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The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman
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The Zookeeper's Wife

by Diane Ackerman

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    Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay (sweetbug)
    sweetbug: Sarah's Key is a work of fiction based on an actual event that took place in France. Both books deal with little-known stories of women/girls trying to keep others safe during the Holocaust; both examine the terrible physical and emotional toll this action takes on the female protagonist.… (more)
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Heartbreaking and fascinating in turns. ( )
  winecat | May 5, 2013 |
An honest assessment of Polish life during WW2. Our heroine is the wife of the Warsaw Zoo. Survival was a matter of edge, tact and luck as the Germans destroyed the city, burned the ghetto and then left. ( )
  buffalogr | May 3, 2013 |
I thought this would be a great story, about a polish zookeeper couple who, after their zoo is bombed in WWII, shelter Jews. Turns out it is poorly written and, frankly, boring. It drags on, beginning, middle and end. I finished it only because I wanted to know the story of this couple. ( )
  JessieP73 | Apr 6, 2013 |
I have wanted to read Diane Ackerman's books for a while, and I did enjoy her ability to express things in fresh ways. Her impressionistic style was different from the styles of most histories or biographies that I have read. And her setting, characters and "plot," about a family of Polish resisters who helped many Jews escape the Nazis, are striking. ( )
  nmele | Apr 6, 2013 |
Jan and Antonina Żabiński were the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo when Germany invaded Poland. Between the bombing, Nazi cruelty, and the Nazi desire to keep all of the rare animals for themselves, there quickly wasn't much of a zoo to keep. But Jan was an ingenious thinker and he came up with various ideas to keep the zoo complex under his care. From community gardens to a pig farm to a fur farm, he always had the zoo under his control. He was deeply involved in the Polish Underground, and as part of his efforts, he moved hundreds of Jews through his zoo on the way to safer ground.

This wasn't exactly what I was expecting, and that was both good and bad. Generally coming at WWII through the Holocaust, I mainly think of Poland as the home of Auschwitz and the worst of the concentration camps. That's as far as I take it. I've never given any thought to the fact that Germany invaded Poland first and kept the Poles brutally repressed throughout the duration. Diane Ackerman showed me how bad it was for the Poles.

My problem was that I expected more of a narrative about life in the zoo, but the story was all over the place. There was actually very little about the zoo and the Jews in hiding there. A few who stayed for a while were written about, but that was about it. The rest of it bounced around a lot. There was a constant thread about the Żabiński family and how they made it through the war. But then there would be paragraphs about girl couriers helping the Underground, a pediatrician who refused to escape because he didn't want to leave the children in his orphanage, random people in the Underground and what their roles were, some animal behavior, some Warsaw battles, Polish superstitions, and backgrounds on a few of the Jews the Żabiński's helped. It sounds a little more coherent here, but with so many random paragraphs, it was hard for me to settle into a reading pace.

I will say that I had never heard of Janusz Korczak, the pediatrician I mentioned earlier. His story and the story of "his" children just broke my heart. I can see why "the Israelis revere him as one of the Thirty-Six Just Men whose pure souls make possible the world's salvation." He made the war easier for a lot of young souls and taught them gentleness in a world that had gotten insanely bloodthirsty. He marched with them and accompanied them and ultimately eased their passing into a better world.

Anyway, I also enjoyed the stories of the animals that lived with the Żabińskis. They found some truly eccentric characters who were full of personality. Badger in particular just tickled me to death. Why wouldn't a badger pay attention and teach himself to use a chamber pot? Oh, and Wicek the carnivorous rabbit was another favorite.

Obviously, there was a good story here that needed to be told. In fact there were a lot of good stories in here. That made the narrative feel very choppy and full of tangents for me. Still, these are people who should be remembered and I recommend it with reservations for that reason. They were truly Righteous Among the Nations. ( )
  JG_IntrovertedReader | Apr 3, 2013 |
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At dawn in an outlying district of Warsaw, sunlight swarmed around the trunks of blooming linden trees and crept up the white walls of a 1930s stucco and glass villa where the zoo director and his wife slept in a bed crafted from white birch, a pale wood used in canoes, tongue depressors, and Windsor chairs.
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Wikipedia in English (3)

Book description
Relates the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, Christian zookeepers at the Warsaw Zoo, who helped save the lives of approximately three hundred Polish Jews during World War II by housing and feeding them on zoo grounds and teaching them how to "pass" as Aryan.
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Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 039333306X, Paperback)

Amazon Significant Seven, September 2007: On the heels of Alan Weisman's The World Without Us I picked up Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper’s Wife. Both books take you to Poland's forest primeval, the Bialowieza, and paint a richly textured portrait of a natural world that few of us would recognize. The similarities end there, however, as Ackerman explores how that sense of natural order imploded under the Nazi occupation of Poland. Jan and Antonina Zabiniski--keepers of the Warsaw Zoo who sheltered Jews from the Warsaw ghetto--serve as Ackerman's lens to this moment in time, and she weaves their experiences and reflections so seamlessly into the story that it would be easy to read the book as Antonina's own miraculous memoir. Jan and Antonina's passion for life in all its diversity illustrates ever more powerfully just how narrow the Nazi worldview was, and what tragedy it wreaked. The Zookeeper’s Wife is a powerful testament to their courage and--like Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise--brings this period of European history into intimate view. --Anne Bartholomew

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:52:19 -0500)

(see all 3 descriptions)

The true story of how the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands. When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw--and the city's zoo along with it. With most of their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina çZabiânski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen "guests" hid inside the çZabiânskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the Polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both its human and its animal inhabitants--otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes--and keeping alive an atmosphere of play and innocence even as Europe crumbled around her.--From publisher description.… (more)

» see all 2 descriptions

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