Hitler's non-Aryan mustache and dark hair. From photographs and a comment of Jan's, one learns that, at some point, Antonina had bleached her own brown hair, but that only meant lightening it several shades, not transforming it from shadow-black to citrine, and so she consulted a barber friend who gave her bottles of pure peroxide and a recipe. She needed a recipe because, as Emanuel Ringelblum emphasized: "In practice, it turned out that platinum blondes gave rise to more suspicion than brunettes."

  One day, she led the Kenigsweins into the upstairs bathroom, locked the door, and stationed Ryś outside as guard. Using cotton balls soaked in diluted peroxide, she rubbed down one head after another, creating scalded red scalps and blistered fingers, but still their hair wouldn't yield a blond, even if she strengthened the caustic solution. When she opened the door at last, her victims emerged with brassy red hair.

  "Mom, what did you do?" Ryś asked in alarm. "They all look like squirrels!" From that day on, "Squirrels" became the Kenigsweins' code name.

  At night, Jan escorted the Kenigsweins through the basement tunnel to the Pheasant House and downtown to Feliks's home on Sapieżyńska Street. There, in times of danger, refugees would climb into a bunker whose entrance was a camouflaged opening in the bathroom, tucked in a recess behind the bathtub. Feliks didn't know that Regina was pregnant until she went into labor one day, and then, since it was already after curfew, too late to call a doctor, the midwifery fell to him. "My happiest moment," he said in a postwar interview, "was when a child was born literally into my hands. This was during the final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. The atmosphere in the town was very tense and the terror was raging at its ugliest, as German gendarmes and blackmailers penetrated the terrain and searched it thoroughly looking for escaping Jews." Feliks cared for them until the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, when Samuel Kenigswein, a World World I veteran, spearheaded a battalion of his own.

  Elsewhere in the city, other rescuers were also resorting to cosmetic tricks to disguise Jews, with some salons specializing in more elaborate ruses. For instance, Dr. Mada Walter and her husband opened a remarkable Institut de Beaute on Marszałkowska Street, where Mrs. Walter gave Jewish women lessons on how to appear Aryan and not attract notice.

  "There I saw a dozen more or less undressed ladies," Władysław Smólski, a Polish author and member of Zegota, testified after the war. "Some were seated under all kinds of lamps, others, with cream upon their faces, were being subjected to mysterious treatments. As soon as Mrs. Walter came, they all assembled around her, brought up chairs, and sat down, opening books. Then began their catechism instruction!"

  Although the women bore Semitic features, each one wore a cross or medallion around her neck, and Mrs. Walter taught them key Christian prayers and how to behave invisibly in church and at ceremonial events. They learned ways to cook and serve pork, prepare traditional Polish dishes, and order the moonshine vodka called bimber. Typically, when the police stopped Jews on the street, they checked the men for circumcision and ordered the women to recite the Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary.

  The smallest detail could betray them, so Mrs. Walter ran a kind of charm school, the charm of nondetection, which required just the right blend of fashionable makeup, restrained gestures, and Polish folk customs. This meant resisting all Jewish expressions—such as asking "What street are you from?" instead of "What district are you from?" They paid special attention to the habitual and the commonplace—how they walked, gestured, acted in public—with men reminded to remove their hats in church (in temple they would have kept them on), and everyone taught to celebrate their own patron saint's day as well as those of friends and family.

  Hair belonged off the forehead, neatly reined in or swept up into more Aryan styles, while bangs, curls, or frizz might raise suspicion. Black hair required bleaching to dull its glitter, but shouldn't become implausibly pale. When it came to choosing clothes, Mrs. Walter advised: "Avoid red, yellow, green or even black. The best color is grey, or else a combination of several inconspicuous colors. You must avoid glasses of the shape that's now fashionable, because they emphasize the semitic features of your nose." And some outstanding semitic noses required "surgical intervention." Fortunately, she worked with Polish surgeons (such as the eminent Dr. Andrzej Trojanowski and his colleagues) who reshaped Jewish noses and operated on Jewish men to restore foreskins, a controversial and clandestine surgery with an ancient tradition.
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  Throughout history, "reskinning," as the Romans called it, had saved persecuted Jews from discovery, and the Bible reports the practice as early as 168 B.C., during the reign of Antiochus IV, when the Greco-Roman fashion of naked sports events and public bathing emerged in Judea. Jewish men hoping to disguise their lineage had only two choices: they could try to avoid scenes of nakedness, or they could redress their appearance by using a special weight, known as the Pondus Judaeus, to stretch the foreskin until it covered the glans. Stretching created small tears between the skin cells, and as new cells formed to bridge the gap, the foreskin lengthened. No doubt this took a while, hurt, and wasn't always easy to hide, though clothes of the era draped loosely. During World War II, the same effect could be achieved surgically, though, needless to say, medical literature of the Nazi era doesn't detail the procedure.

  In the circles within circles of Underground life, Jan surely knew the Walters; the bleach and recipe Antonina used may well have come from their salon. Mrs. Walter and her elderly husband hid five Jews at a time in their own home and offered "an endless chain" of people lessons in "good looks" at the Institut de Beaute throughout the war. In later years, Mrs. Walter wrote that "the accidental fact that not one of the casual inhabitants of our war-time nest fell victim to disaster gave rise to a superstitious legend which continually increased the influx of guests." In fact, she explained, her actions were a simple voodoo of compassion: "Suffering took hold of me like a magic spell abolishing all differences between friends and strangers."

  CHAPTER 26

  AS SPRING SIDLED CLOSER AND NATURE HOVERED BETWEEN seasons, the snow melted and a low green cityscape of garden plants arose during the day, but at night the land froze over again and moonlight glittered the walks into silver skating trails. Hibernating animals still curled up underground, waiting in suspense. The villa's people and animals sensed the lengthening light, and when a gust of air swept indoors, it carried the mossy sweet smell that rises from living soil. The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making and shedding—in short, the fuzzy, fizzy hoopla of life's ramshackle return.

  But spring floated outside the small rupture in time the war had gouged. For people attuned to nature and the changing seasons, especially for farmers or animal-keepers, the war snagged time on barbed wire, forced them to live by mere chronicity, instead of real time, the time of wheat, wolf, and otter.

  Confined to her bed's well-padded prison, Antonina rose occasionally to hobble the few painful steps onto her balcony, from which she had a wide view, and could even hear the powerful noise of ice cracking on the Vistula River, a tympani signaling winter's end. Being bedridden had slowed the world down, given her time to page through memories, and brought a new perspective to some things, while others lay beyond reach or evaded her view. Ryś spent more unsupervised time, but she reckoned him "more capable and levelheaded than any child his age should have to be."

  Older children, from youth groups aiding the Underground, had begun arriving unexpectedly, and neither Antonina nor Ryś knew who would be appearing when; though Jan had warning, he was often away at work when they floated in like clouds or just as suddenly vanished. They usually stayed in the Pheasant House for a night or two, then melted back into Warsaw's undergrowth, with Zbyszek, a boy high on the Gestapo's most-wanted list, lingering for weeks. It fell to Ryś, as the least conspicuous villa-ite, to deliver their meals.

  Antonina and Jan never spoke of the scouts' doings in front of Ryś, even if some appeared like sightings of rare animals, then mysteriously slipped away, and to her bafflement Ryś didn't seem to care much, despite his usual curiosity. Surely he'd fabricated some story about them? Wondering what, she asked him if he had any thoughts about the young visitors, any opinion about Zbyszek, for instance.

  "Oh, Mom," Ryś said in the long-suffering tone children reserve for benighted parents, "I know all about it! A man can naturally understand these things. I never asked you any questions because I could see that you and Zbyszek had secrets you didn't want to share with me. But I don't care about Zbyszek! I have my own friend now. Anyway, if you really want to know what I think of Zbyszek—I think he's a stupid boy!" And with that Ryś shot out of the room.

  Antonina wasn't surprised by his jealousy, which seemed only normal, but Ryś had become more secretive of late, she thought, and much less talkative. Realizing something had collared his attention, she wondered what he was up to. The only answer that rose to mind was his new friend, Jerzyk Topo, the son of a carpenter whose family had recently moved into a staff apartment on the zoo grounds. Antonina found Jerzyk polite and well behaved, a few years older than Ryś, handy with tools, a boy learning his father's trade. Ryś admired his woodworking skills, the two shared an interest in building things, and since they lived close they played together every day. From her second-story watchtower, Antonina sometimes glimpsed them building secret shapes and talking constantly, and she felt relieved that he'd found a new playmate.

  Then one day, after the boys had gone to school, Jerzyk's mother appeared at the villa and anxiously asked Antonina if they could talk in private. Antonina ushered her into her bedroom and closed the door. According to Antonina's account, Mrs. Topo then said:

  "The boys have no idea I'm here. Don't tell them! I don't really know how to begin. . .."

  Antonina began to worry—what had her son done?

  Then Mrs. Topo blurted out: "I was eavesdropping on them—I'm sure they didn't see me. And I know that's a terrible thing to do, but how could I help myself once I got wind of what they were planning? I had to learn what they were up to. So I was quiet and listened, and I was shocked! I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. When they left I didn't know what to do, and I decided I'd better come and talk to you. Maybe together we can figure something out!"

  Antonina found the news alarming. Could Mrs. Topo be overreacting to the boys' innocent capers? Hoping so, she said:

  "Your son is such a good boy. I'm sure he wouldn't do anything to hurt you. And Ryś is still so little. . .. Okay, I can watch him more closely. . .. But what exactly did our boys do?"

  "They didn't do anything wrong yet, but they're planning something big."

  Antonina wrote that "my heart fell into my feet" as Mrs. Topo explained that she'd overheard the boys pledging to oust the Germans, which they believed their patriotic duty, first by hiding a bomb in a tall haystack near the Germans' storehouse of weapons near the zoo fence.

  "And under Jerzyk's mattress," Mrs. Topo continued, "I found one of your towels, with big red letters on it that said 'Hitler kaput!' They want to hang this towel above the main gate of the zoo, because there are so many Germans coming here all the time and they're bound to see it! What are we going to do? Maybe your husband could talk to them and explain that they're much too young to fight, and if they go through with their plan they'll put us all in danger. . .. But what do you think we should do?"

  Antonina listened quietly, trying first to absorb, then analyze the disturbing news that she found both noble and foolish. She assumed Ryś had concocted the idea while eavesdropping on the scouts, who were staging similar acts of sabotage. By now, not drawing attention to the bustle at the zoo had become a fine art, like sleeping with dynamite. All they needed was the boys hanging up a literal red flag.

  She also wondered how she could have missed this plot of Ryś's, and misjudged his ability to understand the grown-up world of consequences, when she'd thought she could count on his absolute secrecy, and on her ability to gauge his maturity. Her anger at him and at herself quickly turned to sadness as she realized that

  instead of praising his bravery and initiative, and telling him how proud he made me, I had to punish him, and tell his father that he stole some explosives, and maybe even embarrass him in front of his friend. I knew Jan would be furious.
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  "Yes," she said to Mrs. Topo, "I will ask Jan to talk with the boys. Meanwhile, it is best to burn the towel."

  That evening, she overheard her menfolk, father and son, quietly talking in a formal, military way:

  "I hope you appreciate that I'm not treating you like a child, but like a soldier," Jan said, appealing to his son's natural wish to be taken seriously as a grown-up. "I am an officer in this house and your leader. In the military field of action, you must do only what I order, nothing on your own. If you want to continue having this kind of relationship with me, you have to swear that you won't do anything without my knowledge. The action you planned with Jerzyk falls into the category of 'anarchy,' and 'arbitrary'; and you should be punished for it—just like you would be in the regular army."

  But what punishment should a father in the role of a military leader impose on a small child in the role of a soldier? Risk isn't shaped the same in a child's eyes, nor can a child see as far downstream from an event, and punishment works only if both parties feel it to be fair, fairness being the gold standard of childhood.

  So he said: "Maybe you want to suggest how I should punish you?"

  Ryś considered it seriously. ". . .You can spank me," he finally offered.

  And presumably Jan did, because Antonina, in recording the scene in her diary, noted simply: "And, in this small way, our own private family Underground ceased to exist."

  CHAPTER 27

  IN SPRING OF 1943, ANTONINA ROSE FROM BED AT LAST, IN tune with hibernating marmots, bats, hedgehogs, skunks, and dormice. Before the war, she had loved the yammering zoo in springtime, with all its noisy come-ons, bugger off!s, and hallelujahs, especially at night, in the quiet city, when feral noises leapt from the zoo as from a giant jukebox. Animal time colliding with city time produced an offbeat rhythm she relished and often wrote of, as in this reverie in her children's book about lynxes, Rysie: