Sitting down heavily on a couch, she felt glued in place. Until this moment, she hadn’t let herself believe that her country might really lose its independence. Again. If occupation wasn’t new, neither was ousting the enemy, but it had been twenty-one years since the last war with Germany, most of Antonina’s life, and the prospect stunned her. For ten years, the zoo had seemed a principality all its own, protected by the moat of the Vistula, with daily life a jigsaw-puzzle fit for her avid sensibility.
Back at the lampshade store, she told everyone the sorry news she’d heard from Englert, which didn’t agree with Polish Mayor Starzyński’s upbeat radio broadcasts, in which he denounced the Nazis, offered hope, and rallied everyone to defend the capital at all costs.
“While speaking to you now,” he had said on one occasion, “I can see it through the window in its greatness and glory, shrouded in smoke, red in flames: glorious, invincible, fighting Warsaw!”[9]
Puzzled, they wondered whom to believe: the mayor in a public speech or members of the Resistance. Surely the latter. In another broadcast, Starzyński had used the past tense at one point: “I wanted Warsaw to be a great city. I believed that it would be great. My associates and I drew up plans and made sketches of a great Warsaw of the future.” In light of Starzyński’s tense (was it a slip?), Antonina’s news rang truer and everyone’s mood fell, as the owners edged among the tables, switching on small lamps.
Several days later, after Warsaw’s surrender, Antonina sat at a table with the others, hungry but too depressed to eat the little food in front of her, when she heard a crisp knock at the door. No one visited anymore, no one bought lamps or fixed broken lampshades. Anxiously, the owners opened the door a crack, and to her astonishment there stood Jan, looking exhausted and relieved. Hugs and kisses followed, then he sat down at the table and told them his story.
When Jan and his friends had left Warsaw weeks before, on the evening of September 7, they followed the river and walked toward Brześć on Bug, as part of a phantom army, looking for a unit to join. Not finding one, they finally split up, and on September 25, Jan overnighted in Mienie, at a farm whose owners he knew from summers at the Rejentówka cottage. The following morning, the housekeeper woke him to ask if he’d translate for her with a German officer who had arrived during the night. Any encounter with a Nazi was dangerous, and as Jan dressed he tried to prepare himself for trouble and rehearse possible scenarios. Taking the stairs with the feigned confidence of a legitimate houseguest, he kept his eye on the Wehrmacht officer standing in the living room, discussing provisions with the owners. As the Nazi turned to face him, disbelief washed over Jan, and he wondered if he were seeing something churned up by his jumpy heart. But in the same instant the officer’s face flashed surprise and he smiled. There stood Dr. Müller, a fellow member of the International Association of Zoo Directors, who directed the zoo at Królewiec (in eastern Prussia, and known as Königsberg before the war).
Laughing, Müller said: “I know only one Pole well, you, my friend, and I meet you here! How did this happen?” A supply officer, Müller had come to the farm seeking food for his troops. When he told Jan of Warsaw’s catastrophe and the zoo’s, Jan wanted to return immediately, and Müller offered to help, but warned that Polish men of Jan’s age weren’t safe on the roads. The best plan, he suggested, was to arrest Jan and drive to Warsaw with him as a prisoner; and despite their past cordiality, Jan worried if Müller could be trusted. But, true to his word, Müller returned when Warsaw surrendered and drove Jan as deep into the city as he dared. Hoping to meet in happier days, they said goodbye, and Jan slid through the ruins of the city, wondering if he’d ever reach Kapucyńska Street, Antonina, and Ryś—if they were even alive. At last he found the four-story building, and when his first knock brought no response, he “nearly toppled from dread.”
In the following days, Warsaw’s fierce quiet grew unnerving, so Jan and Antonina decided to steal across the bridge to the zoo, this time with no shells or snipers peppering them. Several of the old keepers had also returned and taken up their usual chores as a sort of ghost brigade working in a half-massacred village where the guardhouse and quarters now were charred hills, and the workshops, elephant house, whole habitats and enclosures had also burned or collapsed. Strangest of all, many cage bars had melted into grotesque shapes that looked like the work of avant-garde welders. Jan and Antonina walked to the villa, shocked by a scene that looked even more Surrealist than before. Although the villa had survived, its tall windows were shattered by bomb blasts, and fine particles of glass lay everywhere like sand, mixed with crushed straw from when Polish soldiers had sheltered there during air raids. Everything needed fixing, especially the windows, and because panes of glass were a rare commodity, they decided to use plywood for a while, though it meant sealing themselves off even more.
But first they began a quest for wounded animals, combing the grounds, searching in even unlikely hiding places; a cheer rose whenever someone found an animal, trapped beneath debris, confused and hungry but alive. According to Antonina, many of the army’s dead horses lay with swollen bellies, grinning teeth, eyes frozen wide open in fear. All the corpses needed to be buried or butchered (with antelope, deer, and horse meat distributed to the city’s hungry), not something Jan and Antonina could face, so they left it to the keepers and at nightfall, exhausted and depressed, the villa uninhabitable, they returned to Kapucyńska Street.
The next day General Rommel spoke on the radio, urging Warsaw’s soldiers and citizens to accept surrender with dignity and stay calm while the German army marched into their fallen city. His broadcast ended with: “I rely on the population of Warsaw, which stood bravely in its defense and displayed its profound patriotism, to accept the entry of the German forces quietly, honorably, and calmly.”[10]
“Maybe it’s good news,” Antonina told herself, “maybe it’s peace at last and the chance to rebuild.”
After a rainy morning, thick cloud banks shifted and a warm October sunlight began streaming through as German soldiers patrolled each neighborhood, filling the streets with the clop of heavy bootheels and gabble in a foreign tongue. Then different sounds filtered into the lampshade store, more sibilant and transparent: crowd voices of Polish men and women. Antonina saw “one large organism flowing slowly” downtown and people trickling out of buildings to join it.
“Where do you suppose they’re heading?”
The radio told them where Hitler was preparing to review his troops, and she and Jan felt the same osmotic force tugging them outside. Everywhere Antonina looked lay destruction. In her jottings, she described “buildings guillotined by the war—their roofs gone, sitting in misshapen poses somewhere in nearby backyards. Other buildings looked sad, ripped up by bombs from top to basement.” They reminded her of “people embarrassed by their wounds, looking for a way to cover the openings in their abdomens.”
Next Antonina and Jan passed rain-soaked buildings missing their plaster, with exposed blood-red bricks steaming in the warm sunshine. Fires still burned, the entrails of homes still smoldered, filling the air with enough smoke to make eyes tear and throats tighten. Hypnotized, the swelling crowd flowed to the center of the city, and in archival films one can see them lining the main streets, down which conquering German soldiers march in a steady torrent of gunmetal-gray uniforms, their steps echoing like ropes walloping hardwood.
Jan turned to Antonina, who looked faint.
“I can’t breathe,” she said. “I feel like I’m drowning in a gray sea, like they’re flooding the whole city, washing away our past and people, dashing everything from the face of the earth.”
10
Rommel quoted in Israel Gutman,