“It’s for you,” he said. “Take it! Put it on your finger!”
Her heart “shook” as she slipped on the ring, because it bore a silver eagle, a Polish emblem, which meant he’d probably ripped it off the finger of a dead Polish soldier. “Whose ring was it?” she wondered.
Then, loudly summoning his soldiers, he ordered: “Leave everything you took! I will kill you like dogs if you don’t obey me!”
Surprised, his men dropped all the furniture and loot they’d gathered and dragged small items out of their pockets.
“Let’s go now—don’t touch anything!” he said.
With that, she watched his men “shrink in size as they left one at a time like muzzled dogs.”
When they’d gone, she sat down at the table and looked again at the ring with the silver eagle and thought: “If felt words like mother, wife, sister, have the power to change a bastard’s spirit and conquer his murderous instincts, maybe there’s some hope for the future of humanity after all.”
From time to time, other soldiers visited the zoo, without incident, and then one day a car pulled up with several German clerks who managed Third Reich fur farms and knew Fox Man from his days in Grójec. Fox Man reported that the animals still survived with luxuriant fur, and they gave him permission to move both animals and employees to Germany. Packing up so many animals would take time, which meant everyone could stay in the villa for a while longer, possibly even until the Uprising triumphed and the Germans deserted Warsaw. Then no one would have to leave the zoo at all.
In the meantime, trying to weaken the Resistance, German airplanes kept dropping notes urging Warsaw’s civilians to abandon the city before it was gutted. Soon afterward, the German army trucked even more heavy artillery into Praski Park, hiding it among the trees and bushes near the river. Stationed so close, German soldiers often stopped by for a drink of water, a cup of soup, or some cooked potatoes. One evening, a tall young officer expressed concern about civilians living too close to the battlefield, and Antonina explained that she and the others were running a high-priority Wehrmacht fur farm, which they couldn’t leave because it was an inauspicious time for the raccoon dogs, which develop soft dense coats by molting in summer and then regrowing a winter pelage during September, October, and November. Tamper with their schedule by boxing them up, stressing them, and shipping them to a different climate, she warned, and their prized winter coats wouldn’t grow back soon. That seemed to satisfy him.
Thunder had never frightened her before, she wrote—“After all, it’s only sound filling the vacuum created by streaks of lightning”—but the artillery flared without letup, the air didn’t grow moist as a prelude to storm, no rain fell, and the dry thunder jangled her nerves. One afternoon, the artillery suddenly paused, and during that rare lull the women of the house lay down and rested, soaking in the quiet. Jan’s mother, Nunia, and Ewa all took a nap in their bedrooms, and Antonina nursed Teresa downstairs, on a sweltering day, with all the doors and windows open. Suddenly the kitchen door squeaked and a German officer strode into the room. He stopped for a moment when he saw her with the baby, and as he edged closer Antonina smelled alcohol on his breath. Snooping around suspiciously, he wandered into Jan’s study.
“Oooh! A piano—sheet music! Do you play?” he asked excitedly.
“A little,” she replied.
Paging through some Bach, he paused and started to whistle a fugue with tuneful expertise. She figured him for a professional musician.
“You seem to have a perfect ear for music,” she said.
When he asked her to play for him, she sat down at the piano, though something didn’t feel quite right. Tempted to grab Teresa and make a run for it, she feared he’d shoot her if she tried, so instead she began playing “Ständchen,” a romantic song by Schubert, hoping that this German favorite might calm him with sentimental memories.
“No, not that! Not that!” he screamed. “Why are you playing that?!”
Antonina’s fingers sprang from the keys. Clearly a wrong choice, but why? She’d heard and played the German serenade so often. As he strode to the bookshelf to page through sheet music, she glanced down and read the lyrics to “Ständchen”:
A broken heart, that would rattle anyone, she thought. Suddenly his face lit up as he opened a collection of national anthems, through which he searched, looking eagerly for something, which he finally found.
Placing the open book on the piano, he said: “Please, play this for me.”
As she started to play, the German officer sang along, pronouncing the English words in a heavy accent, and she wondered what the soldiers in Praski Park must be thinking as he belted out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Occasionally she peeked up at his half-closed eyes. When she finished with a flourish, he saluted her and quietly left the villa.
Who was this officer so fluent in music, she wondered, and what was the American anthem all about? “Maybe he was joking with another German sitting near the villa?” she thought. “Surely someone will come and interrogate me about the music? Now I’ll have to worry about provoking the SS.” Later, she decided that he probably meant to terrorize her, and, if so, it had worked, because the melody snagged in her head and kept repeating until a round of cannonades split the night.
As the Germans stepped up their attack on Old Town, Antonina still hoped the Underground army would win, but rumors of Hitler’s order to demolish the city trickled in. Soon she learned that Paris had been liberated by the Free French, U.S., and British forces; and then Aachen, the first German city to fall, devastated by 10,000 tons of bombs.
She had no word from or about Jan, stationed in Old Town, where the Home Army, forced into a smaller space, fought from building to building, even room to room in a house or cathedral. Many witnesses tell of the front suddenly erupting inside a building and flowing from floor to floor, while those outside faced a continuous shower of bombs and bullets. All Antonina and Ryś could do was watch the heavy gunfire ricocheting around Old Town and picture Jan and their friends moving along cobblestone streets she knew by heart.
In an archival photograph taken by field reporter Sylwester “Kris” Braun on August 14, Polish soldiers are proudly displaying a German armored personnel carrier they have just captured. Jan is not in the photograph, but it can hardly be sheer coincidence that, as the caption notes, they nicknamed the elephantine vehicle “Jas,” the same name as the Warsaw Zoo’s male elephant, killed early in the war.
CHAPTER 32
BY SEPTEMBER, 5,000 SOLDIERS IN OLD TOWN HAD ESCAPED through the sewers, despite Germans dropping grenades and burning gasoline down the manholes. Elsewhere, the Allies were advancing on all fronts: after liberating France and Belgium, the United States and Britain were pushing into Germany from the Netherlands, Rhineland, and Alsace; and though the Red Army paused near Warsaw, it had already captured Bulgaria and Romania, was prepared to take Belgrade and Budapest, and planned to storm the Reich from the Baltics; the United States had landed on Okinawa and was pounding the South Pacific.