In Antonina's bedroom, shelves and drawers recessed into white walls, and the bed nestled in a shallow alcove, from which it jutted like a well-upholstered pier. All the furniture had been crafted from silver birch, a plentiful tree in Poland, both hard and durable, a pale wood whose fibers vary from plain to flame-like, with here and there brown knots and fine brown traces of insects that once attacked the cambium of the living tree.
On the south side of the room, beside tall windows, a glass door opened onto the wraparound terrace; and on the north side, three white doors led to the hallway, the attic, and the step-in closet where Guests hid. Instead of the lever handles of the villa's other doors, the closet bore a high keyhole, and though it offered little space inside, a Guest could curl up there among the glide of fabrics and Antonina's comforting scent. Because the closet opened on both sides like a magician's trunk, bunched clothes concealed the opposite door whichever way one looked. As safety hatches go, it served well, especially since its hallway door began a foot or so above the floor, suggesting only a shallow cupboard, which a pile of laundry or a small table could easily disguise.
One day Maurycy, seated in a bedside chair, heard the housekeeper Pietrasia on the stairs and he hid in the closet, nestled among Antonina's polka-dot dresses. As Pietrasia left the room, Maurycy quietly emerged and sat down, but before Antonina could say a word Pietrasia opened the door and rushed back in with a housekeeping question she'd forgotten to ask. Seeing a stranger, she stopped abruptly, breathed hard, and frantically crossed herself.
"So you will continue to take salicylic acid," Maurycy said to Antonina in a doctorly tone, and delicately holding her wrist, he added: "And now I will check your pulse." Later, Antonina wrote that her anxious pulse wasn't hard to feel, and that his own had pounded down to his fingertips.
Pietrasia studied their faces, finding them calm, and shook her head in confusion. Mumbling that she must have had some sort of vision problem or blackout, she left the room, rubbing her brow and shaking her head as she went downstairs.
Antonina called Ryś and said: "Please bring me the doctor's coat and hat and let him out of the house by the kitchen door, so that Pietrasia will see him leaving. After that, call her to check on the chickens. Do you understand?"
Ryś blinked his eyes, thought awhile, and then a smile crept over his face. "I'll tell her that this morning I accidentally let a chicken out and we have to find it. Then the doctor can sneak back in through the garden door. That would work."
"Thank you for being so smart," Antonina told him. "Now hurry!"
From then on, Maurycy only roamed the house at night, after the housekeeper had left for the day and he could safely prowl downstairs, as if on forbidden tundra. Every evening, Antonina found him walking back and forth across the living room, slowly, reverently, so that he "would not forget how to walk," he explained. At some point, he'd pause to check on the hamster he'd befriended, before joining other Guests for Fox Man's piano concert.
One evening, between Rachmaninoff preludes, Fox Man took Maurycy aside and said, "Doctor, I'm bad at paperwork, and some of it's in German—a language I don't speak well at all. My fur business is growing and I really need a secretary. . .. Maybe you could help me?"
Maurycy had once confided to Antonina that, in seclusion, using an unfamiliar name, he felt like a phantom. This offer of Fox Man's meant Maurycy could become real again, with papers and mobility, and, best of all, residency status in the villa as an employee of the fur farm. Becoming real was no small accomplishment, since occupation ushered in an overgrowth and undergrowth of official identity cards and documents—bogus working papers, birth certificate, passport, registration card, coupons, and passes. His new papers declared him to be Paweł Zieliński, the official secretary of the fox farm, and so he rejoined the household as a lodger, which also meant he didn't have to hide in the upstairs closet, a space now available for another Guest. Becoming real brought psychological changes, too. He slept on a couch downstairs in the hamster's narrow room, adjacent to the dining room, among the rustlings of his favorite pet, and Antonina noticed that his entire mood began to change.
Maurycy told Antonina that every night he prepared his bed slowly with a happiness unknown to him since before occupation, taking pleasure in the simple acts of carefully folding his only suit, frayed as it was, and laying it over a chair beside his own bookshelf, occupied by the handful of books he had salvaged from his old life, in a house where he could sleep unmolested, surrounded by a surrogate family whose presence padded his existence.
For a great many people, the Ghetto had erased the subtle mysticism of everyday life, such reassuring subliminals as privacy, agency, and above all the faith that allows one to lie down at night and surrender easily to sleep. Among the innocence of hamsters, Maurycy slept near his books, with documents that bestowed the status of being real, and, best of all, under the same roof as his beloved Magdalena. Finding love undemolished, with enough space to exist and his heart still limber, gave him hope, Antonina thought, and even renegade "moments of pleasure and joy, feelings he'd lost in Ghetto life."
On February 2, 1943, the German Sixth Army surrendered at Stalingrad in the first big defeat of the Wehrmacht, but only three weeks later Jews working in Berlin armaments factories were freighted off to Auschwitz, and by mid-March the Kraków Ghetto was liquidated. Meanwhile, the Underground continued attacks of various kinds, 514 since January 1; and on January 18 the first armed resistance began in the Warsaw Ghetto.
During this time of seismic upheaval, more and more Ghetto dwellers washed up on the deck of the villa, arriving weather-beaten, "like shipwrecked souls," Antonina wrote in her diary. "We felt that our house wasn't a light, flimsy boat dancing on high waves, but a Captain Nemo's submarine gliding through deep ocean on its journey to a safe port." Meanwhile, the war storm blew violently, scaring all, and "casting a shadow on the lives of our Guests, who fled from the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of gas chambers," needing more than refuge. "They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war's horrors would one day end," while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.
Keeping the body alive at the expense of spirit wasn't Antonina's way. Jan believed in tactics and subterfuge, and Antonina in living as joyously as possible, given the circumstances, while staying vigilant. So, on the one hand, Jan and Antonina each kept a cyanide pill with them at all times, but on the other, they encouraged humor, music, and conviviality. To the extent possible, theirs was a bearable, at times even festive, Underground existence. Surely, in response to the inevitable frustrations brought about by living in close quarters, the Guests uttered Yiddish's famous curses, which run the gamut from graphic ("May you piss green worms!" or "A barracks should collapse on you!") to ornate:
You should own a thousand houses
with a thousand rooms in each house
and a thousand beds in every room.
And you should sleep each night
in a different bed, in a different room,
in a different house, and get up every morning
and go down a different staircase
and get into a different car,
driven by a different chauffeur,
who should drive you to a different doctor
—and he shouldn't know what's wrong with you either!
Nonetheless, "I have to admit that the atmosphere in our house was quite pleasant," Antonina confessed in her diary, "sometimes even almost happy." This contrasted sharply with the texture of life and the mood inside even the best hideouts around town. For example, Antonina and Jan knew Adolf Berman well, and most likely read the letter Adolf received in November 1943, from Judit Ringelblum (Emanuel's wife), which told of the mood in a bunker nicknamed "Krysia":
Here a terrible depression reigns—an indefinite prison term. Awful hopelessness. Perhaps you can cheer us up with general news and maybe we could arrange for the last of our nearest to be
with us.
Sharing a room, the hamster and Maurycy seemed to find amusement in each other, and Antonina noted how quickly the two became companions. "You know what," Maurycy said one day, "I like this little animal so much, and since my new name is Paweł [Paul], I think his should be Piotr [Peter]. Then we can be two disciples!"
After supper each evening Maurycy turned Piotr loose on the table's polished mesa, where the hamster skittered from plate to plate, whisking up crumbs until his fat cheeks dragged. Then Maurycy would gather him up in one hand and carry him back to his cage. In time, Piotr trusted him enough to float around the house on the carpet of Maurycy's open palm, the pair became inseparable, and villa-mates began referring to Paweł and Piotr collectively as "the Hamsters."
CHAPTER 24
IN THE SPRING OF 1943, HEINRICH HIMMLER WISHED TO GIVE Hitler an incomparable birthday present, one to elevate him above all others in Hitler's favor. Himmler, who often held intimate conversations with Hitler's photograph and strove to be Hitler's best and most faithful servant, would have lassoed and gift-wrapped the moon if he could. "For him, I would do anything," he once told a friend. "Believe me, if Hitler were to say I should shoot my mother, I would do it and be proud of his confidence." As a gift, he swore to liquidate the remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, on April 19, the first day of Passover, an important Jewish holy day, and also the eve of Hitler's birthday.
At 4 A.M., small German patrols and assault squads cautiously entered the Ghetto and caught a few Jews on their way to work, but the Jews somehow managed to escape and the Germans withdrew. At 7 A.M., Major General Jürgen Stroop, commander of an SS brigade, returned with 36 officers and 2,054 soldiers, and roared straight to the center of the Ghetto with tanks and machine guns. To his surprise, he found barricades manned by Jews who returned fire with pistols, several rifles, one machine gun, and many "Molotov cocktails," gasoline-filled bottles bunged up with burning rags. Finns had recently borrowed the idea of the bottle grenade from Franco nationalists, who improvised it during the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War, a time when predinner cocktails slid into vogue among the swanky set. When Russia invaded Finland, the Finns sarcastically named the bomb after Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov. Though vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped, Jews managed to hold Nazis at bay until nightfall, and again the following day when soldiers reappeared with flamethrowers, police dogs, and poison gas. From then on, about 1,500 guerrillas fought back at every chance.
What Himmler planned as a gift-wrapped massacre became a siege lasting nearly a month, until at last the Germans decided to torch everything—buildings, bunkers, sewers, and all the people in them. Many died in the fires, some surrendered, others committed suicide, and a few escaped to tell and write of the armageddon. Underground newspapers called upon Christian Poles to help escaping Jews find shelter, and the Żabíńskis eagerly obliged.
"Nearby, on the other side of the wall, life flowed on as usual, as yesterday, as always," one survivor wrote. "People, citizens of the capital, enjoyed themselves. They saw the smoke from the fires by day and the flames by night. A carousel went round and round beside the ghetto, children danced in a circle. It was charming. They were happy. Country girls visiting the capital rode on the roundabout, looking over the flames of the ghetto," laughing, catching leaves of ash that floated their way, as a loud carnival tune played.
Finally, on May 16, Major General Stroop sent Hitler a proud report: "The Warsaw Ghetto is no more." According to the Underground Economic Bulletin of May 16, 1943, 100,000 apartments burned down, 2,000 places of industry, 3,000 shops, and a score of factories. In the end, the Germans captured only 9 rifles, 59 pistols, and several hundred homemade bombs of various sorts. Seven thousand Jews had been shot outright, 22,000 were shipped to the death mills of Treblinka or Majdanek, and thousands more went to labor camps. To achieve this cost the Germans only 16 dead and 85 wounded.
As everyone at the villa followed news of the Ghetto Uprising, Antonina recorded their mood as "electrified, stunned, helpless, proud." At first, they'd heard that Polish and Jewish flags were hoisted above the Ghetto, then, as smoke and sounds of artillery fire rose, they learned from their friend Stefan Korboński, a high-ranking member of the Underground, that the Jewish Fighting Organization and the Jewish Fighting Union—only 700 men and women—were battling heroically, but "the Germans have removed, murdered, or burned alive tens of thousands of Jews. Out of the three million Polish Jews no more than 10 per cent remain."
Then, one terrible day, a gray rainfall settled on the zoo, a long, slow rain of ash carried on a westerly wind from the burning Jewish Quarter just across the river. Everyone at the villa had friends trapped in that final stage of annihilating Warsaw's 450,000 Jews.
On December 10, just before curfew, after Jan had made it home safely again and Pietrasia had left for the day, Antonina summoned the family, Fox Man, Magdalena, Maurycy, Wanda, and others to the dinner table for their evening soup of borscht, a glossy red beet soup that reflects candlelight and pools like claret on a large silver spoon. Despite the swirling cold that appeared as snow-djinns under the streetlamps, the villa had enough coal to keep everyone warm that winter. In the kitchen, after dinner, while Ryś was changing the water in Szczurcio's bathtub, he heard a quiet knocking. Carefully, he opened the door, then he ran excitedly into the dining room to tell his parents the news.
"Mom," he said, "Sable's daughter and her family are here!"
Mystified, Fox Man set down his newspaper. The fur farm didn't raise sable, a small minklike animal.
"This house is totally crazy!" he said. "You use animal names for people and people's names for animals! I never know whether it's people or animals you're talking about. Who or what is this 'Sable'? I don't know if it's a first name or a code name or a person's name or an animal's name. It's all too confusing!" Then he stood up dramatically and went to his room.
Antonina hurried to the kitchen to greet the new sables in the house: Regina Kenigswein, her husband Samuel, and their two boys—five-year-old Miecio and three-year-old Stefcio. Their youngest, Staś, less than a year old, went to a foundling home run by Father Boduen, because they worried the baby's crying might draw attention. Regina was also "carrying a baby under her heart," as the saying went—she was pregnant with her fourth.
In the summer of 1942, during the mass deportations to concentration camps, with the passages from the courthouse sealed and escape routes through the mazy sewers not yet mapped, Samuel had asked a Catholic friend, Zygmunt Piętak, for help escaping with his family and finding refuge on the Aryan side. A complex web of friends, acquaintances, and chance primed most escapes from the Ghetto, and that held true for the Kenigsweins. Samuel and his friend Szapse Rotholc had joined the Ghetto police force and quickly befriended sympathetic or greedy German guards and Polish smugglers. At night, carrying the sedated children in sacks, the Kenigsweins bribed guards and climbed over the Ghetto wall. At first they were placed in an apartment Piętak had rented for them, where they hid until late 1943. During that entire time, Piętak served as their only contact with the outside world, visiting them often with food and necessities. But when money ran out and they were evicted, Piętak asked Jan if he could lodge the family while the Underground found them shelter elsewhere.
Antonina knew Regina, the daughter of a Mr. Sable (in Polish, Sobol) who had supplied fruit for the zoo animals before the war, a kind, stoop-shouldered man who always wore the same old faded vest, and lumbered beneath heavy baskets of fruits and vegetables. Despite the load, he usually found room in his pockets for extra treats and gifts, like sweet cherries for the monkeys or a yellow apple for Ryś. But the real bridge between the Sable family and the Żabíńskis was through Mr. Sable's son, who belonged to the Ghetto labor force and sometimes stole away from his work site and ran to the zoo, where the Żabíńskis gave him potatoes and other vegetables to smuggle home. One day, he explained that he'd been reassigned to another work gang inside the Ghetto, and implored A
ntonina to cajole his German boss into letting him continue working outside. Antonina did, and noted afterward:
"Maybe this Arbeitsführer was a good man, or maybe he was just shocked when I told him that without the food Sable took back to the Ghetto his family would starve to death. Using quite good Polish, he said that I should be 'more careful.' But young Sable was allowed to keep working outside the Ghetto and bringing food home to his family for over a month."
Not only had the Żabíńskis known Regina as a girl, they had attended her wedding and Jan had worked with her husband, Samuel—to build bunkers. A famous boxer, Samuel Kenigswein used to fight at the Maccabee and Stars sports clubs in Warsaw, and he was also a trained carpenter who helped Zegota create and remodel hideouts. During the war, architect Emilia Hizowa, a central figure in Zegota, invented false walls that slid open at the push of a button, and workmen installed them in flats around the city, where residents took care not to block them with furniture. The ploy worked: The uncluttered passed as the honest and drew no attention.
When the Kenigsweins first arrived at the zoo, their plight stirred Antonina deeply: "I looked at them with tears in my eyes. Poor chicks with big eyes full of fear and sadness looked back at me." Regina's eyes, especially, disturbed her, because they were "the leaden eyes of a young mother doomed to death."
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story Page 17
