The Zookeeper’s Wife
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Published by: W. W. Norton & Company
Release Date: September 17, 2007
Pages: 368
ISBN13: 978-0393061727
OVERVIEW
New York Times bestseller and winner of the Orion Book Award.
A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.
Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history. Drawing on Antonina’s diary and other historical sources, best-selling naturalist Diane Ackerman vividly re-creates Antonina’s life as “the zookeeper’s wife,” responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their “Guests”―Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, the empty zoo cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose names they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself.
Jan led a cell of saboteurs, and the Zabinskis’ young son risked his life carrying food to the Guests, while also tending an eccentric array of creatures in the house. With hidden people having animal names, and pet animals having human names, it’s small wonder the zoo’s codename became “The House Under a Crazy Star.”
Yet there is more to this story than a colorful cast. With her exquisite sensitivity to the natural world, Diane Ackerman explores the role of nature in both kindness and savagery, and she unravels the fascinating and disturbing obsession at the core of Nazism: both a worship of nature and its violation, as humans sought to control the genome of the entire planet.
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PRAISE & ACCOLADES
New York Times Bestseller
2008 Orion Book Award
2017 Feature Film starring Jessica Chastain, Daniel Brühl, Johan Heldenbergh
“Here is a true story—of human empathy and its opposite—that is simultaneously grave and exuberant, wise and playful. Ackerman has a wonderful tale to tell, and she tells it wonderfully.”
—Washington Post Book World
"I can't imagine a better story or storyteller. The Zookeeper's Wife will touch every nerve you have."
—Jonathan Safran Foer
"The Zookeeper’s Wife is about one of the most successful hideouts of World War II. It’s a tale of people, animals, transcendence, and subversive acts of compassion.” Jan Zabinski, the innovative director of the Warsaw Zoo, and Antonina, his empathic wife, lived joyfully on the zoo grounds during the 1930s with their young son, Ryszard (Polish for lynx), and a menagerie of animals needing special attention. The zoo was badly damaged by the Nazi blitzkrieg; and their bit of paradise would have been utterly destroyed but for the director of the Berlin Zoo, Lutz Heck, who wanted Jan’s help in resurrecting extinct ‘pure-blooded species’ in pursuit of Aryan perfection in the animal kingdom. Resourceful and courageous, the Zabinskis turned the decimated zoo into a refuge and saved the lives of several hundred imperiled Jews. Ackerman has written many stellar works, but this is the book she was born to write. Sharing the Zabinskis’ knowledge of and reverence for the natural world and drawing on her poet’s gift for dazzling metaphor, she captures with breathtaking precision and discernment our kinship with animals, the barbarity of war, Antonina’s unbounded kindness and keen delight in ‘life’s sensory bazaar,’ Jan’s daring work with the Polish Underground, and the audacity of the Zabinskis’ mission of mercy. An exemplary work of scholarship and an ‘ecstasy of imagining,’ Ackerman’s affecting telling of the heroic Zabinskis’ dramatic story illuminates the profound connection between humankind and nature, and celebrates life’s beauty, mystery, and tenacity.”
—Booklist
"The Zookeeper's Wife is a groundbreaking work of nonfiction, in which the human relationship to nature is explored in an absolutely original way through looking at the Holocaust. A few years ago, 'nature' writers were asking themselves, How can a book be at the same time a work of art, an act of conscientious objection to the destruction of the world, and an affirmation of hope and human decency? The Zookeeper's Wife answers this question."
— Kathleen Dean Moore, Orion Book Award committee chairperson
"A poignant and absorbing book."
―New York Times Book Review
“It is no stretch to say that this is the book Ackerman was meant to write.”
— Los Angeles Times
“Diane Ackerman has surpassed even herself in her latest book, which is alternatingly funny, moving, and terrifying. This powerful thriller would be a great novel — except that it is true.”
— Jared Diamond
"Author Diane Ackerman offers us The Zookeeper’s Wife, a tale of untold bravery with a whimsical dose of history reminiscent of Noah’s Ark.… Ackerman’s story is a treatise on nobility―a word that applies to some humans and all the animals in The Zookeeper’s Wife."
― USA Today
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