THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE

The book “paints a richly textured portrait of a natural world that few of us would recognize. The similarities end there, however, as Ackerman explores how the sense of natural order imploded under the Nazi occupation of Poland. Jan and Antonina Zabinski – keepers of the Warsaw Zoo who sheltered Jews from the Warsaw ghetto – serve as Ackerman’s lens to this moment in time so seamlessly into the story that it would be easy to read the book as Antonina’s own miraculous memoir. Jan and Antonina’s passion for life in all its diversity illustrates ever more powerfully just how narrow the Nazi worldview was, and what tragedy it wreaked.” – Anne Bartholomew. After their zoo bombed, Polish zookepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages.