The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story

Few geographical locations or historical events are as readily recognizable as the Warsaw Ghetto. Beginning in 1939, the Nazi occupiers of Warsaw set down guidelines prohibiting the movement of Jewish citizens within the city. They then forced the Jewish population of the entire region, more than 400,000 people, into a section of the city consisting of 10 to 12 blocks. Over the course of the next three years, until the Nazis removed the majority of these citizens to the Treblinka concentration camp, resources to feed the people within the Ghetto were severely limited, resulting in starvation. Many deadly diseases ran rampant within the Ghetto, where there were few doctors and virtually no medicines. The number of official entrances and exits to the Ghetto was gradually reduced to only four. Governor-General Frank, the Nazi officer in command of the Ghetto, expressed his desire for all the Jews to cease to exist.

As the Nazis slowly tightened their chokehold on the Ghetto, people within strove to live a normal life. There was a fledgling economy, entertainment, school, and religious services. Many accounts of the vibrant life attained by people within the Ghetto survived the Nazi occupation. Polish people outside the Ghetto expressed real curiosity about what was taking place within its walls. People lined up to look through peepholes into the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the best-known elements of the story of the Warsaw Ghetto deals with people outside the Ghetto striving to help those inside escape. The Żabińskis worked together with many other non-Jewish Poles to spirit people out of the Ghetto.

Having transported most of the citizens out of the Ghetto by mid-April 1944, the Nazis decided to enter the camp with military force and execute the 30,000 “wild Jews” remaining inside. They were surprised to meet about 1500 Jewish guerrilla fighters who waged war against them valiantly for almost a month until the Nazis burned the entire Ghetto to the ground.

While Warsaw and the nation of Poland as a whole did not experience the same extremes as did Jews inside the Ghetto, Ackerman describes the occupied nation as a place of chaos, corruption, extortion, and great uncertainty. The German High Command appointed extremely ideologically committed individuals to oversee a nation of 30 million people that the High Command would rather have ignored. Universities and secondary schools were shut down. Orders were given to execute political leaders, the intelligentsia, and any Polish citizens deemed “creative.” Laws were rewritten according to the stringent principles established by the Nazis. The Polish people, as Ackerman explains, responded to this new German regime with stealth, disobedience, and calculated sloth.

The dysfunction that marked Polish society under German occupation could sometimes be a boon to the resistance. Over a five-year period, Jan moved from being the director of the Warsaw Zoo, to a swineherd, to a garden magistrate, to a clerk. Through this succession of steadily less prestigious jobs, Jan maintained the ability to move freely around Warsaw and keep his family’s residence at the zoo compound. The Vice President of the city’s police force—like Jan, a member of the Underground—helped him achieve this. These menial jobs allowed Jan to create a weapons depot on the zoo property, adjacent to the Nazis’ supply cache, which was also located on the zoo grounds. Jan’s years of cat-and-mouse toying with the Nazis ended only when Polish Home Army staged the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, at which point he left the villa to fight openly against the soldiers he had fought secretly for the previous five years.