The kittens trembled, “half dead with fear,” she wrote in her diary. Gently, she grabbed the scruff of one’s neck, loose and hot, and as she lifted it from the straw, it hung limp and quiet, so she picked up the other one.
“They like it. Their skin remembers their mother’s jaws carrying them from one place to another.”
When she set them down on the floor in the dining room, they skittered around, exploring the slippery new landscape for a few minutes, then hid under a wardrobe as if it were a rock overhang, inching way back into the darkest crevices they could find.
In 1932, abiding by Polish Catholic tradition, Antonina chose a saint’s name for her own newborn son, Ryszard, or Ryś for short—the Polish word for lynx. Though not part of the zoo’s “four-legged, fluffy, or winged” brigade, her son joined the household as one more frisky cub that babbled and clung like a monkey, crawled around on all fours like a bear, grew whiter in winter and darker in summer like a wolf. One of her children’s books describes three household toddlers learning to walk at the same time: son, lion, and chimpanzee. Finding all young mammals adorable, from rhino to possum, she reigned as a mammal mother herself and protectress of many others. Not an outlandish image in a city whose age-old symbol was half woman, half animaclass="underline" a mermaid brandishing a sword. As she said, the zoo quickly became her “green kingdom of animals on the right side of the Vistula River,” a noisy Eden flanked by cityscape and park.
CHAPTER 2
“ADOLF HAS TO BE STOPPED,” ONE OF THE KEEPERS INSISTED. Jan knew he didn’t mean Hitler but “Adolf the Kidnapper,” a nickname given to the ringleader of the rhesus monkeys, who had been waging war with the oldest female, Marta, whose son Adolf had stolen and given to his favorite mate, Nelly, who already had one baby of her own. “It’s not right. Each mother should feed her own baby, and why deprive Marta of her baby just to give Nelly two?”
Other keepers offered health bulletins about the zoo’s best-known animals, like Rose the giraffe, Mary the African hunting dog, Sahib the petting-zoo colt, who had been sneaking into the pasture with the skittish Przywalski horses. Elephants sometimes develop herpes on their trunks, and in captive settings, an avian retrovirus or an illness like tuberculosis passes easily from humans to parrots, elephants, cheetahs, and other animals, and back again to humans—especially in Jan’s preantibiotic era, when serious infection could savage a population, animal or human. That meant calling the zoo vet, Dr. Lopatynski, who always arrived on his spluttering motorcycle wearing a leather jacket, big hat with long waving earflaps, cheeks whisked red by the wind, and pince-nez glasses perched on his nose.
What else might have been discussed at the daily meetings? In an old zoo photograph, Jan stands beside a large half-excavated hippo enclosure that’s partly braced with heavy wooden ribs, the sort that flex ship hulls. The background vegetation suggests summer, and all digging had to be finished before the ground hardened, which can happen as early as October in Poland, so it’s likely he demanded progress reports and chivvied the foreman. Thievery posed another worry, and since the exotic animal trade flourished, armed guards patrolled day and night.[1]
Jan’s grand vision of the zoo shines through his many books and broadcasts; he hoped that one day his zoo might achieve an illusion of native habitats, where natural enemies could share enclosures without conflict. For that mirage of a primal truce one needs to recruit acres of land, dig interlocking moats, and install creative plumbing. Jan planned an innovative zoo of world importance at the heart of Warsaw’s life, both social and cultural, and at one point he even thought of adding an amusement park.
Basic concerns for zoos both antique and modern include keeping the animals healthy, sane, safe, and above all contained. Zoos have always faced ingenious escape artists, leggy lightning bolts like klipspringers, which can leap right over a man’s head and land on a rock ledge the size of a quarter. Powerful and stocky with an arched back, these nervous little antelopes only weigh forty pounds, but they’re agile and jump on the tips of their vertical hooves like ballet dancers performing on their toenails. Startle them and they will bounce around the enclosure and possibly leap the fence, and, like all antelopes, they pronk. Legend has it that, in 1919, a Burmese man invented the closest human equivalent to pronking—a hopping stick for his daughter, Pogo, to use crossing puddles on her way to school.[2]
After the jaguar nearly cleared its moat at the current Warsaw Zoo, Dr. Rembiszewski planted an electric fence of the sort farmers use to jolt deer from their crops, only custom-built and much higher. Electric fences were available to Jan, who may well have priced one and discussed its feasibility given the layout of the big cats’ enclosure.
After breakfast each day, Antonina walked to the zoo office building and awaited VIP visitors, because besides running the household and nursing sick animals, she greeted distinguished guests from Poland and abroad and welcomed press or government officials. Guiding people round, Antonina amused them with anecdotes and curiosities absorbed from books, Jan’s talks, or observed firsthand. As they strolled through the zoo, they glimpsed versions of wetlands, deserts, woods, meadows, and steppes. Some areas stayed shaded, others swam in sunlight, and strategically arranged trees, shrubs, and rocks offered shelter from winter’s hammering winds that could claw the roof off a barn.
She began at the main gate on Ratuszowa Street, facing a long straight boulevard flanked by enclosures where the first thing to catch a visitor’s eye was a wobbly pink pond—pale flamingos strutting with backward-bent red knees,[3] their mouths black change-purses. Not as vivid as wild flamingos, tinted coral pink from eating crustaceans, they were eye-catching enough to be the zoo’s receptionists, and full of raucous growls, grunts, and honking. Just beyond them one met cages of birds from all over the world: noisy, colorfully plumed exotics like mynas, macaws, marabous, and crowned cranes; as well as native birds like the diminutive pygmy owl, or the giant eagle owl that can snatch up a rabbit in its talons.
Peacocks and small deer roamed the zoo as they pleased, trotting away when people approached, as if pushed by an invisible wave. Atop a small grassy mound, a female cheetah sunned herself while her speckled kittens leapt and wrestled nearby, occasionally distracted by the free-range deer and peacocks. Tantalizing as loose prey must have been for caged lions, hyenas, wolves, and other predators, it also kept their senses keen and added a carnal edge to their day. Black swans, pelicans, and other marsh and water birds floated on a dragon-shaped pond. To the left, open enclosures revealed grazing forest bison, antelopes, zebras, ostriches, camels, and rhinos. To the right, visitors viewed tigers, lions, and hippos. Then, following the gravel path, they circled back past the giraffes, reptiles, elephants, monkeys, seals, and bears. The villa lay nearly hidden among the trees, within hooting distance of the aviaries, just before one got to the chimps, due east of the penguins.
The grasslands habitats included African wild dogs, excitable long-legged canines always on the run, swinging their wide heads and sniffing suspiciously as they swiveled large stiff ears. Their scientific name, Canis pictus (painted dog), suggests the beauty of their fur, randomly splotched with yellow, black, and red. But not their ferocity or endurance: they could drag down a bolting zebra or chase an antelope for miles. The zoo boasted the first in Europe, a real prize, even if in Africa farmers regarded them as vicious pests. In Warsaw they were picturesque showmen, no two patterned the same, and a crowd always formed in front of them. The zoo also bred the first Grewyi zebras, native to Abyssinia, which look familiar at first until you realize that, unlike textbook zebras, they’re taller and more heavily striped, with narrow bars that converge vertically around the body and run horizontally down the legs, striping all the way to the hooves.
1
A few years back, burglars broke into the Warsaw Zoo’s aviary and stole various owls, a raven, and a condor, and officials assumed they nabbed the owls and raven to mislead, their real target being the condor, whose black-market value had soared. On another occasion a robber stole a baby penguin. Zoo abductions happen everywhere, usually commissioned by breeders or laboratories, but sometimes by individual collectors. Notably, a beautiful cockatoo stolen from the Duisburg Zoo was later found dead and stuffed, in the apartment of a couple who had received it as an anniversary present.
2
Pogo sticks, all the rage of the 1920s, were actually patented by the American George Hansburg.
3
Flamingos look like they have backward-facing knees, but those are actually their ankles. Their knees float higher up, hidden by feathers.