“Mom, we have to take her home to Stalowa Street!” Ryś pleaded. “We can’t leave her here! Please!”
As Ryś walked toward the gate, the cat fidgeted to jump down.
“It’s just like last summer,” Ryś sulked. “She’s running away!”
“Let her go,” Antonina said softly. “She must have an important reason for staying, one we don’t understand.”
Ryś released her and she darted into the bushes, then stopped and looked back with her scrawny, half-starved face. She meowed, which Ryś translated as: “I’m going back home. What about you?”
For Antonina there was no going back to her previous life. Gone were the gaggling geese, squawking cormorants, whimpering gulls, the peacocks fanning iridescent tails as they strolled in sunlight, the Jericho-wall-tumbling groans of the lions and tigers, the trilling monkeys swinging on rope vines, the polar bears soaking in their pool, the blooming roses and jasmine, and the two “nice little happy otters which became best friends with our lynxes—instead of sleeping in their own basket… they napped in the soft fur of the lynxes, sucking on their ears.” Gone were the days when the lynx cubs, otters, and puppies all lived indoors and played endless chase games together in the garden. She and Ryś staged a private ritual—they formally promised all the broken and abandoned objects that they “would remember them and return soon to help.”
CHAPTER 35
AFTERMATH
WHILE STILL IN HIDING, MAGDALENA GROSS MARRIED MAURYCY Fraenkel (Paweł Zieliński), and after the Warsaw Uprising they moved to the eastern city of Lublin, where artists and intellectuals gathered in the Cafe Paleta. There she met the city’s avant-garde art world, which included many theaters without words: music theater, dance theater, drawing theater, shadows theater, and theaters featuring paper costumes, rags, or small fires. Poland’s long tradition of subversive political puppet theater had dissolved during the war, but in Lublin she joined enthusiasts who dreamt up the first puppet theater for the new Poland, and they invited her to create the puppets’ heads. Instead of crafting them with the traditional bold papier-mâche features, she decided to create lifelike facial nuances and adorn the puppets in silk, pearls, and beads. The first performance took place in Lublin on December 14, 1944.
In March of 1945, Magdalena and Maurycy returned to the newly liberated Warsaw, without electricity, gas, or transportation, whose few surviving houses tilted, windowless. Longing to sculpt animals again, she asked Antonina plaintively: “When will you have animals? I have to sculpt! I’ve wasted so much time!” Absent the flamingos, marabous, and other exotics she preferred, she began by sculpting the only available model, a duckling, and since she was a slow artist, she had to keep revising the piece as the duckling vamped into an adult bird. Still, it was her first sculpture after the war, cause for celebration.
The Warsaw they knew before the war had contained one and a half million people; in early spring of 1946, another visitor, Dr. Joseph Tenenbaum, reported “half a million at most. As it was, I could not see living space for a tenth that number. Many still lived in crypts, caverns, cellars, and subterranean shelters,” but he was greatly impressed by their morale:
Nowhere in the world are people so generally reckless of danger as in Warsaw. There is incredible vitality in Warsaw and an infectious spirit of daring. The pulse of life beats in an unbelievably rapid tempo. People may be shabbily dressed, their faces worn and visibly under-nourished, but they are not dispirited. Life is tense, yet undismayed and even gay. People jostle and bustle, sing and laugh with a mien of amazing cocksureness….
There is a rhythm and romanticism in everything, and a bumptiousness that takes the breath away…. The city is like a beehive. The entire city works, tearing down ruins and building new houses, destroying and creating, clearing away and filling in. Warsaw started to dig out from the ruins the very moment the last Nazi trooper left its suburbs. It has been at it ever since, building, remodeling and restoring without waiting for plans, money or materials.[93]
Throughout the city, he heard an aria by A. Harris, the unofficial “Song of Warsaw,” whistled, sung, and blared through loudspeakers in the central squares as people worked. Its lover’s lyrics pledged: “Warsaw, my beloved, you are the object of my dreams and yearning…. I know you are not what you used to be… that you have lived through bloody days… but I shall rebuild you to your greatness again.”
Jan returned from the internment camp in the spring of 1946, and in 1947 he began cleaning and repairs, and erecting new buildings and enclosures for a revived zoo, one holding only three hundred animals, all native species donated by people in Warsaw. Some of the zoo’s lost animals were found, even Badger, who had tunneled out of his cage during the bombardment and swum across the Vistula (Polish soldiers returned him in a large pickle barrel). Magdalena sculpted Rooster, Rabbit I, and Rabbit II, slowing down then in poor health (“damaged by the war,” Antonina reckoned), and dying on June 17, 1948, the same day she finished Rabbit II. Her dream had always been to create large sculptures for the zoo, and Antonina and Jan wished she’d had that chance, especially since the zoo offered an ideal backdrop for large artworks. At today’s zoo, the main gates greet visitors with a life-size zebra, wearing iron bars as striped bulging ribs. Some of Magdalena’s sculptures now grace the zoo director’s office, as well as the Warsaw Museum of Fine Arts, just as Antonina and Jan had wished.
One day before the July 21, 1949, reopening of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan and Antonina placed Gross’s sculptures Duck and Rooster near the stairs to a large fountain visitors were sure to pass. July 21 fell on a Thursday that year, and they may have wished to avoid opening on Friday the twenty-second because people still associated that unlucky date with the 1942 liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Two years later Jan suddenly retired from zookeeping, though he was only fifty-four years old. Postwar Warsaw, under Soviet rule, didn’t favor people who fought with the Underground, and, at odds with government officials, he may have felt obliged to retire. Norman Davies captures the mood of that time:
Anyone who dared to praise prewar independence, or to revere those who fought during the [Up]rising to recover it, was judged to be talking dangerous, seditious nonsense. Even in private, people talked with caution. Police informers were everywhere. Children were taught in Soviet-style schools where denouncing their friends and parents was pronounced an admirable thing to do.[94]
Still needing to support his family, and devoted to zoology, Jan focused on his writing, producing fifty books that illuminated the lives of animals and sued for conservation; he also broadcast a popular radio program on the same topics; and he continued his efforts with the International Society for the Preservation of European Bison, which prized its small herd of bison in Białowieża Forest.
Oddly enough, those animals survived thanks in part to the efforts of Lutz Heck, who, during the war, shipped back many of the thirty bison he had stolen for Germany, along with back-bred, look-alike aurochsen and tarpans, to release in Białowieża, the idyll where he pictured Hitler’s inner circle hunting after the war. When the Allies later bombed Germany, mother herds of the animals died, leaving those in Białowieża as their species’ best hope.
In 1946, at the first postwar meeting of the International Association of Zoo Directors, in Rotterdam, reactivating the European Bison Stud Book fell to Jan, who began scouting the pedigrees of all bison that survived the war, including those in Germany’s breeding experiments. His research documented prewar, wartime, and postwar bloodlines, and returned the program and pedigree watch to the Poles.
93
Joseph Tenenbaum,