In this Luftwaffe attack, a half-ton bomb destroyed the polar bears’ mountain, smashing the walls, moats, and barriers and freeing the terrified animals. When a platoon of Polish soldiers found the panicky bears, ribboned with blood and circling round their old haunt, they quickly shot them. Then, fearing lions, tigers, and other dangerous animals might escape, too, the soldiers decided to kill the most aggressive ones, including the male elephant, Jaś, Tuzinka’s father.
Watching from the front porch, Antonina had a good view across the grounds to where Polish soldiers gathered beside a well, with several zoo workers crowding around them, one crying, the others grim and silent.
“How many animals have they already killed?” she asked herself.
Events were unfolding without time to protest or grieve, and the surviving animals needed help, so she and Jan joined the keepers in feeding, doctoring, and calming animals as best they could.
“At least humans can pack their essentials, keep moving, keep improvising,” Antonina thought. “If Germany occupies Poland, what will become of the delicate life-form of the zoo?… The zoo animals are in a much worse situation than we are,” she lamented, “because they’re totally dependent on us. Moving the zoo to a different location is unimaginable; it’s too complex an organism.” Even if war should erupt and end fast, the aftermath would be costly, she told herself. Where would they find food and money to keep the zoo afloat? Trying not to picture the worst scenario, she and Jan nonetheless bought extra supplies of hay, barley, dried fruits, flour, dried bread, coal, and wood.
On September 7, a Polish officer knocked at the front door and formally ordered all able-bodied men to join the army fighting on a northwestern front—which included forty-two-year-old Jan—and all civilians to vacate the zoo at once. Antonina packed quickly and traveled with Ryś back across the river, this time to stay with her sister-in-law in the west part of the city, in a fourth-floor apartment at No. 3 Kapucyńska Street.
CHAPTER 5
AT NIGHT, IN THE SMALL FLAT ON KAPUCYŃSKA STREET, SHE learned a new noise: the anvil blows of German artillery. Somewhere else, women her age were slinking into nightclubs and dancing to the music of Glenn Miller, bouncy tunes with names like “String of Pearls” and “Little Brown Jug.” Others were dancing to the newly invented jukebox at roadside joints.[8] Couples were hiring babysitters and going to the cinema to see 1939’s new releases: Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. Families were driving through the countryside to view the fall leaves and eat apple cake and corn fritters at harvest festivals. For many Poles, life had become residue, what remains after evaporation drains the juice from the original. During occupation, everyone lost the many seasonings of daily life, trapped in a reality where only the basics mattered and those bled most of one’s energy, time, money, and thoughts.
Like other animal mothers, she grew desperate to find a safe hiding place for her young, “but unlike them,” she wrote in her diary, “I can’t carry Ryś in my jaws to a safe nest.” Nor could she remain in her sister-in-law’s fourth-floor apartment—“What if the building collapses and we can’t escape?” Maybe it was best, she decided, to resettle downstairs, where a small store sold lampshades—that is, if she could persuade the owners to take her in.
Gathering up Ryś, she climbed down the four flights of dark stairs and knocked on a door which opened to reveal two elderly women, Mrs. Caderska and Mrs. Stokowska.
“Come in, come in.” They glanced around the hallway after her and quickly fastened the door.
A strange new continent, half coral reef, half planetarium, veered into view as she entered a cluttered shop redolent with the odors of fabric, glue, paint, sweat, and cooking oatmeal. A bazaar of lampshades hung from the ceiling, nested together in ziggurats or huddled like exotic kites. Wooden shelves held strudel-like bolts of fabric, brass frames, hand tools, screws, rivets, and gleaming trays of finials separated by substance: glass, plastic, wood, metal. In such shops of the era, women sewed new fabric shades by hand, repaired old shades, and sold some made by others.
As Antonina’s eyes traveled the room, she would have seen fixtures popular during the 1930s, a time when Baltic decor ran from Victorian to Art Deco and modernist, and included shades such as these: tulip-shaped rose silk decorated with chrysanthemum brocade; green chiffon with lace inset panels of white sateen; geometrically shaped pleated ivory; bright yellow panels in the shape of Napoleon’s hat; eight-sided perforated metal with faceted faux jewels inserted around the skirt; dark amber mica crowning a plaster globe embossed with Art Nouveau archers pursuing a stag; a dome of orange-red glass bumpy as gooseflesh, skirted with crystal pendants, below which hung a brass gondola embossed with ivy scrolling. That fashionable red glass, known as gorge-de-pigeon, and often used in European wine goblets in Antonina’s time, shone sour-cherry red when dark, and when lit, cast a glow the color of freshly peeled blood oranges. It was dyed with pigeon blood, an elixir also used to grade high-quality rubies (with the best stones resembling the freshest blood).
Ryś drew her attention to the far side of the room where, to her surprise, disheveled women and children from the neighborhood sat hedged in by shades.
“Dzień dobry, dzień dobry, dzień dobry,” Antonina greeted each woman in turn.
Something about the cozy atmosphere of the lampshade store drew the displaced and bone-chilled to this shop run by grandmotherly ladies willing to share their pantry, coal, and bedding. As Antonina noted,
This lampshade store and workshop was like a magnet to so many people. Thanks to these two tiny lovely old ladies, who were extremely warmhearted, full of love and kindness, we survived this terrible time. They were like the warm light during the summer night, and people from upstairs, homeless people from other locations, from destroyed buildings, even from other streets, were gathering like moths attracted by the warmth around these two ladies.
Antonina marveled as their wrinkled hands passed out food (mainly oatmeal), sweets, a postcard album, and little games. Every night when people chose their spot to sleep, she lay a mattress under a sturdy doorframe and sheltered Ryś with her body, snatching sleep as though falling down a well, as her past grew more idyllic and floated farther away. She had had so many plans for the coming year; now she wondered if she and Ryś would survive the night, if she’d live to see Jan again, if her son would celebrate another birthday. “Every day of our life was full of thoughts of the horrible present, and even our own death,” she wrote in her memoirs, adding:
Our allies were not here, not helping us—we Poles were all alone [when] one English attack on the Germans could stop the constant bombing of Warsaw…. We were receiving very depressing news about our Polish government—our Marshal Śmigly and members of the government had escaped to Romania and were captured and arrested. We felt betrayed, shocked, we were grieving.
8
Jukeboxes were invented in the 1930s, to supply music in back-road jooks—Carolina creole for joints that were a combination of bawdy house, gambling den, and dance shack.