The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman - Book Review
5/5 Stars
Life in the Warsaw zoo was filled with joy, fur, and feathers, and the zookeeper’s wife loved every second of it. Baby lynxes and a badger prowled the house, while an elk followed the zookeeper when he visited the animals. Then the Germans invaded Poland, killing many of the zoo’s animals and taking the rest to Berlin. But through the German occupation the zookeeper and his wife stayed on, tending the zoo’s old ground and hiding Jews in their home and in the animal cages till the war ended. This is their story…
I borrowed The Zookeeper's Wife from my e-library because the description sounded interesting. I started it expecting a normal Holocaust story about a family that hid Jews during the war. When I finished it I was in love with Diane Ackerman's vibrant and touching story about a real-life family that love, laughed, and cried during the Holocaust. This book is, in a way, an oxymoron: it's a heartbreaking book, but it has so many happy moments. It's a story about a family that hid Jews during the Holocaust, but it's equally a story about a small family that loved animals and life.
Antonina (the zookeeper's wife) and Jan (her husband) loved animals and kept everything from pigs and rabbits to badgers and lynxes in their house. They raised their son with the animals and even named him Rys which means "lynx". The German occupation tore away this part of their lives, as bombs exploded throughout the zoo and released animals into the streets. The valuable ones that survived were taken to Berlin by a Nazi zookeeper.
Though their livelihood was gone, Antonina's family did not sit passively under German occupation. Jan was an active resistance member, and Antonina hid many Jews in their house and in the zoo's empty cages. They managed to convince the Germans to use the zoo as a vegetable farm, a pig farm, and even a fox farm, so that they would not have to move. And throughout it all they managed to keep up their spirits up and laugh. Even the song Antonina played on the piano as a signal for the Jews to hide, showed her optimistic outlook on life. The song, "Go, go, go Crete", was written by a Jewish composer!
Though the story has it's happy parts, when it tells the story of the holocaust it rips your heart to shreds. Antonina's family lost friends in the German occupation - animal and human. This book brought the Holocaust home to me in a way that no other book has. The story of Janusz Korczak and his orphans was especially sad. As Janusz and his 200 orphans were marched off to the death trains in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, onlookers were amazed by the orphans silent trust in their 'father'. While most people being marched to the trains had to be kept in line with whips by the German soldiers, Janusz marched in front holding two of the orphans by their hands as the rest silently followed him to their fates. Jan and Antonina did their best to smuggle Jews out of the Ghetto, but they could only help a small number of the hundreds that lived there.
Diane Ackerman has done an amazing job of bringing this family and their world to life in a beautiful and sad retelling. This is the book that everyone should read about the Holocaust. The Holocaust is a horrible piece of history, but one that needs to be remembered as a lesson of what happens when we think that we are better than others.