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David Wilson

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
By Diane Ackerman
Norton, HK$200
The setting is dramatic: blitzkrieg Warsaw. The mood is surreal: in the process of demolishing the city, Stuka bombers pound Warsaw Zoo, enacting a cull during which parrots spiral upward 'like Aztec gods' and plummet.
Rather than succumbing to the madness that strikes the parrots and  monkeys, the heroine Antonina and her zookeeper husband Jan write their place in history by smuggling out Jews in cages and secreting others in their villa.
During the next five years until, like the rest of Warsaw, the zoo is liberated, the couple shield about 300 refugees.
They also supply those who want to flee Poland with the necessary papers and bury ammunition in the elephant pen. With its Noah's Ark and Schindler's List overtones, The Zookeeper's Wife is inherently memorable.
The virtuoso narrator, Diane Ackerman, draws on Antonina's true-life diaries along with other contemporary sources and her own post-war interviews, taking the reader deep into the recesses of the Warsaw Ghetto. En route, Ackerman seems to stretch the bounds of reality and raise questions about her book's non-fiction classification.
The passages where Ackerman enlists those classic devices, dialogue and internal monologue, for example about animal psychology, seem especially suspect. The reader may struggle to believe that, during the occupation, Antonina could be concerned with such an abstract issue. That said, the scene may show how, even in the worst situations, people find time to meditate. 'Whenever I say Antonina or Jan thought, wondered, felt, I'm quoting from their writings or interviews,' Ackerman says.
The popular science observations that spice the text are harder to defend because they seem rather forced. In one rambling passage that has already come under fire, she bangs on about beetles for no fewer than three paragraph-light pages.
Ackerman  has written the best-selling A Natural History of the Senses, among other books of non-fiction and poetry. Her bardic side explains  Zookeeper's title, which comes from a Sylvia Plath poem - and her fanatical attraction to detail.
Her descriptions of bombing and the  sidelights on the resistance  show how the period was about so much more than just fighting. For instance, the leaders of Zegota,  the underground organisation that rescued Jews, taught fugitives how to look Aryan and blend in, which was tricky because the tiniest detail could betray them.
They needed to remember to avoid all Jewish verbal expressions, rein in their hair, wear grey and avoid fashionable spectacles that highlighted the shape of their noses, Ackerman divulges.
And she succeeds in illuminating the sheer lunacy of the people from whom the Jews were hiding. The Nazis' obsession with race stretched into the animal world, where they hoped to recreate cow-like, extinct aurochs so they would have pure Aryan game to hunt after the war.
The fact that this idea seems so batty now raises the question of whether we have grown shrewder. Quite possibly. Surely  no people of any developed nation could be seduced by that kind of eugenic claptrap any more.



The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story