Hypable spoke with Diane Ackerman, author of The Zookeeper’s Wife, ahead of the adaptation’s theatrical debut on March 31.
If you’d like to hear the full interview for yourself, tune into our latest episode of Book Hype.
About ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’
The New York Times bestseller soon to be a major motion picture starring Jessica Chastain.
A true story in which the keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of people from Nazi hands.
After their zoo was bombed, Polish zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski managed to save over three hundred people from the Nazis by hiding refugees in the empty animal cages. With animal names for these “guests,” and human names for the animals, it’s no wonder that the zoo’s code name became “The House Under a Crazy Star.” Best-selling naturalist and acclaimed storyteller Diane Ackerman combines extensive research and an exuberant writing style to re-create this fascinating, true-life story — sharing Antonina’s life as “the zookeeper’s wife,” while examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism. Winner of the 2008 Orion Award.
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If readers liked ‘Zookeeper’s Wife,’ what other books would you recommend to them?
That’s hard for me because there are many books written about the Holocaust. But The Zookeeper’s Wife comes at it from a different perspective, from the perspective of the animals and of compassionate heroism. I don’t know of other books like that.
I enjoyed reading The Pianist. And I’ve read a lot of books by people who were in the Warsaw Ghetto, and those were very powerful. But I wouldn’t recommend them necessarily as reading… I’m going to stop on that.
It’s very hard because I don’t know of another book like it.
What first interested you in writing?
I was writing when I was very little. My mom told me that a friend of hers phoned her one day and said, “Marcia, I just think you’d want to know that your daughter is talking to herself again as she is walking home from school.” That was true. I was making up stories and writing poems and trying to make the world stable from as far back as I can remember. When I was 12, I thought it would be good to be a publisher or a reporter. I started publishing my own horse newspaper — it was all about horses. And I wrote each copy out in pencil by hand and then I abandoned it because it was obviously going to be too tiring a profession if you had to write every one by hand. Then about two years later I thought, “I’ll write a novel about a horse named Stormy and the girl who loved him.” And that didn’t quite work out. Then I thought I’d write a spy novel, but you really needed to know about sex and violence, and I didn’t know about either one at that point. I abandoned that, and so it went. But I continued writing, mainly poetry all the way along.
When I was in high school, I was lying out in the sun with some girlfriend one day and they had put their boyfriend’s names on masking tape on their backs so that they would get a suntan and it would spell out the boys’ names. I happened to be reading a newspaper and it had a little item in there that a schizophrenic’s sweat smells different. And I thought, “Oh my, this is fascinating.” I’d been so interested in learning about who we are, what the human condition is like, how we came to be the way we are. I thought, “Maybe when I go to college next year, what I’ll do is study biopsychology.” I went to Boston [University] and studied biopsychology. I got married and divorced within a year. In that process I transferred colleges. When I transferred, the computer put me in English by mistake. So there I was at 18, someone who had been writing shyly but enthusiastically for her whole life, and I just assumed it was fate. From there, applied to MFA programs and creative writing.
Antonina’s story is another one of those hidden voices. The people you didn’t know were working behind the scenes during these periods. How did you first hear about her and Jan’s story, and what compelled you to share it?
I came to the story of The Zookeeper’s Wife through the animals. I was writing for National Geographic, and at the time I was writing about endangered animals. I had heard that there were very ancient looking horses running around a forest in Poland, and that the forest itself was very ancient. It was the forest that the fairytales we have come from. I wanted to see the horses. Unfortunately, National Geographic sent me to the South Pacific instead to write about seals. But I stayed interested in the horses. Over the next few years, I kept pursuing it, reading a little more here and a little more there, and decided I’d really like to go to this forest. I tried to get in touch with them, but of course I do not speak Polish. I asked a neighbor who had been born in Warsaw if she would help me email the park service. She said, coincidentally, that one of her uncles had been a vet at the zoo before the war. We got in touch with him via email. He said that he thought the zookeeper’s wife from that time had kept a diary. We asked him to find it for us and he did.
He sent it and my friend translated it. Then I discovered what was really going on. It wasn’t just the question of these ancient horses; there were a lot of very unusual and endangered animals running around the forest. The zookeepers in Warsaw were taking home orphaned animals and raising them right inside their home. The more I read, the more I saw that the zookeepers were taking in escaping Jews from the ghetto. When I began to read more about Antonina’s sensibility, what she was like, what her relationship with nature was like, with animals, how much she risked and how deeply, deeply empathetic and compassionate she was, I just knew I had to share her story.
We have so many different versions of what heroism is, but they all tend to equal violence. Even if you see a woman hero, during war time, you can bet that she is going to be larger than life, she is going to shoot people, she’s going to be like a superhero. But it isn’t always like that. There are a great many people out there who are compassionate heroes. Who risk their lives everyday, to make life more livable for people who are in horrible situations. And that is what Antonina did. Her husband was heroic in a more traditional way. He was the head of an underground unit and he was the one who actually smuggled people out of the ghetto. Her form of heroism was not only to keep them alive and hide them whenever the Nazis came by, and that was often, but also to see if they could survive the war with their humanity intact and not be so traumatized that they had no life left. She worked very hard at that. She brought them all out after dark and they were hiding in different zoo cages, but she brought them into the villa and there happened to be a pianist who was hiding there who played music. There were artists. They had dinner parties. They were frightened, of course; they were horrified by what was going on, but they had mutual support from one another and there were also all of these crazy animals running around the house. They had the innocent distraction of the animals as well. She was an extraordinary friend to them.
How do you approach a project that feels so massive?
I did a lot of research, but I happen to love research. The research part is fun. This was challenging. How do you write in such great detail about a time that is unfamiliar to you, and a place as well. You can’t make anything up because I was writing narrative nonfiction. What I did was read everything I could get my hands on, and as I was saying earlier, I read books by people who were living in the Warsaw Ghetto. They wrote diaries about what was going on and hid them in milk churns. The milk churns were buried, and after the war, people found them, so we do have accounts of that. We have accounts by the rabbi in the ghetto; his sermons have come down to us. I read everything.
I also went to Warsaw and visited the zoo. I was able, firsthand, to see what the experience of being there would be like. Fortunately, after the war, even though Warsaw was completely leveled, the citizens rebuilt the downtown area brick by brick according to Renaissance architectural drawings. So when I stood on Antonina’s balcony and looked at the downtown, I saw what she saw. I could learn about the behaviors of the many animals in the zoo, what they smelled like. I could learn about the what navigation pattern of birds over Warsaw in 1929 was like. I knew what she saw when she looked up. It was possible to learn an awful lot about the era, about her.
For example, at one point in her diary she says she and her son hid in a Baltic lampshade store. She doesn’t describe it, but you can learn what they look like, the lampshades of the era. It was possible to set the scene in that way. Every time someone speaks in the book, I am quoting directly from Antonina’s diaries or interviews that were done with her or her husband after the war, or testimonies that were given by people who hid at the zoo or people who knew them. Ultimately, it was possible to write the book in layers. I wanted to make it very vivid on the sense so that people could feel like they were right there and experiencing what Antonina was going through.
What was the most fascinating part of your research?
There were a lot of things that surprised me, but I must say that one of them was the Nazis’ relationship with genetics. Hitler did not invent the idea of a master race. He got the idea from the American Eugenics movement, which was very popular here, unfortunately, before the war. He wanted the people who worked for him to not only breed what he considered to be “pure Aryan people,” and kill all the others, he also wanted pure Aryan animals and plants. He sent a botanical commando squad all over the world to steal the best specimens from botanical gardens and bring them back for breeding. He was going to do the same with animals from all over and the plan was to drain 100,000 acres of marshland in the Baltics, rip up forests, replant everything. If you think about it, we worry about that now because of climate change, but he intended to essentially destroy and replant and rebreed the whole planet, going from one country to another getting rid of the genes of the people who lived there and the animals and the crops and replace them with a Nazi version of them. I found that really surprising. I didn’t realize that the Nazi lunacy went to that extreme.
One of the things that stuck out to us in the book was their relationship to animals. For example, in the book you mention that many of the patients did not get pain medicine or anesthesia and yet others were punished for not giving it to worms.
Yeah, that’s right. Even though children were being operated on without anesthesia, they had a paradigmatic relationship with nature. On the one hand, they were the greenest people imaginable. They really believed that animals were noble creatures, almost mythic. Humans too, except for all the humans they put in special categories — slobs, Jews, Catholics, gay, handicapped, gypsies. They believed that they were related to people who had lived on Atlantis. They were sending out expeditions to very different places where their scientists could measure the cheekbones of people. They were completely obsessed with it. It was a mythology, really. Because Atlantis? Really? It was absolutely preposterous. They took it to maniacal extremes.
What do you do when you get overwhelmed by the amount of information or the morbidity of the story?
You have to be very careful where you hold yourself, where you position yourself as you’re writing. For example, I was able to read the testimony of the people who survived the war, of the people who were living in the Ghetto. I could do all of that. What I could not do was visit the camps. That would have been more than I could cope with. But I must say, when I heard that Jessica Chastain had gone to the camp because she wanted to know what was at stake, what her character Antonina was fighting for, that impressed me enormously. I knew that she was heart and soul invested in the film and in the story.
Keep reading for more about the zoo animals, Antonina’s nature, and the ‘Zookeeper’s Wife’ adaptation
This story is about living. What do you need to truly live?
I am very interested in that and what happens if you are overwhelmed by trauma. What kind of life is possible after that? How do you cope with trauma? How do you help people get through it in some vital way? She was certainly very good at that. She tried to normalize life for them as much as possible. I don’t think it’s an accident that she had all of these people living in the house at the same time. That she had so many wild animals living in the house. Partly, it helps camouflage. The Nazis were walking through the zoo all the time. There would normally be so many strange sounds and shadows. They knew that the house was full of strange animals. That was good camouflage for having people around. But more importantly, there is something funny and distracting and innocent about having animals around. They were therapy animals as well and the house was full of them. I think that was very helpful. There were children who were, of course, frightened, but they socialized with each other. There was actually a baby born in the course of the war there. They tried to make the experience of being there as family-like as possible.
The animals almost allow them to hide in plain sight. What does it say to those who were sympathetic to the Nazi cause that they often overlooked people right in front of them? It’s almost like they chose not to see them.
It was a very interesting split that was going on. There was immense antisemitism among the Pols, and at the same time there was an enormous amount of sympathy and a lot of rescuers; hundreds of the thousands of people who were risking their lives all the time to help Jews escape. It took a great number of people to get one person out of Warsaw safely. Not to mention that they had secret universities and all kinds of underground things. My grandparents are Polish and I had no idea how strong of a fight the Pols put up and how many people were not sympathizers with the Nazis, and how many people were disgusted by racism and felt that the right thing to do, the moral thing to do, was to fight and help their neighbors survive.
We’d all like to believe that we’d act like Antonina and Jan, but we have a survival instinct. How would you react in a situation like this?
It’s a question I asked myself all the time while writing this. Would I have had this kind of courage, especially with children at home because you are risking their lives, too. Everybody in your family would have been killed. I don’t know if I would have, but an interesting aspect of the rescuers, as they were called, is that if you read their accounts, and I read all of them before, they say exactly the same thing — that they didn’t do anything special. Jan says he didn’t do anything special, that anybody in the situation would have done the same thing. It was the right thing to do. It could be that, for many of them, their religious upbringing informed their actions, I don’t know. Jan was an atheist, I believe. Antonina wore a Catholic medal and she had her children baptized, so maybe there was some of that motivating her. That she felt morally and religiously that this is what you do. But I think it has to do with some really mineral sense of morality that they have, that there is good and there is evil, there is right and there is wrong. You need to do whatever is required to keep alive a necessary attitude about life and about respect and dignity.
Antonina and Jan are normal people who rise to heroism through simple acts of sympathy. What was it like uncovering all those moments of decency in this time?
They were normal people and that was something that I had seen personally during the five years or so that I volunteered for a suicide prevention agency as a telephone counselor. When you call up the crisis service, there is an anonymous person at the other end of the line. In my hometown I was one of a large number of people who did that. All of the people who were the counselors were normal people. They weren’t larger than life; they weren’t more moral, more just, more insightful. They were people who cared a lot about their neighbors. They were neighbors helping neighbors.
This was also true for the Zabinskis, too. It happens a lot in wartime where people who are otherwise normal people are inspired by events to reach deep inside themselves and rise to the best that they can be. It certainly was true for Antonina and Jan. And I’m sure it’s true all over our perpetually war-torn planet today.
Antonina never felt inferior to her husband. Was this a point you were purposely trying to make or did it emerge as you were telling Antonina’s tale?
That emerged. I was trying to stay very true to the woman, and fortunately, she wrote children’s books in which she becomes a mother animal and can protect her young and her kind in that way. Imaginatively, on many occasions, she had a sense of herself as very strong, very confident. She was orphaned when she was little. Her parents were murdered in the early days of the Russian revolution. She was raised by her grandmother and became more indecent than other kids do. She was aware of her husband’s strengths, and he certainly had a lot, and she was aware of her own and that they differed from his.
What do you think is the cause of Antonina’s larger than life ability to empathize with both humans and animals?
Actually, that made very good sense to me. That spoke to me very closely. All you really need to do is pay attention to the senses of animals. To understand what kinds of things are going to frighten them. For example, horses, their eyes are on the side of their head because they evolved as prey animals and they needed to be able to see what was coming up behind them, if something was stalking them. Humans have eyes right on the front of the head because we were the predators. We had to be able to spot our prey and track it carefully as it moved in front of us and so on. When you know things like that, you know how to not spook an animal. Or if you know which animals have a sense of smell or a sense of hearing, or which animals have a temperament — are they more trusting or skittish — she was very attentive. She really loved studying them. Both she and her husband were zoologists and they loved animals.
Part of that meant that they were around animals all the time, so they knew how they behaved. In Antonina’s case, it was accompanied by a deep-seated love of animals. For her, she loved all animals, which included humans.
The movie comes out March 31. There are a lot of book adaptations coming out these days. Do you read a book before you see the adaptation?
I like to read the book first because you get the internal life of the characters then. That speaks to me. You also get the descriptions of things. But it’s also fascinating to see the film. What happens, in the case of Zookeeper, the events took place over the period of the war, over several years. But they had to be compressed into just a couple of years. There are things which you can imagine, which I can describe, but it’s very powerful to see the characters stand up and walk off the page and do things and say things. It’s a different artistic experience. Part of the reason I like the film so much is it stayed very true to the book, very true to Antonina’s story, and yet, it enriched the experience by making it possible to see it in a different way. It brought another angle onto it for me.
What makes this adaptation different from others that we’ve seen?
The poetry of the filming is very sumptuous. I knew it was going to be when I heard that Niki Caro would be directing it. She directed The Whale Rider, which is absolutely gorgeous. She has a very poetic eye for details, which is wonderful and really comes through. She also has a special gift for taking situations that in other hands could come across as cliche because they are so human and familiar, and bring to them the individuality of the situation and the character, and make them absolutely fresh. I saw that in some of her other films. I knew she was going to be terrific for it and she directed it beautifully.
Jessica Chastain and Daniel Brühl really put their hearts into it. I was on the set for only four days, but in that time I watched them wrap up themselves as if the self was nothing more than a sweater on a warm day, and then lay it down on the ground and become this other person. Completely whole-heartedly. The people who are involved with the film all got involved for the right reasons. I spoke with two women producers early on; there was a woman screenplay writer, woman director, woman actress, woman crew members, and everybody was involved for the right reasons. They identified with Antonina and get that she was an important role model for our time, and her story really needed to be kept alive.
This is the first of your books to be adapted for the big screen. How did it feel getting the news?
Oh, it was exciting. But it took eight years for it to go from discussions to finally come out. As you know, these things can take quite a long time to happen. I wrote a verse play a few years ago and staged part of it, and that was exciting. One of my other books was converted to a stage play, On Extended Wings. That was a different kind of experience. There was an actress standing up on stage who looked nothing like me, but who was saying my words and sharing my thoughts. That was unusual. They are all very different experiences and in each case it allows you to see something with perspective that you might not have because you are overly familiar with it and you’ve worked on it for so long. It’s really a gift for me.
How much input did you have in the process?
I didn’t want to be involved writing the screenplay. That is not my area of expertise. I would rather the people who have a gift for this and experience do it. That wasn’t something I wanted to be involved with, but I did read the script and thought it was wonderful. I knew about the director and the actors, but I was not hands-on in that sense. I really appreciate the level of artistry that goes into the art forms. On the set, of course, I met everyone and explored everything. I was thrilled when I saw details in the staging or the set design that I had written about in the book. I heard people uttering the words that I had written. It was very exciting to see the scenes being shot and how they were being interpreted. But I’m not a filmmaker, and I have enormous respect for what they do. It’s not something I wish to do personally; I much prefer being a writer. I think I would find it daunting to be a filmmaker.
Are there any specific passages or moments in the book that were left out that you wish hadn’t been cut?
I don’t think so. I’ve seen the film twice… I think they included all the important ones. The parts of the book that may be most important to me have to do with contemplation. For example, where somebody is thinking about something, or I am thinking about something. But you cannot do that on film in the same way. That is a very personal thing.
In terms of the scenes, I think they captured it well. It impressed me with the amount of labor and devotion that went into reproducing it. Of course, there were special effect designers. They do such meticulous work recreating an era.
Which scenes stood out and affected you the most to see on screen?
Those would be the facial expressions of the actors in a variety of intensely emotional scenes. Not just one or two. Bear in mind this is something I could imagine as I was writing the book, but to physically see that, to see them relating to each other just blew me away. It’s compelling from start to finish. It was a deeply unnerving and thrilling and terrifying and gratifying and enriching time to be alive. As they say, “The best of times and the worst of times.” The best because you discover the goodness of people as well as the evil. And you discover that fear means you really pay attention from moment to moment because every detail matters. It may have to do with whether you live or die. You are never more alive than in war time. It’s part of the reason soldiers return from war and report that that was the peak of their lives. It was a time of enormous intensity for them.
This is also true in what went on in Poland during that time and at the zoo. They had to be careful every single second. That doesn’t mean they also did not have fun. They did. And that there wasn’t an enormous amount of love. There was. But the intensity of emotion was very powerful. It’s powerfully conveyed in the movie through the actors and the way that they are responding to one another. That moved me the most. Not just Jan and Antonina, but Lutz Heck and the complicated relationship he had with Antonina. I read Lutz Heck’s autobiography when I was writing the book and the emotions were complex that he was feeling. And also on Antonina’s side. It was really lovely to see those flickerings traveling between those two people.
About the author
Poet, essayist, and naturalist, Diane Ackerman is the author of two dozen highly acclaimed works of nonfiction and poetry, including The Zookeeper’s Wife and A Natural History of the Senses — books beloved by millions of readers all over the world. In prose so rich and evocative that one can feel the earth turning beneath one’s feet as one reads, Ackerman’s thrilling observations urge us to live in the moment, to wake up to nature’s everyday miracles.