The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
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3.9 • 295 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestseller now a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain.
A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.
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, best-selling 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. Ironically, the empty zoo cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose names they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself.
Jan led a cell of saboteurs, and the Zabinskis’ young son risked his life carrying food to the Guests, while also tending an eccentric array of creatures in the house. With hidden people having animal names, and pet animals having human names, it’s small wonder the zoo’s codename 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, Diane 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A World War II history that’s as spellbinding as any novel, The Zookeeper’s Wife tells the true story of husband and wife Jan and Antonina Zabinski, keepers of the Warsaw Zoo, who saved the lives of hundreds of Jews and resisters by hiding them among the animals. Antonina's diary is the lively primary source that lends the story a gripping intimacy—we witness her emotional tumult as she calms both wild animals and refugees and deceives German soldiers. Diane Ackerman is a gifted storyteller and naturalist, deftly moving between the historical record and speculating about larger issues of fascism and social control.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ackerman (A Natural History of the Senses) tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina, who, with courage and coolheaded ingenuity, sheltered 300 Jews as well as Polish resisters in their villa and in animal cages and sheds. Using Antonina's diaries, other contemporary sources and her own research in Poland, Ackerman takes us into the Warsaw ghetto and the 1943 Jewish uprising and also describes the Poles' revolt against the Nazi occupiers in 1944. She introduces us to such varied figures as Lutz Heck, the duplicitous head of the Berlin zoo; Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, spiritual head of the ghetto; and the leaders of Zegota, the Polish organization that rescued Jews. Ackerman reveals other rescuers, like Dr. Mada Walter, who helped many Jews "pass," giving "lessons on how to appear Aryan and not attract notice." Ackerman's writing is viscerally evocative, as in her description of the effects of the German bombing of the zoo area: "...the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart." This suspenseful beautifully crafted story deserves a wide readership. 8 pages of illus.
Customer Reviews
Zookeepers Wife
Good historical view. Slow moving and ended rather abruptly.
Zoo Keepers Wife
This was an amazing story of courage and compassion.
The upcoming movie might be better!
Diane Ackerman is really not writing an interesting true story about the Warsaw Zoo and it's zookeepers hiding and protecting Jews during WWII. She is documenting the lives of those rescued. I'm sure her efforts will help in the future as the stories of the Holocaust become impossible to believe. Just too much detail on the lives of the rescued for my taste. It disrupts the narrative.
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