The Zookeeper's Wife
Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history. Drawing on Antonina's diary and other historical sources, bestselling naturalist Diane Ackerman vividly re-creates Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their "guests" resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto.Jan led a cell of saboteurs, and the Zabinski's young son risked his life carrying food to the guests, while also tending to an eccentric array of creatures in the house (pigs, hare, muskrat, foxes, and more). With hidden people having animal names, and pet animals having human names, it's a small wonder the zoo's code name became "The House under a Crazy Star." Yet there is more to this story than a colorful cast. With her exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Ackerman explores the role of nature in both kindness and savagery, and she unravels the fascinating and disturbing obsession at the core of Nazism: both a worship of nature and its violation, as humans sought to control the genome of the entire planet.
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Community Reviews
I listened to this as I drove back from NJ and was delighted with the escapades of the varied inhabitants of the Warsaw Zoo. Jan and Antonina so bravely live and help others in war torn Warsaw that I was truly inspired. How do people summon the courage and energy to so consistently fight back against wrongdoing? With their zoo in tatters from bombing, and their quarters a veritable revolving door for refugees from the ghetto and the underground/resistance. Masterfully read by Suzanne Toren, who used authentic accents for many of the foreign words and quotes. My only disappointment was the ending. The book kind of fizzled out in the final chapters, in which the author felt compelled to tie up various loose ends with seemingly random sets of statistics. Definitely didn't enhance the storyline, but perhaps proved the research and authenticity of this true story.
This book isn't really about the zookeeper's wife. Rather, Ackerman uses the story of Antonina Zabinski as a backdrop to tell the larger story of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw and the Polish Resistance. As a story-telling technique, I have no problem with this, and Ackerman does it fairly well. We learn a lot about Warsaw during the war, as well as learning about such things as the zookeeping trade and animal life. The biggest drawback to Ackerman's use of the technique, I think, is that she starts with Antonina's memoirs, which seem to have been written very lyrically (from the short excerpts we are given), and then tries to use that lyrical tone throughout the whole book. It doesn't work very well, partly because Ackerman doesn't wield her lyricism as naturally, and partly because a war story doesn't lend itself very well to such a tone. It is an interesting story, although I think the story of the zookeeper (who was active in the Polish Resistance, fought for the Home Army in the Warsaw uprising, and was held as a POW in Germany) might have been more interesting than the story of his wife. I guess he didn't write a memoir.
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