“It’s hard to say what would be best for the city or the zoo,” Jan told Julian Kulski, Warsaw’s Polish vice president. “What if in fifty or a hundred years someone were to read a history of the Warsaw Zoo, re-created by Germans for their pleasure, even though it drained the city? How would you like that footnote to your biography?”
“I live with this sort of dilemma every day,” Kulski moaned. “I swear I never would have taken this job if all the people of Warsaw had been killed in 1939 and the Germans had repopulated the city with outsiders. I’m only doing it to serve my people.”
During the next two days, Jan carefully crafted a letter to Leist, in which he praised his decision to reopen the zoo and appended a colossal budget for basics the zoo would require. Leist didn’t bother with an answer, nor did Jan expect one, but neither did he expect what happened later.
Somehow the director of Parks and Gardens got wind of the proposed rebirth of the zoo, which would have destroyed his unified parks project, and so to foil Jan he sent word to the Germans that Dr. Żabiński’s services were no longer needed and his job should be terminated.
Antonina didn’t credit this to “antipathy or revenge,” but rather an “idee fixe” of leaving his mark on Warsaw’s parks. Still, it threatened Jan and his family, because anyone not needed by a German employer lost his working papers, which made him eligible for deportation to Germany to drudge in munitions factories. Since the villa belonged to the zoo, the Żabińskis could easily lose their home, many melinas, and Jan’s small salary. Then what would become of the Guests?
Kulski doctored the complaint against Jan before the Germans could read it, and, instead of losing work, Jan was transferred to the Pedagogic Museum on Jezuicka Street, a sleepy little enclave with only an elderly director, a secretary, and a few guards, whom the Germans seldom bothered. Jan said his job mainly entailed dusting old physical education equipment and preserving zoological and botanical posters lent to schools before the war. That left him more time to scheme with the Underground and teach biology in the “flying university.” Jan also kept a part-time job in the Health Department, so with one thing and another, Antonina and Ryś knew that Jan melted away each morning, to face who knew what hazards, and reappeared in the obscure no-man’s-land before curfew. Though Antonina didn’t realize exactly what he was up to, her mental cameo of Jan was haloed in danger and potential loss, and she tried to banish the naturally-arising mind-theaters in which he was captured or killed. “But I worried about his safety all day long,” she confessed.
In addition to building bombs, derailing trains, and poisoning pork sandwiches headed for the German canteen, Jan continued to work with a team of construction people building bunkers and hideouts. Zegota also rented five flats, just for refugees, who had to be regularly supplied with provisions and moved from one safe house to the next.
Officially, as spoken truths, Antonina knew few of Jan’s activities; he rarely told Antonina about them, and she rarely asked him to confirm what she suspected. She found it essential not to know too much about his warcraft, comrades, or plans. Otherwise, worry would pollute her mood all day and interfere with her equally vital responsibilities. Because many people relied on her for their sustenance and sanity, she “played a sort of hide-and-seek game” with herself, she noted, pretending not to know, as Jan’s shadow life floated around the edges of her awareness. “When people are constantly on the brink of life and death, it’s better to know as little as possible,” she told herself. But, without meaning to exactly, one still tends to conjure up scary scenarios, their pathos or salvation, as if one could endure a trauma before it occurred, in small manageable doses, as a sort of inoculation. Are there homeopathic degrees of anguish? With sleights of mind, Antonina half fooled herself enough to endure years of horror and upheaval, but there’s a difference between not knowing and choosing not to know what one knows but would rather not face. Both she and Jan continued to keep a small dose of cyanide with them at all times.
When the governor’s office phoned one day, summoning Jan, the villa-ites all assumed he’d be arrested, and as panic filled the house, they advised him to run away while he could. “But then who will guard and support everyone?” he asked Antonina, knowing that he would be condemning them to death.
The next morning, as Jan was leaving for the governor’s office, after they had said their goodbyes, she whispered the unspeakable: “Do you have your cyanide with you?”
His meeting was called for 9 A.M., and Antonina swore she felt the seconds ticking away inside while going through the motions of household chores. Around 2 P.M., as she was dropping peeled potatoes into a pot, she heard a voice whisper “Punia,” and she looked up, pulse skipping, to see Jan standing right in front of her at the open kitchen window. He was smiling.
“Do you know what they wanted?” he asked. “You’re not going to believe this. When I got to the governor’s office I was taken by car to Konstancin, Governor Fischer’s private residence. Apparently, his guards had discovered snakes around the house and in the woods nearby, and they were afraid members of the Underground might have dumped lots of poisonous vipers there to wipe out the German government! Leist told them to contact me as the only person who knew about snakes. Well, I proved there weren’t any poisonous vipers by catching the snakes by hand!” Then Jan added somberly: “Luckily, I didn’t need the cyanide this time.”
BEFORE LEAVING WORK one afternoon, Jan placed two pistols in his backpack and covered them with a freshly killed rabbit. As he stepped off the trolley at the Veterans Circle stop, he suddenly encountered two German soldiers, one of whom yelled “Hands up!” and ordered him to open his backpack for inspection.
“I’m lost,” Jan thought. With disarming casualness, he smiled and said: “How can I open my backpack with my hands up? You’d better check it yourself.” A soldier poked around a little inside the backpack and saw the carcass.
“Oh, a rabbit! Maybe for dinner tomorrow?”
“Yes. We have to eat something,” Jan said, still smiling.
The German said he could put his arms down, and with an “Also, gehen Sie nach Hause!” sent him on his way.
Antonina wrote that as she listened to Jan’s account of his close call, the veins in her head throbbed so hard she could feel her scalp moving. That Jan seemed amused as he told her the story, joking “about what might have been a tragedy, upset me even more.”
Jan confessed to a journalist years later that he had found such risks alluring, exciting, and felt a soldierly pride in ridding himself of fear and thinking fast in tight spots. “Cool” is how Antonina described him, a compliment. This thread of his personality, so unlike her own, she found admirable, alien, and also humbling, since she couldn’t match his feats of bravery. She had had close calls, too, but whereas she ranked Jan’s as heroic, she deemed hers merely lucky.
By the winter of 1944, for example, when the city gas lines didn’t work well and their second-floor bathroom had no hot water, pregnant Antonina craved the carnal luxury of a steaming bath. On a whim, she telephoned Jan’s cousins Marysia and Mikołaj Gutowski, who lived in the borough of Żoliborz, just north of City Center, a pretty neighborhood on the left bank of the Vistula that once belonged to monks who named it Jolie Bord (Beautiful Embankment). At the mention of hot water, just as she’d hoped, her cousin said they had plenty and invited her to spend the night. Antonina rarely left the villa alone, even to visit the butcher, market, or other shops, but this sybaritic rarity tantalized her, so “after getting permission from Jan,” she braved the deep snow, February winds, and German soldiers, and went to their house early one evening.