The Polish zookeepers who saved Jews during WWII
G-d bless them. Please read it all…
Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeepers’s Wife (W.W. Norton) is one of the most unusual accounts about the Holocaust ever to be published.
This relatively slim volume is a sensitively told story about two Polish Catholic zookeepers in Warsaw who saved Jews by concealing them in unused buildings and empty zoo cages.it sounds too surrealistic to be true, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.Ackerman is well equipped to tell this tale. She is a writer who has an affinity to the natural world, and in her capable hands, the courage of the zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski manifests itself eloquently.
Horrified by Nazi racism, this altruistic couple rescued more than 300 people, a blend of Jews and members of the Polish underground resistance movement.
They knew perfectly well that their activities endangered them. But throwing caution to the wind, the Zabinskis carried on defiantly under the noses of the German occupation force.
In an author’s note, Ackerman explains why they are a source of inspiration to her.
“Their story has fallen between the seams of his-tory, as radically compassionate acts sometimes do. But in war-time Poland, when even handing a thirsty Jew a cup of water was punishable by death, their heroism stands out as all the more startling.”
There was another reason Ackerman was drawn to the topic. Her maternal grandparents are from Poland.
Jan and Antonina met at Warsaw’s College of Agriculture. She had studied languages, drawing and painting, and he was a professional zoologist who shared her relish for both animals and animalistic art. They were married in 1931, two years after he was appointed director of the zoo.
Their lives were upended with Germany’s invasion Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. But the effect that war had on the creatures in the zoo was even more calamitous.
As Ackerman writes: “The elephants trumpeted wildly, the hyenas sobbed in a frightened sort of giggle interrupted by hiccups, the African hunting dog