When the Nazis bombed Warsaw on Sept. 1, 1939, no living creature was safe. In Jan and Antonina Zabinski’s zoo, monkeys shrieked, parrot feathers caught fire, and bloodied zebras fled broken cages and ran for the woods.
But after the smoke cleared — and the Germans stole all the surviving animals they wanted — that hellish place became a sanctuary. Hidden in its underground cages and dens and in the basement and cupboards of the zookeepers’ adjoining villa were Polish Jews, sometimes 50 at a time.
When aiding a Jew in Poland was punishable by death, the Zabinskis saved 300 of them. Their story, recounted in Diane Ackerman’s haunting 2007 book, “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” is the basis for the film of the same name: Out Friday, it stars Jessica Chastain as Antonina, a woman of compassion so fierce, you wonder why she isn’t better known.
“The reason is, it’s a female story,” says director Niki Caro. “So many Holocaust movies are from the male perspective. War happened to women and children and animals, also.”
Ackerman, the granddaughter of Polish Jews, stumbled upon Antonina’s diary in 2003. Drawing from that, as well as letters, memoirs, family photos and postwar interviews, the writer told The Post, she discovered a “complicated” woman.
Orphaned at 9, Antonina learned early on how to read people. She painted, spoke several languages and was passionate about polka dots — and animals. After marrying Jan in 1931, she reared orphaned lynx and lion cubs alongside their son, Rys, at their zoo-side home. Later, as Antonina helped Jan smuggle Jews out of the ghetto, she adopted them, too. She even managed to feed them, though the zoo’s cook wondered why a family of three always seemed ravenous, asking for seconds . . . and fourths.
That Antonina was blond and beautiful probably helped. Lutz Heck, the German zoologist who took most of the Zabinskis’ animals for his Berlin Zoo, was “sweet on her,” Ackerman says, and didn’t monitor her doings as closely as he should have.
But Heck was still a Nazi. To ingratiate himself with SS higher-ups, he gave them a private hunting party — inside the Warsaw Zoo.
When the officers arrived that day, wielding pistols, Antonina grabbed her young child and ran indoors. From Rys’ room, blinds drawn, mother and son heard the sound of drunken laughter, gunshots — and the screams of animals dropping in their cages.
It was “sheer gratuitous slaughter,” she later wrote in her diary. “How many humans will die like this in the coming months?”
She and Jan were determined to save as many people as they could, and by any ruse possible. Persuading the Nazis to let them raise pigs for meat for German soldiers gave Jan an excuse to drive his truck into the ghetto: On the pretense of gathering garbage for hog feed, he smuggled food and money in and people out. Both he and Antonina always kept cyanide capsules at the ready, in case they were caught.
They called the people they sheltered their “guests,” and treated them as such, giving them animal code names to throw off their staff. Several refugees, including Magdalena Gross, the sculptor they nicknamed “starling,” were longtime friends of the family, but many more were strangers. Some stayed only a few nights, until they could procure forged papers to get them safely out of Poland; others stayed years. When a German truck pulled up or the doorbell rang, Antonina banged out an Offenbach piece on her piano, signaling her guests to hide and hush.
In 1944, Jan left to join the Warsaw Uprising, making bombs and sabotaging German trains. Antonina, who by then had a newborn to care for, stayed behind. She was holding her baby girl the day the Nazis came and yanked Rys off behind a garden shed. A shot rang out, and then Rys appeared, white-faced, carrying a bloodied chicken. “We’ve played such a funny joke!” the soldiers said, then took the chicken and left.
But by then the tide had turned, and the Germans were in retreat. In 1946, Jan returned to Warsaw from the prisoner-of-war camp where he’d been held after the Germans arrested him. In 1947, he and Antonina began the painstaking process of rebuilding their zoo.
It’s once again open today, as is the family’s home, as a museum. Before she died in 1971, Antonina wrote several children’s books, always from the point of view of animals. Before Jan died three years later, he told a reporter about how “a timid housewife” found the strength to stand up to murderers.
It was, he said, because she identified with the animals she loved.
“From time to time she seemed to shed her own human traits and become a panther or hyena,” he told a reporter. “Able to adopt their fighting instinct, she arose as a fearless defender.”