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As German bombers savagely attacked Warsaw in September 1939, a surreal scene began unfolding in the streets. The city’s renowned zoo was hit hard, and panicked animals were racing through the city’s Old Town. Many were shot, but the slaughter had just begun.
When a Nazi entourage visited the zoo on New Year’s Eve, SS members killed other animals for sheer sport. As she watched in horror, Antonina Zabinski, who ran the zoo with her husband, asked herself: “How many humans will die like this in the coming months?”
Adolf Hitler would go on to exterminate more than 380,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. But the Zabinskis didn’t stand by and watch. As told in Diane Ackerman’s award-winning 2007 book, “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” and now in a movie starring Jessica Chastain, Antonina and her husband, Jan, fought back.
He joined the resistance. She ran a covert operation in which Jews were smuggled out of the ghetto and into the zoo, hidden in cages, tunnels and her home and then transported to safety.
The following is an edited transcript.
A: I learned that there were unusual species of small horses living in a forest in Poland, and I wanted to write about them. I got in touch with the park service there, but I didn’t speak Polish, so I asked a neighbor in Warsaw to help me. She said, incidentally, that one of her uncles had worked in the Zabinskis’ zoo, and he told me that the zookeeper’s wife had published a diary. When I read it, I began to see the extraordinary sensibility Antonina had about animals, and how many she had adopted. But as it turned out, she was also rescuing people and saving lives.
A: I think the book, and the film as well, really resonate with what’s happening now. We see white supremacy being legitimized. We see anti-Semitism on the rise. There’s terrible prejudice against refugees and immigrants. An entire religion has been singled out. And the story in the book reminds us of what can happen. This is not a new phenomenon. It’s happened before.
A: Yes, and that’s one of the reasons I wrote this book. So often we equate heroism with violence, usually with males. But there are many forms of heroism, and we are not an inherently evil species. We would not have evolved to where we are now, because we would have wiped each other out long ago.
In the movies, heroism often means people killing other people. But Antonina didn’t kill anyone. She was in desperate danger, risking the life of her young son and husband every day. But it was to help people survive, and not just bodily. She wanted them to survive emotionally, with their dignity intact. She performed radical acts of compassion. She made sure they could come out of hiding at night. She sneaked them into the house. They had dinner together. There were piano concerts. She was as much a social worker as a rescuer, and I’m convinced that kind of heroism takes place every day on our war-torn planet.
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