A German officer assured Fox Man that, whatever happened to the military, the Third Reich needed its valuable fur farms and he should prepare to pack his animals into well-vented crates and move them to a small town in the suburbs for safety. As shells starting falling closer to the zoo, Antonina prepared to uproot her household, too, and the nearby town of Łowicz, where Fox Man was headed, seemed a haven out of battle range but still close to the city. Antonina, Ryś, Jan’s mother, the two girls, Fox Man, and his helpers planned to travel together, hoping all would pass as fur farm workers. Choosing which pets to leave behind tormented them (muskrat, Wicek, other rabbits, cat, dog, eagle?), but in the end they decided to risk taking only Wicek and release all the rest to the wild and their wits.
Although they could cart whatever household items they pleased, it seemed prudent to travel light, so they bundled up only mattresses, comforters, pillows, winter coats, boots, water containers, pots, shovels, and other practical items. Anything of value had to be hidden far from bombs and prowling soldiers; they loaded the fur coats, silver, typewriter, sewing machine, documents, photographs, heirlooms, and other treasures into large boxes, and Fox Man and his boys quickly stashed them in the underground corridor leading from the villa to the Pheasant House, then they bricked up the entrance to the tunnel.
On August 23, the day of departure, Ryś watched as a huge shell landed about fifty yards from the villa, and dug in but didn’t explode; a bomb squad appeared soon afterward with an officer who swore that anyone still in the villa at noon would be shot. Ryś ran to the Pheasant House and fed the rabbits dandelion leaves a last time, then opened all the cages and turned them loose. Confused by their newfound freedom, the rabbits refused to leave, so Ryś lifted them out by their long ears, one at a time, and carried them to the lawn. No predators lurked in the brush, ponds, or sky, and the last of the household pets—eagle and muskrat—had been freed the day before.
“Go, silly rabbits, go!” Ryś said, shooing them. “You’re free!”
Antonina watched fur balls of all sizes hopping slowly through the grass. Suddenly Balbina sprang from the bushes and ran to Ryś with a high-flagging tail and a loud purr. One whiff of the cat and the rabbits bolted, as Ryś lifted Balbina into his arms.
“What! Balbina, do you want to go with us?” Carrying her, he walked toward the house, but the cat squirmed free.
“You don’t want to go with us? Too bad,” he said, adding bitterly, “But you’re lucky, at least you can stay here.” She sloped away between the bushes.
Watching this scene from the porch, Antonina felt a powerful desire to stay home, too, accompanied by an equally strong wish for the truck to arrive that would carry them to the train station, checking her watch over and over, though “the watch hands moved without pity.” The impulse to plunge into some bolt-hole in Warsaw flashed through her mind, but where would they go? She worried about her lame mother-in-law, “who couldn’t walk half a mile,” and being waylaid by Germans, who, she’d heard, were arresting every Pole they could find and shipping all to a death camp near Pruszków. As things stood, traveling west with the fur farm animals made the most sense.
At last, at 11:30 A.M., Fox Man’s old truck clattered up to the villa, and they quickly stowed their luggage. Leaving the zoo behind, they wove through back streets until they reached the train station where a freight car waited, already loaded with foxes, minks, nutrias, raccoon dogs, and Wicek. Antonina and the others boarded, and soon the train crossed the river, paused at a couple of stations to pick up more passengers, and finally set off slowly. In Łowicz, they were told to unload their crates and await the arrival of fur animals from elsewhere in Poland, and then the assembled stock would travel to one large farm in Germany. Antonina spent the day strolling through the village, struck by her liberty and the momentous quiet of a town showing no signs of war. The next day she went looking for help and learned that Andrzej Grabski, son of the Polish ex-prime minister, happened to be on the German fur company board; when she explained that she feared taking her small children to Germany, Grabski found a temporary shelter for her in town. Six days later she said goodbye to Fox Man (who had to remain in Łowicz with the animals), rented a horse-drawn wagon, and headed for the village of Marywil, only four miles away, yet “a long, slow journey that felt like forever.”
When they finally arrived at a little schoolhouse on an old estate, a woman offered them a small classroom to sleep in, whose wooden walls were splotched with dirt and floor strewn with mud and straw. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling, all the windowpanes were broken, and piles of cigarette butts littered the floor. They set Wicek’s cage beside a clay stove, and Antonina wrote that his scratching to get out created the only noise in a vault of silence that seemed bizarre after weeks of explosions and gunfire, not a calming silence but vacant, unnatural, disturbing, “a nuisance to our ears.”
“The quiet is spooky,” Ryś said, wrapping his arms around her neck and hugging her tight. Although she didn’t want him scared or suffering, she wrote that it felt wonderful to have him need her soothing. During the uncertain and violent days of August, she’d watched him trying to act strong and grown-up, but now, to her relief, “at last he could let himself be a child.”
“Mom, I know we’re never going home again,” he said tearfully.
Moving from a large old city at war to a peaceful hamlet where there was no point settling in for what they anticipated as a short stay, they’d lost contact with friends, family, and the Underground, but they also lost the frights of artillery. Haunted by a distant underpinning of her world, Antonina described feeling “whipped by a disaster [I] couldn’t name or influence… unreal and floating” much of this time, though she vowed to buoy up Ryś’s spirits.
On a hunt for broom, rags, and bucket, they knocked on the door of a room where Mrs. Kokot, the local teacher, her blacksmith husband, and their two boys lived. A short, solid woman with dimples and work-worn hands greeted them.
“I’m sorry,” Mrs. Kokot said, “that we didn’t have time to clean the classroom before you moved in. My husband will stop by tomorrow and install a proper stove. Don’t worry, everything will be all right. You’ll settle in soon and feel at home here.”
Over the next few days, Mrs. Kokot provided bread and butter, and brought a small wooden bathtub for Teresa and hot water. Soon life didn’t seem quite as dire, but Antonina worried about Ryś, who had “lost everything he knew… like a tiny piece of grass uprooted by a strong wind and blown far away from its garden.” What with “the earthquake of leaving Warsaw, worries about his father,” whom they’d had no news of, “and all the unknowns, and the poverty,” it didn’t surprise her when he became depressed and moody.
But as days passed, Ryś grew closer to the Kokot family, whose daily routines yielded order and a predictability he craved. Antonina worried that, having acted more adult than child for most of the war, Ryś had gotten to the point that “he flatly refused to accept childhood, and whoever treated him like a child drew a rude response.” But the mundane events of Kokot family life, in which children went to school and played without fear, proved a tonic. As he watched them going about their lives, she noted, he admired how well they worked together as a family, and also performed many charitable acts—Mrs. Kokot would ride her bike to the village to give a sick person an injection, or as far as the city to bring a doctor; and her husband would fix neighbors’ engines, sewing machines, rubber wheels, watches, lamps, or any other sick objects.