The Holocaust, a Zoo, & Me

The Zookeeper's Wife
Diane Ackerman
​
​Reeder Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

I will admit I had not heard of this book until seeing quick previews of the movie. However, I was thoroughly intrigued and immediately wanted to read the story before indulging in its film version, as any good bibliophile is wont to do.

It wasn't until I began the book that I realized the story of zoo owners Antonina and Jan Zabinski was being presented not as historical fiction as I'd assumed but as a straightforward nonfiction piece. Perhaps this is why I struggled to finish this book, despite its highly alluring story and passages of beautiful and heartfelt description. I longed to not just be informed of their lives and heroics but immersed in it with them, privy to their conversations and conflicts as an invisible presence. Ackerman clearly researched and delved into the deepest corners of these individuals tumultuous existence and so my lack of connection to the book is no fault of her own, but mine for expecting a format the book never promised me. I found myself often wishing, when Ackerman referenced or quoted from Antonina's journals, that I was reading her journals themselves without the middle woman, so I would be able to wrap up in the feeling of connectedness with the brave, benevolent soul being sketched before me. I wanted to hear her speaking of the "guests" they housed and referred to as "pheasants" as code, tucked away in the emptied enclosures while German soldiers strolled through their grounds, clueless.

The story is a worthwhile one, and is set apart from the thousands of works centering on the Holocaust because it contains information about wartime happenings I would never have considered (such as a Nazi fascination with certain extinct species), but unless you are prepared for a documentary-on-paper (and have space in your life to truly concentrate on digesting it) you may want to let this one on the Maybe pile.