The Zookeeper's WifeA War Story

At first, it seems like a too-weird-to-be-true, high-concept movie pitch: in wartime Warsaw, Jews hide in abandoned animal cages as bombs burst around them — and Nazi scientists plot the revival of extinct Aryan animals. However, The Zookeeper’s Wife is actually a much rarer breed of narrative, a genteel World War II story that turns out to be as much an elegy for Warsaw’s lost intelligentsia as a cloak-and-dagger Resistance thriller.

Warsaw Zoo director Jan Zabinksi brought his wife Antonina to live in a villa overlooking the Pheasant House in 1931. At the time, Warsaw was one of the great European cultural centers. The Zabinskis adored holding plays and performances on the zoo grounds, encouraging artists of all stripes to use their animals as creative material. This halcyon period did not last, of course. By 1939, Hitler had begun his brutal progress East, and the Zabinskis, like all Poles, faced a new and terrifying reality. However, they did not submit to Nazi rule, even as their prize animals (including a baby elephant!) were removed to zoos in Germany. Instead, they chose ever more dangerous paths. While raising children and a menagerie of animals, they stored a cache of Underground guns beneath the elephant enclosure, and hosted an expanding coterie of “Guests” — Jews and political undesirables — in their house and on their grounds.

Predominantly a natural history writer, Diane Ackerman has the eyes and ears of a poet (she is, in fact, a published poet). The Zookeeper’s Wife could have been a straight history of a fascinating time and place, but Ackerman finds the tragic-comic heart of the Zabinskis’ world, relishing every detail. It is easy to see how she might identify with Antonina, a truly sensitive woman, whose acute understanding of animal behavior extended to the best and worst of humankind. Suzanne Torren’s precise diction feels appropriately old-world for this story.