While Jan wrote for adults, Antonina penned children’s books, raised her two children, and stayed in touch with the extended family of the Guests, who had traveled to different lands. Among those Jan personally led from the Ghetto (through the Labor Bureau building) were Kazio and Ludwinia Kramsztyk (cousins of renowned painter Roman Kramsztyk), Dr. Hirszfeld (specialist in infectious diseases), and Dr. Roza Anzelówna and her mother, who stayed in the villa for a short time, then moved to a boardinghouse on Widok Street recommended by friends of the Żabińskis. But after a few months they were arrested by Gestapo and killed, the only Guests of the villa who didn’t outlast the war.
The Kenigsweins survived the occupation and retrieved their youngest son from the orphanage, but in 1946 Samuel died of a heart attack, after which Regina and the children immigrated to Israel, where she remarried and worked on a kibbutz. She never forgot her time at the zoo. “The Żabińskis’ home was Noah’s Ark,” Regina told an Israeli newspaper twenty years after the war, “with so many people and animals hidden there.” Rachela “Aniela” Auerbach also moved to Israel, after first traveling to London, where she delivered Jan’s report about the survival of the European bison to Julian Huxley (prewar director of the London Zoo). Irena Mayzel resettled in Israel, and hosted the Żabińskis there after the war. Genia Sylkes moved to London, too, then to New York City, where she worked for many years in the Yiddish Scientific Institute library.
Captured by the Gestapo and brutally tortured, Irena Sendler (who winkled children out of the Ghetto) escaped, thanks to friends in the Underground, and spent the rest of the war in hiding. Despite her broken legs and feet, she worked in Poland as a social worker and advocate for the handicapped. During the war, Wanda Englert would move many times; her husband, Adam, was arrested in 1943 and imprisoned in Pawiak Prison, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald. Amazingly, he survived prison and the concentration camps, later reunited with his wife, and together they moved to London.
Halina and Irena, the girl messengers, still live in Warsaw today and keep in close touch, best friends for over eighty-two years. On the wall in Irena’s apartment, along with her fencing medals, are photographs of her and Halina as young women, in which they’re coiffed, glamorous, and all future—studio portraits taken during the war by a neighbor.
Sitting with Halina in the courtyard restaurant of the Bristol Hotel, among packed tables of tourists and businesspeople, with a buffet of delicacies on long tables just inside open doors, I watched her face switch among the radio stations of memory, then she quietly sang a song she’d heard over sixty years before, one a handsome young soldier had sung to her as she walked past:
Halina’s face flushed a little from that tall umbrella drink of memory, stored among more tragic images, as wartime memories often are, having their own special filing system, their own ecology. If other diners overheard, no one gave a sign, and as I looked around the archipelago of tables, I realized that out of fifty or so people, she was the only one old enough to harbor wartime memories.
Ryś, a civil engineer and a father himself, lives in downtown Warsaw today in an eight-story walk-up, minus pets. “A dog couldn’t climb the stairs!” he explained as we lurched from landing to landing. Tall and slender, in his seventies, he appears fit from all the stair-climbing, friendly and hospitable, but also a little wary, not surprising given the war lessons ingrained from an early age. “We lived from moment to moment,” Ryś said, sitting in his living room, watched over by photographs of his parents, many of their books, a framed drawing of a forest bison, and a sketch of his father. Zoo life hadn’t seemed at all unusual to him as a boy, he said, because “it was all I knew.” He told of watching a bomb fall near the villa and realizing that he was close enough to be killed, had it gone off. He remembered posing for Magdalena Gross, sitting for long hours while she coaxed clay, existed in it really, and he relished her chirpy attentions. I learned from him that his mother filled the villa’s upstairs terrace with overflowing flower boxes in warm weather, that she especially liked pansies, the flowers with pensive faces (from the French pensee), that she preferred the music of Chopin, Mozart, and Rossini. No doubt he found some of my questions odd—I hoped to learn about his mother’s scent, how she walked, her gestures, her tone of voice, how she wore her hair. To all such inquiries, he answered “average” or “normal,” and I soon realized those were memory traces he either didn’t visit or didn’t wish to share. His sister Teresa, born late in the war, married and lives in Scandinavia. I invited grown-up Ryszard to visit the villa with me, and he kindly obliged. As we explored his childhood home, stepping carefully over the doorframes with decorative anvil-shaped thresholds, I was struck by the way he tested his memory, often comparing what is to what was in much the same way Antonina described him doing as a boy, when they returned to the bombed zoo at the end of the war.
In one of those twists of fate that pepper history, the Berlin Zoo was heavily bombed, just as the Warsaw Zoo had been, assailing Lutz Heck with many of the same concerns and hardships he’d imposed on the Żabińskis. In his autobiography, Animals—My Adventure, he writes movingly about his fatally wounded zoo. Unlike the Żabińskis, he knew exactly what devastation to expect, having witnessed it firsthand in Warsaw, whose zoo bombing he never mentions. His safari animals, large collection of photographs, and numerous diaries vanished by war’s end. As the Soviet army advanced, Lutz left Berlin to avoid being arrested for looting Ukrainian zoos, and he spent the rest of his life in Wiesbaden, making hunting trips abroad. Lutz died in 1982, a year after his brother Heinz. Lutz’s son Heinz immigrated to the Catskills in 1959, where he ran a small zoo famous for its herd of Przywalski horses, descended from those nurtured by Heinz Heck throughout the war. At one point, the Munich Zoo had assembled the largest herd of Przywalski horses outside of Mongolia (some stolen from the Warsaw Zoo).
In all, around three hundred people passed through the way station of the Warsaw Zoo, en route to the rest of their nomadic lives. Jan always felt, and said publicly, that the real heroine of this saga was his wife, Antonina. “She was afraid of the possible consequences,” he said to Noah Kliger, who interviewed him for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, “she was terrified the Nazis would seek revenge against us and our young son, terrified of death, and yet she kept it to herself, and helped me [with my Underground activities] and never ever asked me to stop.”
“Antonina was a housewife,” he told Danka Narnish, of another Israeli paper, “she wasn’t involved in politics or war, and was timid, and yet despite that she played a major role in saving others and never once complained about the danger.”
“Her confidence could disarm even the most hostile,” he told an anonymous reporter, adding that her strength stemmed from her love of animals. “It wasn’t just that she identified with them,” he explained, “but from time to time she seemed to shed her own human traits and become a panther or a hyena. Then, able to adopt their fighting instinct, she arose as a fearless defender of her kind.”