10 Things ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’ Teaches Us About WWII History (Guest Blog)

The new movie “The Zookeepers Wife” tells the incredible true story of Antonina and Jan Zabinski, a Polish couple (played by Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh) who saved hundreds of Jews from the Germans by hiding them in the Warsaw Zoo.

The film retells this captivating history without any of the usual excesses that pervade Hollywood productions, instead staying generally true to the facts and accurately portraying life in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

In one of the most traumatizing early scenes of the movie, Antonina’s idyllic bicycle ride through the Warsaw Zoo is interrupted by the roar of planes overhead.

The German invasion of Poland is often boiled down to false stereotypes (for the record, Polish cavalry did not attack German tanks head on).

The policies, which began with a requirement to wear special armbands and limiting what time of day Jews were allowed outside their homes, quickly expanded and soon the Germans were forcing all Polish Jews to relocate into ghettos.

In occupied Poland, the Germans considered any sort of aid to Jews, from providing extra food to smuggling them out of the ghetto, to be a capital offense punishable by death.

Historian Timothy Snyder estimates that more Poles were executed for aiding Jews in individual districts of the General Government [occupied Poland] than in entire west European countries.

German soldiers then proceeded to execute Jozef Ulma and his pregnant wife Witkoria, as well as their six children ages 2-8 for this “crime.”

Antonina had become convinced that her underground rescue operation was compromised and that the Germans were preparing to search the Zoo for Jews.

In “The Zookeepers Wife” there is a scene where a woman and her elderly mother are escorted out of their safe house and executed by the Germans.

[...] differences, in addition to that of hair color or other physical features, made it very hard for Jews to survive detection outside the ghetto walls.

[...] scholars estimate that in order to save a single Jew in occupied Europe, the cooperation of ten individuals was required.

From the men who drove the Jews from the Zoo to other safe houses across occupied Poland, to the women who made counterfeit documents in the back of a bakery, a whole underground network of operatives, part of the Polish Home Army, was involved in helping the Jews rescued by the Zabinskis.

For almost a month, Jewish fighters battled with German forces in what would become known as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

Since many of the fighters were hiding in buildings and bunkers, the Germans leveled the ghetto, systematically destroying all the buildings.

Non-Jewish Poles were regularly seized on the streets and sent to forced labor camps.

Polish children with blue eyes and blond hair were kidnapped from their parents and sent to Germany in order to be raised as Germans.

Air drops of supplies were few and far between on account of Stalin’s refusal to allow British and American planes from refueling on Soviet airfields.

[...] there are almost 1,000 cases of Poles executed for helping Jews in hiding, and nearly all of them are not included in the Yad Vashem total.