I drove to Seattle a couple of weeks ago to see
"The Zookeeper's Wife" in its first run. After watching the addictive trailer at least a dozen times, I needed to up my hit. Ferries and Seattle traffic seemed inconsequential.
It's a
fascinating tale with a haunting music score that hooked me from the start.
The trailer scenes deliver an emotional wallop of their own. For me, the most moving of them was a young Jewish boy innocently raising his arms to be lifted into a German transport train. As protagonist zookeeper Jan looks on at the train station, the camera captures his shock, sadness, and look of foreboding. It's a
powerful, cinematic moment...as if he flashed on the horror
about to unfold but couldn't yet grasp the enormity of what he had seen.
This film is based on the same named book by Diane Ackerman. It's the true story of Dr. Jan Zabinska, a zoologist, his wife Antonina, and their young son Rhys. They owned the Warsaw Zoo and lived in a villa on the zoo grounds. The film's opening scenes depict their idyllic seeming life just before the German invasion in 1939.
Almost too idyllic. Antonina looks sweetly at her sleeping son with baby lions sleeping beside him in the bed; opens the zoo's gates to visitors; rides her bike with a young camel tagging along; plays with an elephant; and greets Jan on his rounds. Their love and special rapport with animals are evident and touching. She refers to the zoo's animals as "her treasured guests".
But the movie doesn't stoop to sentimentality. And early scenes may only be jarring if you're expecting another kind of movie -- perhaps a darker, quicker plunge into the horrors of the Holocaust. In the case of "The Zookeeper's Wife", this brush with sweetness ends quickly enough anyway.
Germany invades Poland and bombs nearly destroy the zoo. The occupation begins and the outlook for the zoo deteriorates. Ominously, Jews are segregated and forced into the ghetto. Mass transports to concentration camps accelerate until the ghetto's emptied and burned by the Germans.
Miraculously, German zookeeper Lutz Heck, Hitler's chief zoologist, has offered to take some of their surviving animals to a zoo in Germany and return them post-war. Jan and Antonina quickly agree.
However Lutz, returning in officer's uniform with German troops, assumes control of the zoo, and, with food scarce, shoots many of the animals not selected for relocation. The young camel that follows Antonina each morning is a heartbreaking casualty.
To save what's left of the zoo, Antonina and Jan re-purpose it to raise hogs for German troops and make daily runs to the ghetto for food scraps to feed them. Risking their lives, Antonina and Jan start smuggling Jews out of the ghetto. Jan alludes to the danger: "you can be shot for giving them a glass of water". Antonina brushes aside the risk: "We have room. Bring as many as you can".
On their daily runs to the ghetto, they ingeniously hide Jews under food scraps in the truck's hold. Once out of the ghetto, they keep them safely out of sight in the zoo's emptied underground cages. Most will be smuggled out of the country with forged papers.
They manage to enable their guests --almost 300 during the course of the war-- to live undetected until they reach safety. All under the nose of Lutz and his troops. Antonina even feigns affection for him at a critical moment to evade danger. He's infatuated with her and she uses it to their advantage even as his familiarity becomes a source of unrest for Jan.
Each night after German patrols leave for their barracks. Antonina signals an all-clear on the piano and then serves dinner to her "Jewish guests". It's a moving tableau of kindness in the midst of terror.
She also cares for a young girl raped by two soldiers. Slowly Antonina gains her trust. Sharing a love of animals and a cautionary reflection that "you can never know who your enemies are or who to trust", she gently initiates healing.
There may be a tendency to pigeonhole this as just another Holocaust movie with formulaic tropes of good vs. evil. It's not. No bullet-proof heroes. No comically simplistic villains. It's as much about healing and affirming life as overcoming evil. It's not a documentary of Holocaust horrors or a one-note war thriller.
Lutz, for example, was a well known zoologist. He's painted as more of an opportunist than anything, not one who descended into madness and pure evil. In the end, although he threatens to, he won't allow rage over Antonina's betrayal to push him into murdering Rhys.
A contrasting movie is the recent award winning "Son of Saul". Set in the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp, its horrific scenes were integral to the story of Saul. The violence and imagery weren't gratuitous.
But "The Zookeeper's Wife", in war-ravaged Warsaw, is a much different and arguably an equally powerful movie. Here the starkest imagery wouldn't have been the most cinematic and would have overwhelmed the poignancy of its other themes. Yet "The Zookeeper's Wife", with well-written affecting scenes of courage, resilience, and love, will linger just as memorably.
