The Zookeeper’s Wife (6 page)

Soon afterward, he issued the "Decree for the Combating of Violent Acts," which imposed death on anyone disobeying German authority, mounting acts of sabotage or arson, owning a gun or other weapons, attacking a German, violating curfew, owning a radio, trading on the black market, having Underground leaflets in the home—or failing to report scofflaws who did. Breaking laws or failing to report lawbreakers, both acting or observing, were equally punishable offenses. Human nature being what it is, most people didn't wish to get involved, so few people were denounced, and fewer still denounced for not denouncing others. . .in what could quickly have become an absurdist chain of disinclination and inaction. Somewhere between doing and not doing, everyone's conscience finds its own level; most Poles didn't risk their lives for fugitives but didn't denounce them either.

Hitler authorized Frank to "ruthlessly exploit this region as a war zone and booty country, and reduce to a heap of rubble its economic, social, cultural, and political structure." One of Frank's key tasks was to kill all people of influence, such as teachers, priests, landowners, politicians, lawyers, and artists. Then he began rearranging huge masses of the population: over a span of five years, 860,000 Poles would be uprooted and resettled; 75,000 Germans would take over their lands; 1,300,000 Poles would be shipped to Germany as slave labor; and 330,000 would simply be shot.

With courage and ingenuity, the Polish Resistance would sabotage German equipment, derail trains, blow up bridges, print over 1,100 periodicals, make radio broadcasts, teach in covert high schools and colleges (attended by 100,000 students), aid Jews in hiding, supply arms, make bombs, assassinate Gestapo agents, rescue prisoners, stage secret plays, publish books, lead feats of civil resistance, hold its own law courts, and run couriers to and from the London-based government-in-exile. Its military wing, the Home Army, at its height included 380,000 soldiers—among them, Jan Żabiński, who later told interviewers, "from the very beginning, I was connected to the Home Army in the area of the zoo." Confusing as life during occupation must have been, the clandestine Polish state, linked by language rather than territory, would fight nonstop for six years.

A key to the Underground's strength was its no-contact-upward policy and the unflagging use of pseudonyms and cryptonyms. If no one knew his superior, capture wouldn't endanger the core; and if no one knew anyone's real name, saboteurs proved hard to find. Underground headquarters floated around the city, and schools migrated from one church or apartment to another, while a band of couriers and illegal printshops kept everyone informed. The Underground Peasant Movement adopted the slogan of "As little, as late, and as bad as possible," and set about sabotaging deliveries to Germans and diverting supplies to people in the cities, repeatedly claiming delivery of the same grain or livestock, overstating receipts, conveniently losing, destroying, or hiding provisions. Forced laborers in the secret German rocket program at Peenemünde urinated on the electronics to corrode them, crippling the rockets. The Resistance encompassed so many cells that anyone could find a niche, regardless of age, education, or nerve. Jan had a penchant for risk, which he later told a reporter he found exciting, adding in his understated way that its pulse-revving gamble felt rather "like playing chess—either I win or I lose."

W
ITH AUTUMN, COLD BEGAN SEEPING UNDER DOORS AND
through tiny cracks, and at night hoarse winds dashed across the villa's flat roof, billowed any plywood shutters that had warped, and squalled around the walled terrace. Despite its disheveled buildings and lawns, the zoo bedded down its few remaining animals for winter, but nothing looked the way it had before the war, least of all the seasonal tableaux of zoo life. The tempo of the days used to change dramatically as the zoo entered its own period of hibernation: boulevards, normally crowded with as many as ten thousand people during the summer holiday, would grow almost deserted; a few people would visit the Monkey House, the elephants, the predators' islands, or the seal pool. But the long columns of schoolchildren waiting in line to ride llamas, ponies, camels, or little pedal cars would evaporate. Delicate animals like flamingos and pelicans, venturing outside for a short constitutional each day, would march gingerly in single file over frozen ground. As the days shortened and tree branches grew bare, most animals would stay indoors, while the tone of the zoo paled from raucous to mumbling during what's known in the trade as the
dead season
, a time of animal rest and human repair.

Even in its reduced wartime state, the zoo endured as a complex living machine, where one wobbly screw or stripped gear could trigger a catastrophe, and a zoo director couldn't afford to miss a rusty bolt or a monkey's runny nose, forget to lock or adjust the warmth in a building, overlook a bison's badly matted beard. All this became doubly serious during windstorm, rain, or frost.

Missing now were all the women who used to rake fallen leaves, the men who insulated the roofs and stable walls with straw, the gardeners who wreathed the roses and ornamental shrubs to protect them from frost. Other blue-uniformed helpers should have been cellaring beets, onions, and carrots, and topping off the silos with fodder, so that wintering animals would have plenty of
vitamins
(a word coined in 1912 by Polish biochemist Casimir Funk). The barns should have been brimming with hay, the storerooms and pantries with oats, flour, buckwheat, sunflower seeds, pumpkins, ant eggs, and other essentials. Trucks should have been carting in coal and coke, and the blacksmith fixing broken tools, weaving wire, and oiling padlocks. In the carpentry shop, men should have been repairing the fences, tables, benches, and shelves, and crafting doors and windows for added buildings when the ground softened in spring.

Normally, Antonina and Jan would have been preparing the budget for the coming year, awaiting the arrival of new animals, and reading reports in offices angled to view the river and the steeply roofed houses of Old Town. The press department would have been organizing talks and concerts, lab researchers would have been smearing slides and running tests.

Dead season, though never an easy time of year, usually offered gated asylum in a world private and protected, where they banked on a well-stocked larder, standing orders for foodstuffs, and a belief in self-reliance. The war undermined all three.

"The wounded city is trying to feed their animals," Antonina reassured Jan one morning as she heard a clop-and-clatter, then saw two wagons creaking up to the gate with leftover fruit and vegetable peelings from kitchens, restaurants, and houses. "At least we're not alone."

"No. Warsawians know it's important to save their identity," Jan replied, "all the elements of life that elevate and define them—and, fortunately, that includes the zoo."

Still, Antonina wrote that she felt the ground disappearing beneath her when the occupation government decided to move the capital to Kraków, noting that, as a provincial city, Warsaw no longer needed a zoo. All she could do was await the
liquidation
, a loathsome word suggesting a meltdown of creatures her family knew as individuals, not as a collective mass of fur, wings, and hooves.

Only Antonina, Jan, and Ryś remained at the villa, with not much food at any price, little money, and no jobs. Antonina baked bread every day, and relied on vegetables from the summer garden and preserves made from rooks, crows, mushrooms, and berries. Friends and relatives in outlying hamlets periodically sent food, sometimes even bacon and butter, luxuries seldom seen in the devastated city; and the man who delivered horsemeat to the zoo before the war procured a little meat for them now.

One day in late September, a familiar face appeared at their front door in German uniform: an old guard from the Berlin Zoo.

"I've been sent directly by Director Lutz Heck with his greetings and a message," he said formally. "He wishes to offer you help, and awaits my call."

Antonina and Jan looked at one another, surprised, not quite sure what to think. They knew Lutz Heck from the annual meetings of the International Association of Zoo Directors, a small clique of altruists, pragmatists, evangelists, and scoundrels. In the early twentieth century, there were two main schools of thought about how to keep exotic animals. One believed in creating natural habitats, the landscape and climate each animal would find in its homeland. The zealous proponents of this view were Professor Ludwig Heck of the Berlin Zoo and his older son, Lutz Heck. The opposing view held that, left to their own devices, exotic animals would adapt to a new environment, regardless of where the zoo was located. The leader of this opposing camp was Professor Lutz's younger son, Heinz, director of the Munich Zoo. Influenced by the Hecks, the Warsaw Zoo was designed to help animals acclimatize, and it also provided inviting habitats. It was the first Polish zoo that didn't cramp animals into small cages; instead, Jan tried to fit each enclosure to the animal, and as much as possible reproduce how it would live in the wild. The zoo also boasted a good natural water source (artesian wells), elaborate drainage systems, and a trained, dedicated staff.

At the annual meetings, ideologies sometimes soured into feuds, but zookeeping families all gloried in their zoos and juggled similar concerns and passions, and thus a freemasonry of shared wisdom and well-being prevailed, despite the language barriers. Other directors didn't speak Polish, Jan didn't speak fluent German, Antonina spoke Polish and some Russian, French, and German. But a sort of Esperanto (a Polish invention) arose that relied heavily on German and English, accompanied by photographs, freehand drawings, animal calls, and pantomime. Annual meetings felt like reunions, and as the youngest zookeeper's wife, Antonina captivated them with her smarts and willowy looks; and they regarded Jan as an energetic and determined director whose zoo was thriving and blessed with rare offspring.

Heck had always been cordial, to Antonina especially. But in his zoo work and now in his politics, he was obsessed with bloodlines, Aryan included, and from what they had heard, he'd become an ardent and powerful Nazi, with Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as frequent houseguests and hunting companions.

"We are grateful for Professor Heck's offer," Antonina replied politely. "Please thank him, and tell him that we do not need help, since the zoo is destined to be
liquidated
." She knew full well that, as the highest-ranking zoologist in Hitler's government, Heck might be the very man in charge of the liquidation.

The following day, to their surprise, the guard returned and said that Heck planned a visit soon, and when the guard left they wondered what to do. They didn't trust Heck, but on the other hand, he was sweet on Antonina, and in theory, as a fellow zookeeper, he should be sympathetic to their situation. In an occupied country where survival often depended on having friends in high places, cultivating Heck made sense. Antonina thought Heck relished the idea of being her patron, a medieval knight like Parsifal, some romantic ideal to win her heart and prove his nobility. As she wondered if his overture signaled help or harm, her mind filled with feline battery: "For all we know he may just be playing with us. Big cats need little mice to toy with."

Jan made a case for Heck's possible goodwill: as a zookeeper himself, Heck loved animals, spent his life protecting them, and undoubtedly sympathized with fellow zookeepers' losses. And so, poised between hope and fear, they passed the night before Lutz Heck's first visit.

After curfew, Poles could no longer stroll under a canopy of stars. They could still watch August's Perseids, followed by the autumn meteor showers—the Draconids, Orionids, and Leonids—from their windows and balconies, but thanks to all the shelling and dust, most days became cloudy with tumultuous sunsets and a drizzle before dawn. Ironically, the far-ranging warfare that created grotesque battlefields and pollution also inspired gorgeous sky effects. Now, fast-falling meteors at night, however kitelike their tails, conjured up images of gunfire and bombs. Once meteors had figured in a category of mind remote from anything technological, as wayfarers from distant realms where stars sparkled like ice-coated barbed wire. Long ago, the Catholic Church had christened the Perseids
the tears of Saint Lawrence
because they occurred near his feast day, but the more scientific image of dirty snowballs pulled by invisible waves from the rim of the solar system, then yanked down to earth, evokes its own saintly magic.

L
UTZ HECK TOOK OVER THE BERLIN ZOO FROM HIS DISTINGUISHED
father in 1931, and almost immediately began remodeling the zoo's ecology and ideology. To coincide with the 1936 Olympics, held in Berlin, he opened a "German Zoo," an exhibit honoring the country's wildlife, complete with "Wolf Rock" at its center, surrounded by enclosures for bears, lynxes, otters, and other native species. This bold patriotic display underscoring the importance of familiar animals, and that one needn't go to the ends of the earth to find exotic species, conveyed a laudable message, and if he'd unveiled his exhibit today, his motives wouldn't be questioned. But given the era, his beliefs, and the ultranationalism of his family, he clearly wanted to please Nazi friends by contributing to the ideal of Germany's master races. A 1936 photograph shows Heck and Göring on a hunting trip to Schorfheide, Heck's large preserve in Prussia; and the following year, Heck joined the Nazi Party.

A big-game hunter, Heck spent the peak moments of his life pursuing danger and adventure, several times a year launching trips to garner animals for his zoo and perhaps bag a pair of longhorn sheep heads for his wall or come face to face with a toweringly mad female grizzly. He relished wild razor-edged hunts, in Africa especially, which he recapped in scenic letters, written by lantern light, astride a camp stool near a well-fed fire, while lions grunted invisibly in the blackness and his companions slept. "The campfire flickering in front of me," he once wrote, "and behind me coming out of the dark infinity the sounds of an invisible and mysterious wild animal." Alone yet faintly haunted by circling predators, he would replay the day's exploits in ink, some to save, some to share with friends in another drape of reality, the Europe that seemed to him planets away. Action photographs often accompanied his letters: lassoing a giraffe, leading a baby rhinoceros, capturing an aardvark, evading a charging elephant.

Heck loved collecting trophies, as memory aids to a wild part of his self that emerged in remote wilderness—live animals to display at his zoo, dead animals to stuff, photographs to share and frame. In the heyday of his travels he seemed to collect life itself, keeping voluminous diaries, snapping hundreds of photographs, and writing popular books (such as
Animals—My Adventure
) which limned his passion for the wilderness, in which he detailed feats of extraordinary bravery, stoicism, and skill. Heck knew his strengths, admired the heroic in himself and others, and could tell a bar-gripping story over drinks at annual meetings. Though he indulged in self-mythology from time to time, his personality fit a profession which has always attracted some people with a yen for exploration, in flight from domesticity, and craving just enough ordeal to feel the threads of mortality fraying. Without his type, maps would still show a flat earth and no one would believe the source of the Nile. Sometimes Heck slayed dragons—or rather their real-life equivalents—but mainly he captured, photographed, and displayed them with gusto. Passionate and single-minded, when he set his sights on an animal, either in the wild or belonging to someone, he lusted after it, tried every lure or ruse he could think of, and persisted until he exhausted the animal or wore down its owner.

For decades the Heck brothers had pursued a fantastic goal, a quest that engaged Heinz but completely infatuated Lutz: the resurrection of three pure-blooded, extinct species—the Neolithic horses known as forest tarpans, aurochsen (the wild cow progenitor of all European cattle breeds), and the European or "forest" bison. On the eve of the war the Hecks had produced some near aurochsen and tarpans of their own, but the Polish strains ran truer to type, the clear inheritors.

Only prehistoric creatures would do, ones untainted by racial mixing, and although Lutz hoped to gain influence and fame in the process, his motives were more personal—he sought the thrill of bringing extinct, nearly magical animals back to life and steering their fate, hunting some for sport. Genetic engineering wouldn't emerge until the 1970s, but he decided to use eugenics, a traditional method of breeding animals which showed specific traits. Heck's reasoning went like this: an animal inherits 50 percent of its genes from each parent, and even an extinct animal's genes remain in the living gene pool, so if he concentrated the genes by breeding together animals that most resembled an extinct one, in time he would arrive at their purebred ancestor. The war gave him the excuse to loot east European zoos and wilds for the best specimens.

As it happens, the animals he chose all thrived in Poland, their historic landscape was Białowieża, and the imprimatur of a respected Polish zoo would legitimize his efforts. When Germany invaded Poland, Heck scouted the farms for mares preserving the most tarpan traits to mate them with several wild strains, including Shetlands, Arabians, and Przywalskis, hoping to breed back to the ideal animal, the fierce, nearly unridable horses painted in ochre on Cro-Magnon caves. Heck assumed it wouldn't take many generations of back-breeding—maybe only six or eight—because as recently as the 1700s tarpans still roamed the forests of northeastern Poland.

During the Ice Ages, when glaciers blanketed northern Europe and a wind-ripped tundra stretched down to the Mediterranean countryside, thick forests and fertile meadows gave refuge to great herds of tarpans that roamed the central European lowlands, browsed the east European steppes, and galloped across Asia and the Americas. In the fifth century
B.C.
, Herodotus said how much he enjoyed watching herds of tarpans grazing in the bogs and marshes of what is now Poland. For ages, purebred tarpans outwitted all the hunters and somehow survived in Europe, but by the eighteenth century not many remained, in part because diners prized tarpan meat—it was sweet, but more appealingly, it was rare—and in part because most tarpans had interbred with farm horses to produce fertile offspring. In 1880, pursued by humans, the last wild tarpan mare fell down a crevasse in Ukraine and died; and the last captive tarpan died seven years later in the Munich Zoo. At that point the species officially became extinct, just one more chapter in the annals of life on Earth.

Humans domesticated wild horses about six thousand years ago, and immediately began refining them: killing the defiant ones for food while breeding the most genial, to produce a horse that submits more easily to saddle and plow. In the process, we revised the horse's nature, compelling it to shed its zesty, ungovernable, evasive
wildness
. The aloof, free-range Przywalski horses retained that fury, and Heck planned to weave their combative spirit into the new tarpan's genetic mix. History credits Colonel Nikolai Przywalski, a Russian explorer of Polish descent, with "discovering" the wild Asiatic horse in 1879, hence its name, though, of course, the horse was well known to the Mongolians, who had already named it
tahki
. Heck factored the
tahki
's stamina, temper, and looks into his formula, but he craved even older creatures—the horses that dominated the prehistoric world.

What a powerful ideal—that sexy, high-strung horse, pawing the ground in defiance, its hooves all declaratives. Heinz Heck wrote after the war that he and his brother had begun the back-breeding project out of curiosity, but also from "the thought that if man cannot be halted in his mad destruction of himself and other creatures, it is at least a consolation if some of those kinds of animals he has already exterminated can be brought back to life again." But why have tarpans to ride if there were nothing worthy to hunt?

Lutz Heck soon began ministering to a handful of European bison, including those he stole from the Warsaw Zoo, hoping that they might prosper in Białowieża's spirit-house of trees, just as their ancestors had. Heck envisioned forest bison once again galloping along the trails, as sunlight speared through branches of hundred-foot oaks, in a woodland throbbing with wolves, lynx, wild boar, and other game, soon to be joined, he hoped, by herds of ancient horses.

Heck also sought a legendary bull, the aurochs, once the largest land animal in Europe, known for its savagery and vigor. When Ice Age glaciers melted, about twelve thousand years ago, most giant mammals vanished, but in the cold forests of northern Europe, some aurochsen survived, and all modern cattle have descended from those few—not that aurochsen would have been easy to domesticate eight thousand years ago. Because the aurochs went extinct in the 1600s, recent in evolutionary terms, Heck felt sure he could reconstruct it, and in so doing save it, too, from "racial degeneration." He dreamt that, alongside the swastika, the bull might become synonymous with Nazism. Some drawings of the era showed the aurochs and a swastika joined in an emblem of ideological suavity combined with ferocious strength.

Many ancient cultures worshipped the aurochs bull, especially in Egypt, Cyprus, Sardinia, and Crete (whose trans-species ruler supposedly descended from a sacred bull). Zeus often assumed the shape of a bull in Greek myth, the better to ravage alluring mortals and produce offspring with magical gifts; when he abducted Europa, it was in the guise of an aurochs, a great black bull with short beard and giant forward-pointing horns (like those on long-horned cattle, or on the helmets of heroes in the
Nibelungen
). What better totemic animal for the Third Reich? Heck's passion for the project was shared by top Nazi officials, making it clear that Heck's work was not just about the re-creation of extinct species. After Hitler came to power, the biological aims of the Nazi movement spawned many projects to establish racial purity, which justified acts of sterilization, euthanasia, and mass murder. One of the Third Reich's key scientists, Heck's colleague and good friend Eugene Fischer, founded the "Institute of Anthropology, Genetics, and Eugenics," which favored Josef Mengele and other equally sadistic SS doctors who used concentration camp inmates as guinea pigs.

Fascinated by violence and the red-blooded manly spirit—naturally brave, daring, fierce, hardy, sane, lusty, strong-willed—Eugene Fischer believed that mutations in human beings were as destructive as those in domestic animals, and that interbreeding was wilting the human race in the same way that it had already denatured certain "beautiful, good, and heroic" wild animals, losing the potent original in the genetic clutter. The roots of Nazism fed on a lively occultism that spawned the Thule Society, the Germanenorden, the Völkisch movement, Pan-Germanism, and other nationalist cults that believed in a race of Aryan god-men and the urgency of exterminating all inferiors. They exalted superhuman ancestors, whose ancient gnostic rule had brought the Aryans wisdom, power, and prosperity in a prehistoric age until it was supplanted by an alien and hostile culture (namely, Jews, Catholics, and Freemasons); these ancestors were supposed to have encoded their salvation-bringing knowledge in cryptic forms (e.g., runes, myths, traditions), which could be deciphered ultimately only by their spiritual heirs.

This ideal of racial purity really bloomed with Konrad Lorenz, a Nobel scientist highly respected in Nazi circles, who shared Oswald Spengler's belief popularized in
The Decline of the West
(1920) that cultures inevitably decay—but not Spengler's pessimism. Instead he turned to the domestication of animals as an example of how cultures decline, through haphazard breeding of robust and humdrum stock, and championed a biological solution: racial hygienics, a "deliberate, scientifically founded race policy" in which ruin is prevented by the elimination of "degenerate" types. Lorenz used the terms
species, race
, and
Volk
interchangeably and warned that "the healthy volkish body often does not 'notice' how it is being pervaded by elements of decay." Describing that decay as the cancer of a physically ugly people and arguing that each animal's goal is the survival of its species, he invoked an ethical commandment he claimed the Bible supported—"Thou shalt love the future of your Volk above all else"—and called for dividing people between those of "full value" and those of "inferior value" (which included whole races and anyone born with mental or physical disabilities), purging the feeble, both in humans and animals.

Heck agreed, aspiring to nothing less than recasting Germany's natural world, cleansing it, polishing it, perfecting it. A true believer from the first stirrings of Nazism, Heck ingratiated himself with the SS, imbibed Fischer's and Lorenz's beliefs about racial purity, and became a favorite with Hitler and, especially, Hermann Göring, his ideal patron. In this sanitary utopia, Heck's job, essentially, was to reinvent nature, and he found Göring a generous patron with deep pockets. In return, Heck wanted to give Göring dominion over Poland's greatest natural treasure, the fantastic lost-in-time preserve on the Polish-Belarussian border, Białowieża. As Heck appreciated, it made the ultimate gift for a man who stamped his coat of arms on most possessions and liked to dress in "pseudo-medieval outfits of long leather jerkins, soft top boots, and voluminous silk shirts, and go marching around his house and estate carrying a spear." Many aristocrats held key positions in the Nazi Party and most of the high command owned hunting lodges or estates, so an important facet of Heck's job was bagging the best hunting preserves and stocking them in novel ways. Dotted with medieval castles, inheritor of Europe's only primeval forest, Poland boasted some of the finest hunting on the continent. Prewar photographs place Göring at his sumptuously appointed hunting lodge northeast of Berlin, on an estate stretching to the Baltic, complete with a 16,000-acre private preserve which he stocked with elk, deer, wild boar, antelope, and other game animals.

More broadly, the Nazis were ardent animal lovers and environmentalists who promoted calisthenics and healthy living, regular trips into the countryside, and far-reaching animal rights policies as they rose to power. Göring took pride in sponsoring wildlife sanctuaries ("green lungs") as both recreation and conservation areas, and carving out great highways flanked by scenic vistas. That appealed to Lutz Heck as it did to many other world-class scientists, such as physicist Werner Heisenberg, biologist Karl von Frisch, and rocket designer Wernher von Braun. Under the Third Reich, animals became noble, mythic, almost angelic—including humans, of course, but not Slavs, Gypsies, Catholics, or Jews. Although Mengele's subjects could be operated on without any painkillers at all, a remarkable example of Nazi zoophilia is that a leading biologist was once punished for not giving worms enough anesthesia during an experiment.