Some made adjustments to their appearance to appear more “Aryan,” some by bleaching their hair.
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Not only did people need documentation, they needed to learn how to pass as Christian, how to behave in church, for example.
The complexity of the operation was significant. What was possible, though, was for Antonina and Jan to use the zoo as a refuge for those targeted by the Nazis, for Jews. Many of the animals were taken by a Nazi officer who happened to be in charge of a zoo in Germany.
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Antonina and Jan would take them into their zoo-residence, a villa, creating a very Doctor-Doolittle-like atmosphere.īut sustaining a full zoo in the middle of a blitzkrieg, and then a brutal occupation was impossible. Then, able to adopt their fighting instinct, she arose as a fearless defender of her kind.”It was frequently the case that this or that animal required special care, patching up from an injury, recuperation from an illness. “It wasn’t just that she identified with them,” he explained, “but from time to time she seemed to shed her own human traits and become a panther or a hyena. Jan once said of Antonina “Her confidence could disarm even the most hostile,” he told an anonymous reporter, adding that her strength stemmed from her love of animals. Both were smitten with animals and sought not only to offer an educational experience to the people, primarily the children of Warsaw, but to take the best possible care of their charges. She and her husband, Jan, were in charge of the Warsaw Zoo. Amid the carnage and daily horror, heroes emerged. With the Nazis’ bizarre fixation on racial purity (which extended to animals) and hatred for Jews, it became an existential crisis merely to be Jewish in the city. one puzzle of daily life at the villa was this: How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society?On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany, emboldened by the recently-signed Molotov-Ribbentrop pact with Stalin’s Soviet Union, invaded Poland.
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