She said, incidentally, that one of her uncles had worked in the Zabinskis’ zoo, and he told me that the zookeeper’s wife had published a diary. I got in touch with the park service there, but I didn’t speak Polish, so I asked a neighbor in Warsaw to help me. I learned that there were unusual species of small horses living in a forest in Poland and I wanted to write about them. She ran a covert operation in which Jews were smuggled out of the ghetto and into the zoo, hidden in cages, tunnels and her home, and then transported to safety.
#Do animals die in the zookeepers wife movie#
As told in Diane Ackerman’s award-winning 2007 book “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” and now in a Focus Features movie starring Jessica Chastain, Antonina and her husband, Jan, fought back. But the Zabinskis didn’t stand by and watch.
As she watched in horror, Antonina Zabinski, who ran the zoo with her husband, asked herself: “How many humans will die like this in the coming months?”Īdolf Hitler would go on to exterminate more than 380,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. When a Nazi entourage visited the zoo on New Year’s Eve, SS members killed other animals for sheer sport. Many were shot, but the slaughter had just begun. The city’s renowned zoo was hit hard, and panicked animals were racing through the city’s Old Town. As German bombers savagely attacked Warsaw in late September 1939, a surreal scene began unfolding in the streets.
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