He is shown fighting the Germans at one point, but it's handled so haphazardly it's not clear what's going on.
Jan's involvement in the Polish Underground and the Home Army, his weapons stashes all over the city, his long absences, are sketched in, if that. It's an Edenic world.īut so much information is missing, including the real personalities of these eccentric and tough people. The couple's villa, on the zoo premises, is filled with an eccentric menagerie: badgers and parrots and a pair of baby lynxes, snoring in bed with the Zabinski son Rys (the Polish word for lynx). She is called to the elephant yard to aid with a suffocating baby elephant, and is able to remove the obstruction from the baby's trunk all while calming down the panicked mother elephant. The opening sequences are effective, showing Antonina's daily routine before the bombs start falling, her affinity for animals, her Snow-White-like gift for relating to them on their level. There are also some fictionalizations that come straight out of the familiar and cliched Nazi-movie playbook. "A human zoo," Antonina ( Jessica Chastain) breathes, when Jan ( Johan Heldenbergh) suggests they take in Jews. The film adaptation, written by Angela Workman and directed by Niki Caro (" Whale Rider"), has many lovely and moving moments but fails to capture the many layers of this unique story, relying instead on plainly-stated metaphors. Only 2 of the 300 Jewish "guests" (as they referred to them) hidden in the zoo were captured by the Nazis and murdered. Sometimes the metaphor was a bit strained, but Antonina's vivid journals (she also wrote a children's book about animals) was the thread that held it all together. Diane Ackerman, an author who focuses on the natural world, told the tale in her book The Zookeeper's Wife, dovetailing stories of animal camouflage techniques with stories of human survival. Considering that the German army had commandeered the zoo for an armory, this "hiding in plain sight" strategy was extremely risky. It's a great-and as yet untold-story: Jan Zabinski and Antonina Zabinska, Polish husband and wife zookeepers, owners of the Warsaw Zoo, opened their zoo to Jewish refugees after the September 1939 German invasion of Poland, and continued to "host" people throughout the occupation, smuggling them out of the Warsaw ghetto, hiding them in animal cages and basement tunnels leading from the house to the zoo.
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