Animal Stories
The Indian Pariah Dog Club has its own blog.
And here is a true story, set in Warsaw during the Holocaust, about humans and animals:
The book begins in the mid-1930s, when a young couple, Antonina and Jan Zabinski, were the directors of Warsaw’s elaborate, fecund zoo, which housed its animals not just in cages but in habitats meant to recreate their native wetlands, deserts and woods. Antonina was a Russian-born Pole whose parents were killed by the Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian Revolution. Jan was a rarity: a Polish Catholic whose father raised him as a staunch atheist in a working-class Jewish neighborhood. The Zabinski household was a sort of madcap bohemia, full of artists, intellectuals and a rotating assortment of non-human friends, including a lion kitten, a wolf cub, a chimpanzee, a “sluttish” cat named Balbina, a kissing rabbit named Wicek, and a paunchy muskrat who practiced an “exquisite” ritual of morning ablutions…The mercilessly effective Nazi bombardment of Warsaw in 1939 destroyed the zoo. Ackerman, a poet and naturalist whose previous books include A Natural History of the Senses, is particularly evocative in describing the wreckage: “The sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed. . . . Wounded zebras ran, ribboned with blood, terrified howler monkeys and orangutans dashed caterwauling into the trees and bushes, snakes slithered loose, and crocodiles pushed onto their toes and trotted at speed. . . . Two giraffes lay dead on the ground, legs twisted, shockingly horizontal. . . . The monkeys and birds, screeching infernally, created an otherworldly chorus. . . . The tumult surely sounded like ten thousand Furies scratching up from hell to unhinge the world.”
And here is where the Zabinskis’ real story begins… Jan and Antonina opened their home — a Bauhaus-style glass villa — and the zoo to partisans and Jews, some of whom were smuggled out of the ghetto by Jan himself. The Zabinskis hid their “Guests” in closets, rooms and even the old animal cages; in the course of the Nazi occupation, they helped approximately 300 women, men and children. And Antonina insisted, throughout, on maintaining a festive, music-filled household, even as she and Jan lived with the constant threat of exposure, torture and death, not just for themselves but for their young son, too.
How to account for the Zabinskis’ actions? Jan was a cool, courageous risk-taker, and his upbringing had brought him personally close to many Jews. But Antonina was high-strung, often fearful (after all, the Bolsheviks had taught her something about political violence). In Ackerman’s telling, it was Antonina’s connection to the animal world — her belief that every living thing is entitled to life, respect and nurture — that made her incapable, despite her own terrors, of turning away from suffering…
The whole thing here.
