CHAPTER 14
IN THE SUMMER OF 1940, A PHONE CALL, A NOTE, OR A WHISPER might alert the Żabińskis to expect secret “Guests” placed by the Underground. Jews in hiding and in transit, nomads, not settlers, they stopped briefly to rest and refuel en route to unnamed destinations. German-speaking Jews who looked Aryan received false identity papers and sailed smoothly through, and those who couldn’t pass spent years at the zoo, some in the villa and as many as fifty at a time in empty cages. Many Guests, like Wanda Englert, were longtime friends or acquaintances, and Antonina regarded them as one amphibious family. Hiding them posed problems, but who better than zookeepers to devise fitting camouflage?
In the wild, animals inherit clever tricks of blending into their surroundings; for instance, penguins are black on top and white on the bottom so that the patroling skuas will assume they’re a twist of ocean and leopard seals dismiss them as clouds. The best camouflage for people is more people, so the Żabińskis invited a stream of legal visitors—uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends for varying stays—and established a regular unpredictability, a routine of changing faces, physiques, and accents, with Jan’s mother a frequent guest.
“Everybody loved Jan’s mother,” Antonina noted in her memoirs. “She had a kind, graceful nature, and she was very smart, a fast thinker with an excellent memory, very polite and sensitive. She had a big full-bodied laugh and a great sense of humor.” But Antonina did worry about her, because “she’s like a delicate greenhouse flower, and our duty was to protect her from any fear or pain that might damage her spirit or trigger a depression.”
Jan left those intangibles to Antonina, who always handled the “difficult animals” and for whom the chance to amuse, impress, and, ultimately, rescue a parent surely appealed in visceral ways. Jan preferred the role of general, spy, and tactician, especially if it meant bamboozling or humiliating the enemy.
Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer’s family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed “collective responsibility.” Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city’s underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist’s dummies.
The zoo wasn’t always a first stop for Guests, especially ones escaping the Ghetto, who might spend a night or two downtown with Ewa Brzuska, a short, ruddy, squarish woman in her sixties whom people called “Babcia” (Granny). She owned a tiny grocery (sixteen feet by three feet) on Sędziowske Street, which extended out onto the sidewalk where Ewa arranged barrels of sauerkraut and pickles beside baskets of tomatoes and greens. Neighbors crowded to shop and socialize, despite the German military’s car repair depot right across the road. Every day, a group of Jewish men would be escorted from the Ghetto to work on the cars, and Granny would secretly post their letters or keep watch while they spoke with family members. Tall sacks of potatoes stood around for young smugglers from the Ghetto to hide behind. In 1942, her back rooms became a branch office of an Underground cell, and she stored ID cards, spare birth certificates, money, and bread coupons under barrels of pickled cucumbers and sauerkraut, stashed subversive publications in the stockroom, and often hid escaping Jews for a night, some surely bound for the zoo.
Antonina rarely knew when to expect Guests, or where they came from; Jan handled the plotting and liaised with the Underground, and as a result, no one hiding in the villa guessed the full measure of his Underground activities. They didn’t know, for example, what was hidden inside the Nestle or Ovaltine boxes which would appear from time to time on the shelf above a radiator in the kitchen.
Antonina reports Jan saying casually one day: “I put some small springs for my research instruments into this box. Please don’t touch or move it. I may need it at any time.”
No one raised an eyebrow. Jan had always been a collector of small metal findings—screws, washers, and gizmos—though he usually stored them in his workshop. Those who knew him found his hobby quaint, a hardware junkie’s pastime. Not even Antonina realized that he was collecting fuses for making bombs.
When a young researcher from the Zoological Institute arrived with a big barrel of fertilizer, Jan stashed it in the animal hospital next to the villa, and every now and then he’d mention in passing that so-and-so might come to fetch some fertilizer for his garden. Antonina only learned after the war that the barrel actually contained C13F, a water-soluble explosive, and that Jan was the leader of an Underground cell that specialized in sabotaging German trains by jamming explosives into wheel bearings, so that when the train started to move, the powder would ignite. (During one month in 1943, they derailed seventeen trains and damaged one hundred locomotives.) She didn’t know during the war that he also infected some pigs with worms, butchered them, then shaped the poisoned meat into balls which, with the help of an eighteen-year-old working in a German army canteen, he slipped into the soldiers’ sandwiches.
He also helped to build bunkers, vital underground dens. In wartime Poland, the word bunker didn’t conjure up the simple trench it might today, but a damp underground shelter with camouflaged shafts and air vents, usually located at the edge of a garden or public park. Emanuel Ringelblum’s bunker at 81 Grójecka Street, lying under a market gardener’s greenhouse, ran ninety-two feet square and housed thirty-eight people on fourteen crowded beds. One of his bunker-mates, Orna Jagur, who, unlike Ringelblum, left the bunker before it was discovered in 1944, recalls the moment she first inhaled bunker life:
A wave of hot stuffy air struck me. From below there poured out a stench made of mildew mixed with sweat, stale clothing, and uneaten food….
Some of the inhabitants of the shelter were lying on the bunks, sunken in darkness, the rest were sitting at the tables. Because of the heat, the men were half-naked, wearing only pajama bottoms. Their faces were pale, tired. They had fear and unease in their eyes, their voices were nervous and strained.