Zoo keeper's wife

I just finished reading The Zookeper's wife, by Diane Ackerman. I bought it when looking for a good book to read. Having recently read The Guernsey literary and potato peel pie society, I wanted something that continued the story of life in all its smallness triumphing over despair and evil. The title of this book intrigued me, and I was taken by the graphic on the front cover: what will I find through these gates?

The Zookeeper's wife takes place in Nazi occupied Poland - the Warsaw zoo, specifically. Before I began reading, I expected it to be a novelization of true events, but in fact, this is non-fiction. At first, I found this off-putting, but it gradually drew me in. I came to love Poland - the vibrant culture of the people, their great generosity, hospitality, resilience and intelligence; the beautiful countryside and unique zoology.

Giving an account of the horribly inventive cruelty visited on the people of Poland - particularly the Jews - cannot be easy for a writer, but doing so through the experiences of Antonina Zabinski tempers the sadness and disbelief at just how pervasive the evil became.

It was Jan, Antonina's husband, who worked for the underground, commiting acts of bravery and heroism, but it was Antonina who looked after more than 300 Jews as they hid in the zoo, one of the places of refuge along the underground route to safety. "Guests" passed through their home or stayed in the animal habitats for varying lengths of time, some of them hiding in closets, some of them out in the open pretending to be friends or family.

The careful details, the layers of accuracy, and the ingenuity required to bring someone out of the ghetto is astounding. Even the scouts (boy and girl) were mobilized in the resistence, acting as messengers and so on. The Polish people maintained underground schools, universities, seminaries, government, and military. I wonder how effective we would be, if we found ourselves in such a situation of privation and oppression?

As with any biography or account of real events, I found myself wishing for details not given in this book, and wanting to know more about what happened after the last page leaves the Zabinskis. I think stories like this need to be told - not so we won't forget the horror, but so we remember the heroic good people are capable of doing in the bleakest of circumstances.

Even with the grim details of the Nazi occupation, I found myself dwelling longest on the fact that after struggling to surivive those handfull of bitter wartime years, the people of Poland were about to face a handfull of decades behind the iron curtain. Even that story though, ends in victory.