Jan’s exploits are as little discussed in this book as they evidently were at the time: Antonina almost never knew what her husband was doing and how it might doom her family. Ackerman focuses on Antonina-her quotidian efforts to keep her domestic world a nurturing place for her son Rys, her struggles to cope with the constant threat of discovery by German soldiers. Unfortunately, the scope and resonance of this amazing story is reduced by the author’s blinkered approach. Jan used the zoo as a base for his resistance operations, and Antonina took care of the legal residents, who included her young son, a tiny menagerie of somewhat exotic companion animals, and a revolving cast of eccentric characters, like a noted female Polish sculptor and a man who came with a cat, two parakeets, and a zest for playing Chopin all through the night. The near-total abduction of the Warsaw flock left a set of buildings and the surrounding grounds almost vacant- which made it a very effective hiding place for Jews escaping the monstrous consequences of German imperialism.įrom the summer of 1940, when a longtime friend became the zoo’s first “guest,” until August 1944, when Poles battled the fading Nazi military for a nearly decimated Warsaw while the Russians waited, the Zabinskis sheltered some three hundred fugitives: some for only a few days, others for months on end. The German military invasion and occupation of Warsaw in 1939 brought the persecution, segregation, and liquidation of Jews it also brought the relocation of animals from the Zabinskis’ zoo to German facilities, both for the enjoyment of these natural treasures and for genetic experiments attempting to revive ancient and extinct European creatures treasured by the Nazis. In the early 1930s, Jan and Antonina Zabinski ran the Warsaw Zoo and lived on the premises, tending the animals in the collection and laboring, with love, toward a more humane way of preserving wildlife through natural enclosures.
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