After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty aniaml cages. With animal names for these 'guests' and human names for the animals, it's no wonder the zoo's code name became 'The House Under a Crazy Star". ( )

Chosen by my bookclub, this non-fiction book was not exactly what I was expecting. The story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, this story significantly changed my perceptions of what happened during World War II in Poland. Jan and Antonina Zabinski were animal lovers, deeply attached to the Warsaw Zoo and its animals. As the zookeeper's wife Antonina raised orphaned animals in the family's home alongside their young son while Jan was rightfully proud of the zoo he was shepherding so carefully. But they were living in times destined to be rent apart by a devastating war, calling upon them to make a moral stand and then to turn that moral stand into action.

Jan fought against the Nazis during the Blitzkreig while Antonina held the homefront and feared for her son, Rysz, and for the animals left in her care. And of course, once the Nazis won, the fears increased. The animals not killed outright in the bombings suffered two fates: either be shipped to Berlin to the zoo there or be shot during a Nazi Christmas hunting party. And while the zoo ceased to be a zoo by any definition, the Zabinskis were allowed to continue living there through its other incarnations, giving them the means to smuggle more than 300 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto, saving them from certain death in the camps. Jan worked throughout the war, helping the Polish Underground, smuggling human beings, and helping with low levels of sabotage. Antonina was more confined in the role she could play, especially during a difficult pregnancy, but without her calm head and quick thinking as the matriarch to a zoo-full of hidden people, all could have been lost.

The Zabinski's story is one that shows the heroism of the common people. It proves that more people than we sometimes suspect avoided the moral depravity that war brings in its wake. And it is a compelling and wonderful story of truly good people. So why was the book itself just the slightest bit dull? Ackerman makes many digressions from her main story, telling of the history that brought Poland to this pass, stories of acquaintances of the Zabinskis who really have almost nothing to do with the purported story here, and other bits that caused the story to drag instead of leap along. She detailed long lists of people or insects or animals that served no purpose in the narrative and she occasionally waxed overly lyrical about pieces of the natural world (a tendency I put down to her love of gardening and natural history as evidenced by her other book topics).

The book was strongest when she concentrated on the terrors that the Zabinskis faced, small and large, and when she allowed Antonina's journal to speak for her. There was little beyond superficial information about what sort of man Jan was, leaving the impression that he was a silent, rather cold person while she rounded out Antonina well, thanks to descriptions from those who had known her and to her own writings. But her attention to Antonina faltered at times and it was at those times that it became easy to put the book down and pursue other stories. This is a story that should have been riveting. It deserves to be told. But it plodded more than it ever should have. ( )

A story of an amazing Polish woman who managed a zoo in Warsaw during the Holocaust and saved over 300 people . ( )

I was really impressed by this book. It's the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski who hid Jews in their villa on the zoo grounds in Warsaw, Poland. Some heart-wrenching stories in there. What made it even more amazing is that it is a true story. Most of the book is taken from the diary that Antonina kept during the war, so we get a close look at how she felt. The descriptions of how fear affects you were really well done. The only thing I didn't like about the book is that I didn't really find out what happened to Jan and Antonina after the war or how the diary came to be found. ( )

(#39 in the 2008 Book Challenge)

I read a review of this when it first came out, and it looked fascinating -- the zookeeper of the Warsaw Zoo and his wife were very involved in the Polish underground during the occupation, and their resistance activities included hiding Jewish people in the zoo. Unfortunately, the book doesn't really add any other coolness to what I told you right there -- that's the whole story. It's based on the diaries of the zookeeper's wife, and the author also included some more general stories of the Warsaw ghetto. I see what she was aiming for, sort of a collection of anecdotal slices about the ghetto, tied together by Mrs. Zookeeper's journals, but it ended up being too random. I was also hoping there would be more information about the zoo itself, but I guess that was just a hook; by that time the animals were gone: some relocated and others sadly meeting bad ends during the initial bombing.

Also, do you remember in Amadeus when the Emperor says something like "it's nice, but it has too many notes" about Mozart's music, and Tom Hulce as Mozart (wasn't he supposed to have more of a career after that?) gets this look on his face like "ignoramus says what?" and the audience gets to snicker knowing that only a complete Philistine would think that Mozart used too many notes? Well, my reaction to this book was like that -- there were too many words. I felt bludgeoned by adjectives, as if the author was using the thesaurus to make her term paper longer the night before it was due to meet the minimum number of pages.

Grade: C, a sad C.
Recommended: If you are very familiar with Warsaw you would get some enjoyment from that aspect at least. In general, I think this is one of those unfortunate things where the real story strikes you as compelling so you want the book to be better than average ... but at the end of the day, it's more dimwitted than anything else.