“Ryś never made much of intellectuals,” Antonina mused, “being absorbed in abstract ideas seemed silly to him. He admired practical know-how, and so he deeply respected the Kokots for their talents, common sense, and hard work.” Shadowing Mr. Kokot all day, he helped replace panes of broken glass, filled cracks in wooden window frames with moss and straw, and plugged the holes in walls by using straw caulking or a mixture of lamp oil and sand.
Then Ryś did something surprising. As the ultimate sign of friendship, he gave his beloved rabbit Wicek to the Kokots’ sons, Jędrek and Zbyszek. This extraordinary gesture didn’t alter Wicek’s living conditions much, since the boys played together all the time, but the privilege of feeding Wicek and piloting his future changed hands. At first, Antonina noted, Wicek didn’t understand what was happening. Then she heard Ryś giving him a serious and detailed explanation of who his new owners were and where he’d be sleeping; afterward Wicek kept trying to steal back into Ryś’s room, only to be turned away at the door.
“Now you live in Jędrek and Zbyszek’s apartment, you silly creature!” Ryś said. “Why don’t you want to understand this simple thing?”
Antonina watched the rabbit listening to Ryś, moving his ears and looking at Ryś “as if he understood perfectly well,” but the minute Ryś carried him into the hallway between the apartments, set him down, and closed the door behind him, Wicek began scratching at the door to return.
Depression scathed Antonina once more, which she matter-of-factly recorded, without fuss or details, as if it were just another form of weather. The trip had been so depleting that, “like someone in a trance,” she pushed herself to secure food and help for her small tribe of women and children. Somehow she finagled potatoes, sugar, flour, and wheat from a woman in the village; peat to use as fuel from a man down the road; and half a liter of milk a day from the county.
The spirited Warsaw Uprising collapsed after sixty-three days of ferocious street-to-street fighting, with much of the city in rubble, when what was left of Warsaw’s Home Army surrendered, in exchange for the promise of humane treatment as prisoners of war, not partisans. (Nonetheless, most survivors were shipped off to slave labor camps.) Overflowing hospitals were burned with patients still in them, and women and children were roped onto tanks to prevent ambush from snipers. Hitler celebrated by ordering Germany’s churches to ring their bells for a week solid.
The roads streamed with refugees seeking shelter in the neighborhood of Łowicz and Marywil, a countryside dotted with feudal estates, complete with manor houses, small poor farms, hamlets the landowners helped support, and many locals employed at the manors. Day by day, more people swarmed into the region, until farmers, overwhelmed by the sheer mass of hungry, frightened people landing in their fields and on their doorsteps, begged local officials to relocate them elsewhere.
When Antonina and her family had first arrived at the schoolhouse, they tried to lie low, in case the Gestapo might be chasing them, but as days passed quietly, they began to relax, and after a few weeks in Marywil, following Warsaw’s capitulation, they started angling for news of family and friends. Antonina awaited word of Jan, convinced he’d magically appear one day, “having moved heaven and earth” to find her, as he had with Dr. Müller’s help in 1939. She knew nothing of Jan’s bizarre luck during the early days of the Uprising, when he was shot through the neck and rushed to the hospital on Chmielna Street, to die, everyone thought, since it’s nearly impossible for a bullet to fly through someone’s neck without hitting the esophagus, spine, veins, or arteries. Years later, Antonina met the doctor who had treated him. “If I had anesthetized him,” Dr. Kenig recalled in amazement, “and tried to re-create the route of that bullet, I couldn’t do it!” When Germans captured the hospital, he was shipped to a POW camp for officers, where he mended from the bullet wound only to battle hunger and exhaustion.
Antonina sent a letter to a family friend, who agreed to relay messages for her; and Nunia, who, instead of joining her own parents, had stayed with Antonina and Ryś to help look after things and act as messenger, rose before dawn one morning, waited hours for the horse and wagon that served as a “bus,” and traveled to Warsaw by way of Łowicz. All along the route, she tacked up small pieces of paper asking about Jan Żabiński and giving Antonina’s address; she pinned them to trees, electric poles, fences, buildings, train station walls, in what had become a public lost and found bureau. Stefan Korboński remembers how on the fences of all the stations were hundreds of notices and the addresses of husbands searching for their wives, parents searching for their children, and people in general announcing where they were. Large crowds stood in front of these “forwarding offices,” from morning till night.[91]
Soon Antonina started receiving letters with clues: from the nurse at the hospital where Jan was treated for his neck wound, a mailman in Warecki Square, a guard at the Zoological Museum on Wilcza Street. All wrote to tell of Jan and give her hope, and when she learned he’d been shipped to a German POW camp, she and Nunia wrote dozens of letters to all the camps that imprisoned officers, fishing for leads.
CHAPTER 33
DECEMBER 1944
WITH WINTER, THE ENDLESS MUD PUDDLES FROZE OVER AND the land grew firm and fibrous again under a slather of white as Antonina prepared a Christmas starkly unlike those before the war. On Christmas Eve, Poles traditionally served a twelve-dish meatless dinner before exchanging gifts, and the zoo’s Christmas Eve used to include a special bounty. Antonina remembered how “a wagon drove into the zoo full of unsold Christmas trees; it was a gift for the zoo animals: ravens, bears, foxes, and many other animals liked to chew or peck at the aromatic bark or needles of evergreens. Christmas trees went to different aviaries, cages, or animal units, and the holiday season officially started in the Warsaw Zoo.”
All night, comets of lantern light would orbit the grounds: one man dutifully guarding the exotic animals section, checking the heat in buildings, and adding coal to the furnaces; several men carrying extra hay to barns and open shelters; others tucking extra straw into the aviaries where the tropical birds burrowed in to stay warm. It had been a scene of refuge and dancing lights.
This Christmas Eve, 1944, as Ryś headed for the woods with Zbyszek, he announced to Antonina that “children should have a little fun.” Later the boys returned dragging two small fir trees.
Following rural custom, trees were decorated during the daylight and lit when the first planet appeared (to honor the Star of Bethlehem), then dinner was served with extra places set for absent family members. Antonina wrote of arranging the small tree on a stool, where baby Teresa found it a source of hand-clapping delight, which she babbled to as the family embellished shiny branches with “three small apples, a few gingerbread cookies, six candles, and several straw peacock-eye ornaments that Ryś had made.”
Over the holidays, Genia surprised Antonina with a visit; risking arrest because of her Underground activities, she took the train, then walked through gusty cold for four miles, to bring money, food, and messages from friends. Antonina and Ryś still had no word from Jan. One day, Mrs. Kokot biked to the post office as usual, and they watched her returning, as usuaclass="underline" a tiny figurine growing larger and more defined as she pedaled nearer. This time she was waving a letter. Ryś ran out to meet her in his shirtsleeves, grabbed the letter, and dashed indoors with Mrs. Kokot following, smiling.
“Finally,” was all she said.
After Antonina and Ryś read the letter several times, Ryś rushed away to share the news with Mr. Kokot; according to Antonina, Ryś rarely spoke of his phantom father, whom he could now risk mentioning at last.