The Prison Book Club (31 page)

“You've always got such a positive outlook,” said Graham laughing.

“Well, I believe in karma,” said Frank. “I don't think you can do bad deeds without eventually it will come back to you. I don't mean going to jail or anything. I mean it comes back to you in life. When you feel guilty about something, it's already gotten you.”

“You carry it all around with you,” said Graham.

“Yeah, and that's the biggest weight.”

18

GOOD IS MORE CONTAGIOUS THAN EVIL

I
F IT WEREN'T for what I came to call “the Plexiglas lockdown,” Parvat said he wouldn't have finished the March book for the Collins Bay Book Club,
The Zookeeper's Wife
, by Diane Ackerman. A piece of Plexiglas from the CORCAN workshop had gone missing in early March. Plexiglas, which was not detectable by a metal detector, could be fractured into equally undetectable and lethal shanks. Over on Unit 7, Peter used the time to read too. He was always well equipped for lockdowns with an emergency pack of supplies to deal with the lack of access to the showers or the canteen. The pack contained a sponge for hand-washing in his cell sink and snacks to bridge between mealtimes because of his high metabolism: oatmeal, sugar, apples, peanut butter packets, cream cheese packets and crackers.

Even during a lockdown, though, inmates still could be released from prison. On March 7, Ben wrote his last diary entry at Collins Bay: “I'm out tomorrow. My aunt is picking me up. I'm not sure where I will be going yet.”

When we gathered for the Collins Bay Book Club meeting later in the month, I was expecting the discussion to be gripping.
The Zookeeper's Wife
tells the heroic true story of Warsaw zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski, who audaciously hid more than three hundred Jews in their empty animal cages and the closets and basement of their house on the zoo grounds during the German occupation of Poland in World War II.

The zoo's animals disappeared in three phases: German bombing destroyed some of the zoo enclosures, sending some of the animals scurrying and galloping through the streets of Warsaw; soldiers then killed the big cats and other more dangerous animals in case they might escape too; and finally the director of the Berlin Zoo looted some animals for his own collection, then sponsored a shooting party to kill the remaining creatures on the zoo grounds while they were still penned up.

Jews found their way from the Warsaw Ghetto to the zoo because of Jan's position in the Polish Underground, but it was Antonina's bravery and ingenuity at deception that kept them safe. Complicating the matter was the risk that their eight-year-old son, Rys, might accidentally blurt out their secret to the German officials who regularly came onto the grounds. Such a blunder would have led to the execution of everyone involved. Recognizing that risk, the family gave the stowaways animal names, so that even if Rys slipped up, the Germans would think he was talking about animals.

Only ten thousand of the more than three hundred and fifty thousand Jews who lived in Warsaw in 1939 survived there by the end of the war. The actions of the Zabinskis to save three hundred of them has been recognized formally by Israel, which includes them on the list of “The Righteous Among the Nations”—those who showed extraordinary courage to rescue other human beings from the Holocaust in the face of widespread indifference by their countrymen.

The Zabinskis' story was a little-known episode in the resistance and I had recommended
The Zookeeper's Wife
with hopes that the men might empathize with the courage of the zookeepers. But I also hoped that the author's rapturous descriptions of the zoo gardens would transport them briefly out of the prison's enclosed world. Her evocations of the scent of lilacs and lindens transported me, as though being a naturalist gave her an animal-like heightened sense of smell and a poetic language for conveying it.

“Peter, what did you think?” asked Derek, whom Carol had asked to lead that month's discussion.

“It was a good read,” said Peter, referring to his notes. “I think the author was trying to say the zoo itself was just an inherent spot for goodness. It represents life, nature.” As opposed to the Nazis' murderous campaign, he explained. His comment made me recognize how extreme evil can occasionally provoke extreme good. One becomes necessary in the face of the other. His choice of the word
inherent
stayed with me too. The zoo celebrated life forms in all their diversity. And while some animals kill others for food in the wild, I could think of no animals, other than human beings, who killed out of cruelty or ideology. I remember the Canadian realist painter Alex Colville saying once, in reference to his depictions of animals, that he didn't believe that any animal was evil or capable of malice.

Parvat tucked his long hair behind his ears and expanded on Peter's idea, arguing that the Zabinskis had a heightened degree of empathy because they were more in touch with nature. “It was easy for them to care for humans, 'cause they were caring for animals,” he said in his somewhat sleepy voice, with its cultivated cool. And Antonina went beyond just caring for animals, I thought. The way Jan Zabinski described it, his wife had an uncanny sixth sense in which she seemed able to intuit what the animals were thinking. In one scene, Antonina appeared to understand that it was the moving fingers of human hands that scared the lynx kittens. In another she discerned that their baby badger was sociable and benefited from long companionable walks.

The men were intrigued to discover in the book that the Nazis' eugenics program extended to animals as well as humans. The Nazis despised animals that had “degenerated” from racial purity, and sought to rebreed extinct animals that they considered noble and pure, including European bison, aurochs and forest tarpans. Some of the animals that the Germans looted from the Zabinskis' zoo were taken expressly for that purpose. “A little twisted,” commented Gaston, in a dry understatement.

Meanwhile, Peter highlighted some of the more startling details of the book. He reminded the men about the passages describing how Jews altered their appearances to avoid detection. “Re-skinning, for example,” he said, “having your foreskin surgically brought back over again.” Specifics like those are what readers take away, he said, when reading books on the war. He also talked about the Nazis creating anti-Semitic children's literature. “These little things are just as atrocious as the bigger things.”

The men puzzled over what it was about Antonina that gave her the power to defuse situations when the SS were on the property snooping around. “She could talk to these SS guys and get them to back off,” said Derek. “I mean the power that she had was extraordinary.” I recalled one scene in which a German soldier questioned Antonina about a fire near their barracks. She coolly deflected the blame by pointing out that the haystacks near the barracks were often used by German soldiers to entertain their girlfriends and smoke. It reminded me of the scene in
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
where Elizabeth invents an alibi that deters a suspicious German patrol.

Peter proposed that maybe Antonina's power derived from her ability to read and calm people, as she did animals. Joao recalled that the author attributed some of it to Antonina's Aryan features. Parvat took a different tack by observing: “Women tend to have a certain power, especially attractive women.” Dread disagreed, saying her power wasn't sexual. In my view, some of Antonina's charisma derived from her determination to make life fun by filling the house and grounds with other animals: rabbits, badgers, muskrats, dogs, hamsters, pigs and even cats that would nurse baby foxes. It was a way to stay sane in the face of terrible uncertainty.

Carol, looking particularly cheery in her oversized pink plastic glasses and long mauve scarf, jumped in next. “Maybe I could throw this out as a thought,” she said. “The book was about sacrificing yourself and your safety for others.” I loved Carol's predictability in always raising the theme of helping others.

Peter took Carol's thought a bit further by suggesting that the Zabinskis' courage was a more complicated gamble than simply putting their own safety at risk. “The author pointed out that there was cumulative responsibility,” he reminded us. If Polish citizens were found to be harbouring Jews, the penalty would have been immediate death for them, their family, their employees on the grounds and their neighbours. The severity of that punishment was far more extreme than in many other countries, where the consequences for sheltering Jews was prison. “That's a whole different ball game,” said Peter.

“It's really something to put all those people at risk,” said Carol.

Then Peter made a breakthrough comment. “I think that the people that are actually at risk catch on and start to do it as well,” he said. “The overall good is more contagious than the evil. Then those people say, ‘Yeah, she's putting us at risk, but we should be helping too,' and it just goes around.” The humanity in that statement, the innate goodness, thrilled me.

And, as Michael pointed out, Antonina anticipated that eventually the war was going to end, and they just had to hang on a little longer.

“I have to say that I really wondered if I'd be able to be as courageous as Antonina,” offered Carol. “I had a very—I had a funny feeling I wouldn't be.”

“I wouldn't risk my family,” intoned Dread, without any of Carol's hesitation. Dread had two children. “Even though I know it would be a courageous thing, I wouldn't do it.”

“It's hard to turn people down,” said Peter. Several of the other men said “yeah.”

“But nowadays nobody would do that,” said a new member whose name tag read TONY. “Back then, there was more sense of family, belonging, tightness.” The comment sounded very much like Dread's comment when we had discussed O. Henry's “The Gift of the Magi,” and he observed that grand romantic gestures were part of an earlier age of chivalry. Tony's remark implied that ethical decisions could go in and out of fashion. As I saw it, the whole point is not what others would do, but what you or I would do when confronted with an opportunity to save the life of another human being. But I realized that in prison, minding your own business is part of the survival handbook. So there were no heroes that day in the book club, and I suppose I included myself in that number. I wasn't sure I could put my family at risk. But Derek reminded us that no one knows what they would do in the instant when a desperate person is standing on your doorstep begging for help.

“You know,” said Carol. “As I was reading this I was thinking about you fellas. Some of the people that we encounter in this story are people who have lost their home and they are moving through from one safe place to another. Are you going to be able to find that thing called home when you leave here and what effect has that had on you, being placed here for a period of time?” Something about that question made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Perhaps it was the question's implication that family and friends might drift away.

Tony said he would always know where home was: Toronto. His hair seemed to be slicked down with oil and his head was large in proportion to his body. “The last time I got out, after six years, so much had changed. Stores locked up, an old club taken down. But I know the streets will be the same.”

Dread wasn't sure it would be quite so easy. “You have a record, people will stereotype you and it's not going to be easy,” he said.

“A child or a wife can affect where home is or was,” said Brad, the only one of the white inmates who wore his hair long. His voice sounded shaky and I wondered whether he had lost a family member.

“There's a difference,” said Parvat. “We had an option of coming here or not. We got caught. The Jews got removed out of their places of home.” An important distinction. And then his thoughts took a twist. “For some people, being home is doing drugs and eating once every three days. In here they're eating three meals a day, so some people love jail better than out there.”

I passed around a piece of paper and a pen and asked the men to write down comments to share with our Toronto women's book club, which would meet two weeks later to discuss the same book. Then Carol had an exciting announcement. Roddy Doyle had emailed back answers to the men's questions about his novel
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors
. Carol asked the book club members who had posed the questions to read his responses aloud. It was Michael's question that evoked the most interesting reply from the author: “‘Do you believe that abuse is learned and carried from generation to generation? I suspect that Charlo himself was a victim of abuse,'” Michael read, with his slight lisp.

Then he read aloud the author's answer:

“‘I don't know' is my answer to that question—and ‘possibly' and ‘probably.' But I'm reluctant to say ‘Yes.' Paula says ‘I don't know' quite often in the book, because the possible reasons for Charlo's behaviour seem too neat and simple; and they seem, almost, to excuse his behaviour. If abusive behaviour is learnt, what then of the men or women who hit their children although they themselves were never hit? It happens.”

Doyle's point hit a chord, and the men talked about it as they said goodbye and walked down the hall. Gaston and Peter lingered for a moment at Carol's request. Carol went to the chaplain's office and came out with a stack of Professor Duffy's selected security-cleared classics. She gave them each an armful:
The Heart of Darkness
and
The Secret Sharer
by Joseph Conrad; two sci-fi novels by H.G. Wells,
The Island of Dr. Moreau
and
The Time Machine
; Charles Portis's western
True Grit
; and J.D. Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
. Peter had already read
The Catcher in the Rye
and said he was not inclined to read it again. Carol told him the books were his to keep, and he was delighted. “These will make a wonderful beginning to a book collection,” he said. He told Carol, though, that it was likely he would be transferred to a halfway house just before or after our next meeting. It would be a loss for the book club and a personal loss for me, given his fine journal writing.