I am fascinated by Diane Ackerman’s novel “The Zookeeper’s Wife” for two reasons. First, I’ve always loved animals. For many years in China, I would visit every zoo when I was in a new city, however small the zoo might be. Secondly, Diane’s novel is based on facts: It is a true story of how the director of Warsaw’s zoo and his wife took advantage of the Nazis’ obsession with rare animals to save over three hundred doomed people – Jews, Poles, and others – during the second World War, when Warsaw came under the occupation of Hitler’s Germany and when tens of thousands of Jews and underground fighters in the city were murdered in cold blood. On “Black Saturday,” the Uprising’s fifth day alone, for instance, Himmler’s battle-hardened SS and Wehrmacht soldiers stormed into Warsaw and slaughtered 30,000 men, women, and children. According to German figures, they shipped 316,822 people from Warsaw to concentration camps between early 1942 and January 1943.

When German troops started marching on Warsaw, its zookeeper Jan, his wife Antonina, and their son Ryś joined the huge crowds of people escaping from the city. Soon, however, they were driven back to their zoo. And as luck would have it, Jan happened to be a Pole a high-ranking zoologist-turned official was looking for.

Lutz Heck, Director of Berlin Zoo, was a zealous Nazi who supported Hitler’s concept of about racial purity, part of which was the well-known Nazi idea that the Aryans are the best race in the world and that Jews, considered to be an inferior race, should be wiped out from the face of the earth. Where Hitler’s concept of racial purity extended to the animal world, Lutz Heck’s role came in: he worked very hard to keep the animal breeds pure by preserving the superior and weeding out the inferior. Strangely, he was dead against what we know as hybrid vigor. One of his pet projects was to preserve the European Bison, which was believed to be one of the oldest and purest of bisons in the world. He became a favorite with Hitler and, especially, Hermann Göring, his ideal patron. One important job he did was to find the best hunting preserves in Europe and stock them in novel ways so that Hitler and other top Nazi leaders could go hunting there.

As it happened, Jan and Heck had met time and again before WWII at the annual conferences of the International Association of Directors of National Zoos. And now, when Heck met Jan at Warsaw Zoo under German occupation, he persuaded him to allow him to take most of its prized animals to zoos in Germany and as a reciprocal favor, Heck would guarantee the normal life and work of Jan as the man in charge of whatever remained of Warsaw Zoo.

Thus a new way of life began for Jan, his wife Antonina, and their son Ryś. Nominally, Jan continued to work in the zoo, but most of the time, he was actively involved in the activities of the underground fighting. The daily maintenance of the zoo and the care of the few animals that remained there fell on the shoulders of Antonina.

Not long after the German occupation, the Germans decided to turn the zoo into a farm where animals were grown for fur, to be used to make coats for German soldiers fighting in Russia during the winter. Jan and Antonina could not but accept the decision. Whether a zoo or a farm for furs, it made little difference. What mattered was that Jan and Antonina turned their institution into a refugee transition center for Jews, Poles and other such people in danger of being arrested by the Nazis and sent to concentration camps or Ghettos. Often at a day’s notice, Antonina had to provide housing and food for those people in the zoo, sometimes in the dank basement and sometimes anywhere else that could accommodate a person or two.

The difficulty of Antonina’s job lay partly in the fact that the zoo was surrounded by many posts with German soldiers stationed in them. And from time to time, some of them would come and visit the zoo on private reasons or search it on military orders. It was no wonder that worries and dangers of every kind were the constant companions of Antonina, her husband and son, and everyone else living in the zoo. To reduce danger and facilitate the transition process, Jan and Antonina gave animal names to people and people’s names to animals.

In one case, Ryś and a transiting boy were playing with Antonina standing nearby when a German soldier dashed in, a revoler in his hand, and ordered the boys to follow him into a nearby forest. All Antonina heard a few moments later were two shots fired by the soldier. She almost collapsed in fear. But miraculously, the two boys returned safe and sound. It turned out that the soldier just wanted to play a trick on Antonina and her charge.

In another case, Antonina was nursing her new-born baby Teresa on a sweltering summer afternoon when the kitchen door was squeezed open and a German officer strode into the room. He stopped a moment when he saw her with the baby, and as he edged closer Antonina smelled alcohol on his breath. Snooping around suspiciously, he wandered into Jan’s study where he found a piano. Excitedly, he asked if Antonina could play the piano: he himself was probably a professional musician. “A little,” she replied. And he asked her to play for him. She began playing “Ständchen,” a romantic song by Schubert, hoping that this German favorite might calm him with memories. “No, not that!” he screamed. “Why are you playing that?!” To her utter disbelief, he asked her to play the American national anthem “The Star-Spnagled Banner.” And as her fingers skidded over the piano, he belted out the American song in broken English.

In still another case, German troops had already retreated from Warsaw after a fierce battle near the zoo. One day a gang of Russian soldiers arrived with “wild eyes,” and busily began searching the cupboards, walls and floors for anything they could steal, including picture frames and carpets. Antonina approached them without any fear. “If they guess my fear, they’ll devour me like hyenas,” she thought to herself. Their leader, a man with Asian features and icy eyes, walked up to her and stared at her hard, while Teresa slept nearby in a tiny wicker cradle. Antonina resolved not to look away or move. Suddenly, the man grabbed the small gold medallion she always wore around her neck. Slowly and gently, Antonina pointed to the baby and commanded in a loud, stern voice in Russian:

“Not allowed! Your mother! Your wife! Your sister! Do you understand?”

Then she placed her hand on his shoulder. Surprised, he placed his hand into the back pocket of his pants, fished out some dirty pink candies, and handed them over to Antonina.

“For the baby!” he said.

Antonina shook his hand in thanks. He smiled at her admiringly and glanced at her ringless hands. Then he took a ring off his own finger, and offered it to her.

“It’s for you,” he said. “Take it! Put it on our finger.”

As she slipped on the ring, she was surprised to find it bearing a silver eagle, a Polish emblem, which meant that he must have stolen it from some dead Polish soldier.

Then the Russian officer did something unusual. He ordered, “Leave everything you took! I will kill you like dogs if you don’t obey me!” Surprised, his men dropped all the furniture and loot they’d gathered and dragged small items out of their pockets.

“Let’s go now – don’t touch anything!” the officer shouted.

From those and similar encounters one can easily understand what Jan said about Antonina after the war. “Antonina was a housewife. She wasn’t involved in politics or war, and was timid, and yet despite that she played a major role in saving others and never once complained about the danger.” “Her confidence could disarm even the most hostile, her strength stemming from her love of animals. It wasn’t just that she identified with them, but from time to time she seemed to shed her own human traits and become a panther or a hyena. Then, ale to adopt their fighting instinct, she arose as a fearless defender of her kind.”

Antonina had a traditional Catholic upbringing, but according to Jan, that didn’t deter her. “On the contrary, it strengthened her determination to be true to herself, to follow her heart, even though it meant enduring a lot of self-sacrifice.”

Zookeeper’s Wife makes very interesting reading partly because it carries so many real-life stories about animals.

Here’s a story about their pets.

In September 1944, the Nazis were retreating while the Red Army was advancing toward Warsaw. Antonina, Ryś, Jan’s mother, and others, however, had to leave the city for fear of imminent battles. Of the pets that had been living with them, a muskrat, Wicek (a pet rabbit), a cat, rabbits, an eagle, which should they bring along and which should be left behind? They found it very difficult to make the choices. In the end, they decided to risk taking only Wicek and release all the rest to the wild and their wits.

On the day of departure, Ryś watched a huge shell landing about 50 feet from their villa, digging in but not exploding. A bomb squad appeared, warning that anyone still in the villa at noon would be shot. Ryś fed the rabbits dandelion leaves a last time, then opened all the cages and turned them loose. But the rabbits seemed to be confused, not knowing what to do. Ryś lifted them out by their long ears, one at a time, and carried them to the lawn.

“Go, silly rabbits, go!” Ryś said, shooing them. “You’re free!”

Balls of all sizes hopped slowly through the grass. Suddenly their pet cat Balbina sprang from the bushes and ran to Ryś with a loud purr. Ryś was so impressed that he lifted the cat into his arms, saying, “What! Do you want to go with us?” Carrying her, he walked toward the house, but the cat ran free.

After all, the cat came just to say good-bye; she didn’t want to leave.

Here’s another story, about a cat serving as the surrogate mother for two baby foxes.

Balbina gave birth to a litter. The second morning, however, she found her new-born babies all gone, and in their place were two baby foxes who had lost their birth mother. The baby foxes nudged themselves against the cat for milk. At the beginning, she didn’t like them. But soon she came to love them, feeding them, licking them, and a few days later, she began to teach them to do this and that. As time passed, the two little foxes acquired many of the habits of a cat. For instance, they would climb onto the top of a cabinet and watch. They would even jump onto a table to share people’s food.

There was one thing the two little foxes never learned: They couldn’t meow the way a cat does. They could only make cries like a fox. And this puzzled their surrogate mother a great deal.

From all this Antonina came to the conclusion that animals learn to shed their beastly behavior while some people never learn to drop their beastly nature. Do you agree with her?

One important thing that I’ve learned from Zookeeper’s Wife is about religion.

Many people know that 30 to 40 percent of the world’s Jews were killed during World War II, but few of us know that 80 to 90 percent of the Orthodox community perished. Many in the Orthodox community have kept alive an ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation reaching back to the Old Testament world of the prophets. Abraham Joshua Heschel, an eloquent rabbi who left Warsaw in 1939 to become an important professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, tells us something very important in the upbringing of kids in the Orthodox community in Warsaw.

“In my youth,” he wrote of his childhood in Warsaw, “there was one thing we did not have to look for and that was exaltation. Every moment is great, we were taught, every moment is unique.”

The etymology of the Hebrew word for prophet, navi, combines three processes: navach ( to cry out), nava (to gush or flow) and navuv (to be hollow). The task of this meditation was “to open the heart, to unclog the channel between the infinite and the mortal,” and rise into a state of rapture known as mochi gadlut, “Great Mind.”

Thanks to these words, I’ve come to know a little more about religion. And let’s go back to those words again: Every moment is great. Every moment is unique. What a significant concept that is!

It is no wonder that the weak, sick, exhausted, hungry, tortured, and insane should all go to the rabbi for spiritual nourishment. By stilling the mind and communing with nature ^[1], they hear the [Teaching’s] voice from the world as whole, from the chirping of the birds, the mooing of the cows, from the voices and tumult of human beings; from all these he hears the voice of God….