It was her instinct to keep fear at bay, and what Jan described as an ability, perhaps learned from observing the animals in the zoo and in the informal household menagerie, to keep calm, keep enemies from suspicion and friends from panic. It was more than feeding the Guests and sounding the alarm to hide that made Antonina the central heroine of this book.
First, that Antonina Zabinski, more than her husband Jan whose jobs and involvement with the Underground kept him out of the house from dawn until curfew, was responsible for the wellbeing and survival of their Guests. When I finished reading The Zookeeper's Wife, I was left with two lasting impressions. This naturalist's perspective on World War II is fresh, and makes it clear that as war devastates the human population, so too does it destroy the natural balance of the physical world.
Instead, her sweeping writing makes stops along the way at a natural history of Poland including a fascinating account of the primeval Białowieża Forest, the behavior of zoo animals during times of peace and war, and the Nazi plan to Aryanize and Germanize the physical world by seeding it with native German flora, and reviving extinct species of European mammals. Jan was also active in the Polish Underground, resisting the Germans by poisoning the food supply, smuggling weapons, and sabotaging trains and tracks.īut Ackerman does not stop at describing the Zabinskis and their heroic experience during the War. Instead, it focuses on Jan and Antonina Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo and his wife, who managed to rescue more than 300 refugees during the devastating German occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1944. Unlike most other books about World War II that I've read, The Zookeeper's Wife does not focus on the Jewish targets of Nazism. The Zookeeper's Wife, however, is a genre-bending piece of prose that defies the conventions of history, memoir, and naturalist writing, all of which it employs. Maybe I was just in that headspace because the first two books on the Jewesses with Attitude Summer Reading List were fiction. I made the mistake of picking up The Zookeeper's Wife and reading it as though it were a novel. There are many people who’ve attacked me and I’ve completely ignored them.”Īnd despite counsel from some, like a Hollywood director she hasn't named who told her being so vocal could harm her career, “I’m not going to stop," she says. "If someone doesn’t want to hire me because I believe in gender equality, then I probably don’t want to work with them.The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman (Norton 2007) “I usually do that with people who honestly, truly believe what they think but perhaps are only seeing it from one small angle. The actress says she tries to maintain a positive voice in the echo chamber of social media, but will engage with trolls only “if I think it’s going to be helpful for other people to read,” she says. On Twitter, Chastain has become an ardent voice for women’s rights. "The first thing to do is attack the press and kill off intelligentsia and create propaganda.” “I was just stunned as I was going through it learning about the beginning of what had happened, and how (Hitler) took power," she says. View Gallery: Jessica Chastain books it to 'Zookeeper's Wife' premiereĬhastain toured the Holocaust Museum while debuting the film in Washington. “We don’t see very many movies that speak of war from the female point of view,” says Caro, who shot the film in 2015. The film, based on the best-selling non-fiction book by Diane Ackerman, took years to get off the ground, and Caro credits Chastain’s star power with finally getting it made. It’s incredible,” says Chastain, who went to Auschwitz to prepare for the role, and channeled Zabinski as she soothed elephants, zebras, lion cubs and even a skunk.
“The zoo and the home are still intact, so you can still go into the basement and see where they hid people in the tunnels. “What’s the norm? Probably less than 10% (of women) on a set,” says the actress, who plays Antonina Zabinski in the true story of how a woman and her husband Jan who used their Warsaw Zoo to hide Polish Jews during the Nazi occupation.
Frequently, that person is female.”įor Chastain, it was eye-opening. “It seems as if it was by design, but it wasn’t,” says the New Zealand director.
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