Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeepers’s Wife (W.W. Norton) is one of the most unusual accounts about the Holocaust ever to be published.
This relatively slim volume is a sensitively told story about two Polish Cath-olic zookeepers in Warsaw who saved  Jews by concealing them in unused buildings and empty zoo cages.It sounds too surrealistic to be true, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.Ackerman is well equipped to tell this tale. She is a writer who has an affinity to the natural world, and in her capable hands, the courage of  the zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski manifests itself eloquently.
Horrified by Nazi racism, this altruistic couple rescued more than 300 people, a blend of Jews and members of the Polish underground resistance movement.
They knew perfectly well that their activities endangered them. But throwing caution to the wind, the Zabinskis carried on defiantly under the noses of the German occupation force.
In an author’s note, Ackerman explains why they are a source of inspiration to her.
“Their story has fallen between the seams of his-tory, as radically compassionate acts sometimes do. But in war-time Poland, when even handing a thirsty Jew a cup of water was punishable by death, their heroism stands out as all the more startling.”
There was another reason Ackerman was drawn to the topic. Her maternal grandparents are from Poland.
Jan and Antonina met at Warsaw’s College of Agriculture. She had studied languages, drawing and painting, and he was a professional zoologist who shared her relish for both animals and animalistic art. They were married in 1931, two years after he was appointed director of the zoo.
Their lives were upended with Germany’s invasion Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. But the effect that war had on the creatures in the zoo was even more calamitous.
As Ackerman writes: “The elephants trumpeted wildly, the hyenas sobbed in a frightened sort of giggle interrupted by hiccups, the African hunting dogs howled and the rhesus monkeys, agitated beyond sanity, battled one another, their hysterical shrieks clawing the air.”
Shortly after the German army rolled into Poland, Jan was conscripted into the Polish army, but with Poland’s defeat, he returned to his duties.
By then, the zoo had been heavily damaged and many of its animals killed by Ger-man air raids.
Jan stayed on so that the zoo could be used as an arms and ammunition depot for the Home Army, the dominant Po-lish resistance movement.
He and Antonina were soon involved in helping Jewish friends in the Warsaw ghetto. She prepared small packets of food and he delivered them to the closed-off ghetto.
The ghetto’s Jewish inmates were desperately hungry. Germans were entitled to rations of 2,613 calories a day, while Poles received 669 calories and Jews had to make do with 184 calories. Clearly, the Nazi occupiers had a plan. Hans Frank, the German governor of Poland, said, “I ask nothing of the Jews except that they disappear.”
Jan’s philo-Semitic attitude was forg-ed on the anvil of friendship with Jews.
As a boy, he attended a school where the study of Christianity was not requir-ed and where 80 per cent of the students were Jewish. He was enrolled in that school because his father was a staunch atheist.
Jan made friends with Jews and, un-like some Poles, he was not anti-Semitic.  Later, as a teacher at a predominantly Jewish school, he befriended still more Jews.
One of his Jewish friends, Szymon Tenenbaum, was a renowned entomologist who had amassed a vast insect collection. Confined to the ghetto, he died in 1941. Before his death, Jan smuggled Tenenbaum’s collection out of the ghetto. Three weeks before the general Warsaw uprising in 1944, he moved it  to the safety of the Natural History Museum.
The Zabinskis began rescuing Jews   in 1943, less than a year after the Nazis deported 265,000 ghetto residents to the Treblinka death camp, leaving 55,000 Jews in the ghetto.
As a gift to Adolf Hitler, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, swore to liquidate the rest of the Jews in the ghetto. The killing process was launched on April 19, the first day of Passover, under the direction of Major General Jurgen Stroop, the commander of an SS brigade. To Stroops’ utter surprise, the Jews fought back in a heroic uprising, defending positions behind barricades with pistols, rifles, one machine gun and Molotov cocktails.
Stung by the ferocious response, he dispatched 2,090 soldiers, backed by tanks, into the centre of the ghetto.
As the fighting raged, Polish underground newspapers called on Poles to help escaping Jews find shelter.
The Za-binskis, Ackerman says, “eagerly obliged.”
Ackerman neglects to mention that far too many Poles were indifferent to the tragedy unfolding in the ghetto and did not, in fact, assist Jews. Some Poles were even manifestly hostile to Jews.
It was during this dark period that the Zabinskis established their credentials as compassionate Christians. Ackerman, at length, describes their selfless acts of heroism, which earned them a citation from the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum in Jerusalem.
She uses their heroics as a platform to describe the efforts of other Poles to help Jews melt into Polish society.
One Polish woman taught Jewish women Christian prayers and how to cook and serve pork, while a Polish plas-tic surgeon reshaped Jewish noses and operated on men to restore foreskins.
Captured by the Germans during the 1944 Warsaw uprising, Jan was interned by the Germans. His wife, meanwhile, tended to the needs of Jews in her care.
Returning from the internment camp in 1946, he resumed his job at the zoo, cleaning and repairing it.
The zoo was reopened in the summer of 1949, but in 1951, when Jan was 54, he retired. Ackerman speculates that, as a veteran of the Home Army, he was not in favour in a country that was under the thumb of the Soviet Union.
With Antonina at his side, he spent the rest of his life writing books about the animal kingdom and hosting a popular radio program on the same subject.  
But to the grateful Jews he and his wife had rescued, his chief claim to fame was not zoology but humanitarianism.