He and Jan shook hands warmly, and he cupped Antonina’s hand and kissed it. One can be certain of that, since it was the custom, but not how this “true German romantic” might have kissed it. Casually or with a flourish? Lips touching the skin or hovering a breath away? As with a handshake, a hand kiss may reflect subtle feelings—a salute to femininity, a quaking heart, a grudging obedience, a split second of crypto-devotion.
He and Jan would have discussed raising rare animals, particularly those of special interest to Heck, whose life’s mission—some would say obsession—dovetailed beautifully with the Nazi desire for purebred horses to ride and purebred animals to hunt.
When it came to rare animals, Jan and Lutz shared a love for those native to Poland, especially the big woolly forest bison (Bison bison bonasus), bearded cousin to the North American buffalo (Bison bison), and Europe’s heaviest land animal. As the recognized expert on these bovines, Jan played a key role in the International Society for the Preservation of the European Bison, founded in Berlin in 1923, with a first agenda of locating all the remaining forest bison in zoos and private collections. It found fifty-four, most beyond breeding age, and in 1932 Heinz Heck traced pedigrees in the first European Bison Stud Book.[23]
Antonina later wrote that as Heck reminisced about their meetings before the war and how much they had in common, once again praising their efforts with the young zoo, she felt hopeful. At last talk turned to the real reason for Heck’s visit, which according to Antonina went like this:
“I’m giving you my pledge,” he said solemnly. “You can trust me. Although I don’t really have any influence over German high command, I’ll try nonetheless to persuade them to be lenient with your zoo. Meanwhile, I’ll take your most important animals to Germany, but I swear I’ll take good care of them. My friends, please think of your animals as a loan, and immediately after the war I’ll return them to you.” He smiled reassuringly at Antonina. “And I will be personally responsible for your favorites, the lynxes, Mrs. Żabíńska. I’m positive they’ll find a good home in my Schorfheide zoo.”
After that, conversation opened to sensitive political topics, including the fate of bomb-ravaged Warsaw.
“At least there’s one good thing to celebrate,” Heck said, “that the nightmare of September in Warsaw is over and that the Wehrmacht has no further plans to bomb the city.”
“What will you do with all your rare animals if war comes?”
“I’ve been asked that a lot, along with: ‘What will you do with the dangerous ones? Suppose your animals escape during an air raid,’ and so on. These are terrible thoughts. A vision of Berlin and my zoo after a bombardment by the English is a personal nightmare. I don’t want to imagine what might happen to other European zoos if they’re bombed. I suppose that’s why it grieves me so much to witness your loss, my friends. It’s terrible, and I’ll do everything I can to help.”[24]
“Germany has already turned against Russia….”
“And rightfully so,” Heck said, “but overpowering Russia can’t happen without England’s help, and in the present situation, with England on the other side, our chance of winning is very small.”
With so much at stake, Antonina studied Heck carefully. As fleeting emotions stalk it, a face can leak fear or the guilt of a forming lie. The war had a way of curdling her trust in people, but Warsaw’s devastation, and the zoo’s, clearly rattled Heck. Also, his lack of enthusiasm for Hitler’s decisions surprised her, indeed she found “such words, coming from a functionary of the Third Reich, quite shocking.” Especially since the Heck she had met before the war rarely shared his political opinions and harped on “German infallibility.” Nonetheless, he would soon be shipping her lynxes and other animals to Germany, to be taken care of, he’d said, on loan, he’d said, and she really had no choice but to comply, stay cordial, and hope for the best.
CHAPTER 10
THE LUTZ HECK THAT EMERGES FROM HIS WRITINGS AND actions drifted like a weather vane: charming when need be, cold-blooded when need be, tigerish or endearing, depending on his goal. Still, it is surprising that Heck the zoologist chose to ignore the accepted theory of hybrid vigor: that interbreeding strengthens a bloodline. He must have known that mongrels enjoy better immune systems and have more tricks up their genetic sleeves, while in a closely knit species, however “perfect,” any illness that kills one animal threatens to wipe out all the others, which is why zoos keep careful studbooks of endangered animals such as cheetahs and forest bison and try to mate them advantageously.[25] In any case, in the distant past, long before anyone was recognizably Aryan, our ancestors shared the world with other flavors of hominids, and interbreeding among neighbors often took place, producing hardier, nastier offspring who thrived. All present-day humans descend from that robust, talkative mix, specifically from a genetic bottleneck of only about one hundred individuals. A 2006 study of mitochondrial DNA tracks Ashkenazi Jews (about 92 percent of the world’s Jews in 1931) back to four women, who migrated from the Near East to Italy in the second and third centuries.[26] All of humanity can be traced back to the gene pool of one person, some say to a man, some a woman.[27] It’s hard to imagine our fate being as iffy as that, but we are natural wonders.
Maybe, after decades of observing wild animals, Heck regarded ethnic cleansing as hygienic and inevitable, an engine of reform, replacing one genetic line with an even fitter one, resembling a drama that unfolds throughout the animal kingdom. The usual scenario—using lions as an example—is that an aggressor invades a neighboring pride, kills the lead male and slaughters its young, forcibly mates with the females, thereby establishing his own bloodline, and grabs the previous male’s territory. Human beings, gifted at subterfuge and denial yet disquieted by morals, disguise such instincts in terms like self-defense, necessity, loyalty, group welfare, etc. Such was the case in 1915, for example, when Turks massacred Armenians during World War I; in the mid-1990s, when Christian Serbs in Bosnia began exterminating the country’s Muslims; and in 1994, in Rwanda, when hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered (and women raped) in warfare between the Hutus and the Tutsis.
The Holocaust was different, far more premeditated, high-tech, and methodical, and, at the same time, more primitive, as biologist Lecomte du Noüy argues in La dignite humaine (1944): “Germany’s crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of evolution.”[28] That’s not to say humans haven’t tampered with evolution in the past—we know we’ve driven many animals to extinction, and we may well have done the same to other lines of humans. Even so, what’s instinctive isn’t inevitable, we sometimes bridle unruly instincts, we don’t always play by nature’s rules. No doubt Hitler’s twin imperatives of purifying the bloodline while grabbing territory felt right along an ancient nerve in people like Heck, to whom it may even have seemed a diabolical necessity.
Heck was also a pragmatist, and Polish lands would soon be re-formed by Germans, zoos included. So when Heck visited the bombed-out Warsaw Zoo, he hid a bleak agenda: his visits were an excuse to loot the finest animals for German zoos and preserves, along with priceless breeding records. Together with his brother Heinz, he hoped to benefit the new German empire and restore the natural environment’s lost zest, just as Hitler hoped to reinvigorate the human race.
23
It continues to this day, though it’s now issued in Poland. No bloodline information is kept on the wild bison, which rangers simply keep an eye on and count.
For good discussions of the motif, see Piotr Daszkiewicz and Jean Aikhenbaum,
25
This curse of closely knit species also applies to our dairy cows, now almost clones of one another; an illness that kills one can kill all.
26
“The Matrilineal Ancestry of Ashkenazi Jewry: Portrait of a Recent Founder Event”: Doron M. Behar, Ene Metspalu, Toomas Kivisild, Alessandro Achilli, Yarin Hadid, Shay Tzur, Luisa Pereira, Antonio Amorim, Lluís Quintana-Murci, Kari Majamaa, Corinna Herrnstadt, Neil Howell, Oleg Balanovsky, Ildus Kutuev, Andrey Pshenichnov, David Gurwitz, Batsheva Bonne-Tamir, Antonio Torroni, Richard Villems, and Karl Skorecki.
27
That person didn’t live all alone on the planet; it’s simply that no one else’s offspring survived.