The Zookeeper’s Wife (4 page)

The older boys believed, as Antonina did, that war belonged to the world of adults, not children. She sensed that Ryś yearned to grill them with questions, though he didn't want to look stupid or, worse, like a little kid, so he kept quiet about the invisible hand grenade lying at his feet that everyone feared might explode.

"What a subject to be broached by the innocent lips of children," Antonina reflected, glancing at the sun-bronzed faces of the three boys, glistening in the light cast by a large oil lamp. "Grazed by sadness" about their safety, she wondered yet again: "What will become of them, if war begins?" It was a question she'd been denying, sidestepping, and rewording for months. "Our animal republic," she finally admitted to herself, "exists in the busiest and most buzzing Polish city, as a small autonomous state defended by the capital. Living behind its gates, as if on an island cut off from the rest of the world, it seems impossible the waves of evil spilling across Europe could overwhelm our little island as well." As darkness began seeping into everything, erasing edges, a free-floating anxiety plagued her; eager as she was to mend the fabric of her son's life the instant holes formed, she could only await the unraveling.

She meant the last idylls of summer to be well spent, so the next morning she organized a mushroom-hunting brigade, with prizes and honors for whoever bagged the most saffron milk-cap, boletus, and button mushrooms, which she planned to jar. If war did erupt, spreading mushroom marinade on bread in winter would fill everyone with cottage memories of river swims, Badger's antics, and better days. They hiked four miles to the Bug River, with Ryś carried piggyback at times, Zośka trotting alongside, and Badger riding in a knapsack. Stopping by meadows along the way, they picnicked and played soccer, with Badger and Zośka serving as goalies, though Badger battled fiercely over the leather ball once he latched onto it with teeth and claws.

Most summer weekends, Antonina left Ryś with his nanny in the country and returned to Warsaw to spend a few days alone with Jan. On Thursday, August 24, 1939, the same day Britain renewed its pledge to aid Poland if Germany invaded, Antonina made her usual visit to Warsaw, where, to her shock, she saw antiaircraft sites ringing the city, civilians digging trenches and erecting barricades, and, most disturbing of all, posters that announced an imminent draft. Only the day before, foreign ministers Ribbentrop and Molotov had stunned the world by revealing that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a nonaggression pact.

"The only thing dividing Berlin from Moscow is Poland," she thought.

Neither she nor Jan knew of the pact's secret clauses, already hacking up Poland after a two-stage invasion and divvying up its desirable farmlands.

"Diplomats are cagey. This might only be a bluff," she thought.

Jan knew Poland hadn't the planes, weapons, or war equipment to compete with Germany, and so they started talking seriously about sending Ryś somewhere safer, to a town of no military interest, if such a place existed.

Antonina felt as though she were "waking from a long dream, or entering a nightmare," either way a psychic earthquake. Vacationing far from the political clatter of Warsaw, cocooned in "the calm, level order of the farmer's life, the harmony of white sand dunes and weeping willows," with each day enlivened by eccentric animals and a little boy's adventures, it had been nearly possible to ignore world events, or at least stay optimistic about them, even stubbornly naïve.

WARSAW, SEPTEMBER
1, 1939

J
UST BEFORE DAWN, ANTONINA WOKE TO THE DISTANT SOUND
of gravel pouring down a metal chute, which her brain soon deciphered as airplane engines.
Let them be Polish planes on maneuver
, she prayed as she went onto the terrace and scouted a strange sunless sky, veiled as she'd never seen it before, not with clouds but a thick golden-white gloss hanging low on the ground like a curtain, yet not smoke, not fog, and stretching along the horizon from rim to rim. A veteran of World War I and a reserve officer, Jan had spent the night on duty, but she didn't know where, just "somewhere outside the zoo," in the city canyons beyond the mental moat of the Vistula.

She heard "the hum of planes, tens, maybe even hundreds," that sounded like "faraway surf, not a calm surf but when waves crash onto the beach during a storm." Listening a moment longer, she detected the telltale unsynchronized hum of German bombers that Londoners, later in the war, swore they heard grumbling,
Where are you? Where are you? Where are you?

Jan returned home by 8
A.M
., agitated and with only sketchy information. "Those won't be the practice maneuvers we were told about," he said. "They'll be bombers, Luftwaffe squadrons escorting the approaching German army. We've got to leave right away." With Ryś and his nanny safe in Rejentówka, they decided to head first to the nearer village of Zalesie, where his cousins lived, but waited for further updates on the radio.

This was the first day of the school year for Polish children, a day when the sidewalks should have been streaming with school uniforms and knapsacks. From the terrace, they saw Polish soldiers sprinting in all directions—down the streets, over lawns, even into the zoo—erecting balloon barriers, aligning antiaircraft guns, and piling long black cannon shells tapered at one end like animal droppings.

The zoo animals seemed unaware of danger. Small fires didn't scare them—for years they'd trusted the sight of household bonfires—but they grew alarmed by the sudden flood of soldiers, because the only humans they'd ever seen in early morning were the dozen or so blue-uniformed keepers, usually with food. The lynxes began gargling a sound between roar and meow, the leopards chug-chugged low notes, the chimpanzees yipped, the bears brayed like donkeys, and the jaguar sounded as though it were hacking up something lodged in its throat.

By 9
A.M
., they'd learned that, to justify invasion, Hitler had staged a phony attack on the German border town of Gleiwitz, where SS troops dressed in Polish uniforms commandeered a local radio station and broadcast a fake call to arms against Germany. Although foreign journalists imported to witness the events were shown dead bodies of prisoners (dressed in Polish uniforms) as proof of hostilities, no one fell for the charade. Still, even such a hoax couldn't go unanswered, and at 4
A.M
. Germany's battleship
Schleswig-Holstein
bombarded an ammunition depot near Gdańsk, and Russia's Red Army started preparing to invade from the east.

Antonina and Jan packed hurriedly and set out on foot across the bridge, hoping to make their way to Zalesie, beyond the Vistula River and only a dozen miles to the southeast. As they approached Zbawiciel Square, the engine noise ground louder and then planes floated overhead, appearing in the gap between the rooftops like stereopticon slides. Bombs whistled down and struck a few streets in front of them, with black smoke followed by the crackling of shattered stucco roof tiles and the rasp of brick and mortar crumbling.

Every bomb creates a different scent, depending on where it hits, what it boils into aerosol and the nose detects slipping apart, as molecules mix with air and float free. Then the nose can pick up ten thousand distinctive scents, from cucumber to violin resin. When a bakery was hit, the rising dirt cloud smelled of yeast sours, eggs, molasses, and rye. The mingled odors of cloves, vinegar, and burning flesh spelled the butcher's. Charred flesh and pine meant an incendiary bomb that blasted houses with a hot, fast fire, and that the people inside had died quickly.

"We've got to turn back," Jan said, and they ran past the walls of Old Town and across the whistling metal bridge. At the zoo once more, Antonina noted: "I was so depressed that I couldn't do anything. I could only hear Jan's voice directing his staff: 'Bring a cart with horses, load it with food and coal, pack warm clothes, and go immediately. . ..'"

FOR JAN, THE PUZZLE
of finding a town of no military interest posed an equation littered with unknowns he wasn't prepared for, since neither he nor Antonina had thought the Germans would invade Poland. They'd worried, but agreed "it was only fear speaking": a private siege, not signs of an impending war. Antonina wondered how they could have guessed so wrong, and Jan concentrated on hiding his family somewhere safe while he remained at the zoo to tend the animals as long as possible and await orders.

"Warsaw will soon be closed," he reasoned, "and the German army is advancing from the east, so I think it's best if you return to the cottage in Rejentówka."

She pondered this, then decided, despite misgivings: "Yes, at least it's a place we know, one Ryś associates with good times." Really, she had no idea, but persisted in packing, relying on Jan's hunch, then climbed into a cart loaded for what might be a long absence, and set out quickly before the roads grew too crowded.

The resort village of Rejentówka lay only about twenty-five miles away, but Antonina and a cart driver spent seven hours en route, sharing the dirt road with thousands of people, mainly on foot, since cars, trucks, and most horses had been confiscated by the military. Women, children, and old men hurried along in a worried trance, escaping the city with whatever they could carry, some pushing baby buggies, wagons, and hand trolleys, some hauling suitcases and small children, but most wearing several layers of clothing, with knapsacks, bags, and shoes slung across their bodies or swinging from their necks.

Flanking the road, tall poplars, pine, and spruce juggled large brown balls of mistletoe in their limbs; and black-and-white storks nested atop the telephone poles, still fattening up for their arduous flight to Africa. Soon farm fields quilted both sides of the road, grain glistening and tassels pointing skyward. Antonina wrote of sweat pouring in rivulets and breath bunching, the air clotted with dust.

A storm's distant rumble became a cloud of gnats on the horizon, then grew to German aircraft looming near in seconds, chewing up the skies, flying low overhead, panicking people and horses alike. Pelted by bullets, everyone hurried through clouds of flying dirt, the unlucky fell, and the relatively lucky fled beneath splattering machine-gun fire. Dead storks, redwings, and rooks littered the road along with tree branches and dropped satchels. Catching a bullet was sheer chance and for seven hours Antonina beat the odds, but not without scenes of the dead and dying etched into memory.

At least her son, in Rejentówka, was spared these images, so hard to erase, especially for a small child whose brain, busily sampling the world, was learning what to expect and stitching those truths in place at a trillion connections.
Stay prepared for this world the rest of your life
, a child's brain tells itself,
a world of mayhem and uncertainty
. "That which doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," Nietzsche wrote in
The Twilight of the Idols
, as if the will could be annealed like a Samurai sword that is heated and pounded, bent and reforged, until it becomes indestructible. But the metal of a little boy, what does the pounding do to him? Mixed with Antonina's worry about her son was moral outrage that the Germans "in this modern war, so different from wars we knew, allowed the killing of women, children, and civilians."

As the dust settled, blue sky returned and she noticed two Polish fighters attacking a heavy German bomber above a field. From afar, the geometry of the scene looked homely, like fierce wrens driving off a hawk, and people cheered whenever the fighters stung the bomber with tufts of smoke. Surely an air force that agile could repel the Luftwaffe? Threads of tinsel flashed in the waning sunlight, and suddenly the bomber gushed a fountain of blood-red flames and fell to earth in a sharp curve. Then a white jellyfish floated above the peaks of the pine trees: a German pilot swaying under his parachute, slowly descending through a cornflower-blue sky.

Like many Poles, Antonina didn't realize the magnitude of danger, relying instead on a Polish air force that boasted superbly trained and famously courageous pilots (especially those of the Pursuit Brigade defending Warsaw), whose outnumbered, obsolete PZL P.11 fighters posed no match for Germany's fast, swervy Junkers JU-87 Stukas. Polish Karas bombers swooped low over German tanks at such a slow speed, while flying level, that they fell easy prey to antiaircraft fire. She didn't know that Germany was testing out a new form of combined-arms warfare which would come to be called
Blitzkrieg
(lightning war), a charge-in-with-everything-you've-got—tanks, planes, cavalry, artillery, infantry—to surprise and terrify the enemy.

When she finally arrived in Rejentówka, she found a ghost town with summer guests gone, shops shuttered for the season, and even the post office closed. Exhausted, rattled, and dirty, she rode to the cottage hemmed in by tall trees and luminous quiet, in a setting that smelled familiar and safe, full of the mingled aromas of loam, meadow herbs and wild grasses, decaying wood and pine oil. One can picture her hugging Ryś hard and greeting his nanny; eating a dinner of buckwheat, potatoes, and soup; unpacking; bathing; longing for the habitual routines of just another summer, but unable to calm her nerves or quell her sense of foreboding.

Over the next few days, they often stood on the porch watching waves of German planes, en route to Warsaw, blacken the sky in lines neat as hedgerows. The regularity addled her: each day planes swarmed above at 5
A.M
. and again after sunset, without her knowing whom exactly they had bombed.

The local landscape looked strange, too, since Rejentówka wasn't a spot they visited in autumn, without vacationers and pets. Tall lindens had begun turning bronze and oaks the burnt maroon of stale blood, while some green survived on the maples, where yellow-bellied evening grosbeaks fed on winged seeds. Along the sandy roads, staghorn sumac shrubs raised antler-velvet twigs and cone-shaped clusters of hairy red fruits. Blue chicory, brown cat-o'-nine-tails, white dame's rocket, pink thistle, orange hawkweed, and goldenrod tuned the meadows to fall, in a tableau that changed whenever a breeze bent the stems like a hand gliding over a plush carpet.

On September 5, Jan arrived by train, his face somber, to find Antonina "very depressed and confused."

"I've heard rumors that a wing of the German army, invading from East Prussia, will soon reach Rejentówka," he told her. "But the front hasn't arrived in Warsaw yet, and people are slowly getting used to the air raids. Our army is bound to protect the capital at all costs, so we may as well return home."

Even if he didn't sound altogether convinced, Antonina agreed, in part because Jan was a good strategist whose hunches usually panned out, but she also thought how much easier life would be if they could stay together, sharing comforts, worries, and fears. Traveling the main road again was out of the question.

At night, they boarded a slow train with blackened windows and arrived in civil morning twilight, the hour of brightening before the sun spills over the horizon, in a lull between the night and dawn raids. According to Antonina, horses awaited them at the station and they rode home bewitched by the everyday—windless calm, damp air, aster hedges, colorful leaves, squeaky axles, clopping hooves on cobblestone—and, for a short spell, they slipped into the premechanized past, sinking deep into a pristine stillness where the war seemed to her muffled and unreal, only a remote glow like the moon.

At the main gate in Praga, the toll smacked her wide awake again as she dismounted. Bombs had ripped up the asphalt, shells had bitten large chunks out of the wooden buildings, cannon wheels had furrowed the lawns, old willows and lindens dangled unplugged limbs. Antonina held Ryś tight, as if the desolation before her were communicable. Unfortunately, the zoo edged a river with busy bridges, prime German targets, and with a Polish battalion stationed there, it had made a superb target, repeatedly, over several days. Picking their way through debris, they walked to the villa and its bomb-cratered yard. Antonina's eyes fell to the flower beds crushed from the hooves of horses, and she fixed on the small delicate calyxes of flowers stomped into the ground "like colorful teardrops."

Just after dawn, the day and battle started heating up. Standing on the front porch, they were surprised by the canyon echoing of hoarse explosions and snapping iron girders. Suddenly the ground trembled and walked under their feet, and they hurried indoors, only to find the roof beams, floors, and walls all shaking. The moaning of lions and yowling of tigers spiraled from the big cat house, where she knew cat mothers, "crazy with fear, were grabbing their young by the scruff of the neck and pacing their cages, anxiously looking for a safe place to hide them." The elephants trumpeted wildly, the hyenas sobbed in a frightened sort of giggle interrupted by hiccups, the African hunting dogs howled, and the rhesus monkeys, agitated beyond sanity, battled one another, their hysterical shrieks clawing the air. Despite the uproar, workers continued to carry water and food to the animals and check their cage bars and locks.

In this Luftwaffe attack, a half-ton bomb destroyed the polar bears' mountain, smashing the walls, moats, and barriers and freeing the terrified animals. When a platoon of Polish soldiers found the panicky bears, ribboned with blood and circling round their old haunt, they quickly shot them. Then, fearing lions, tigers, and other dangerous animals might escape, too, the soldiers decided to kill the most aggressive ones, including the male elephant, Jaś, Tuzinka's father.