Emanuel Ringelblum wrote of a "psychosis of fear" that many people felt about escaping to the Aryan side:
It is the imaginary perils, [the] supposed observation by the neighbour, porter, manager, or passer-by in the street, that constitute the main danger, because the Jew. . .gives himself away by looking around in every direction to see if anyone is watching him, by the nervous expression on his face, by the frightened look of a hunted animal, smelling danger of some kind everywhere.
Even if to others Antonina often appeared calm, her writings reveal a woman often assailed by worry and broadsided by fear. She knew the impression she created, as the villa's ballast, and she insisted that "the warm, friendly, almost therapeutic" atmosphere of the villa implied a safety that was only illusory. True, the villa provided a spacious environment for Guests, who weren't forced to live crippled up behind walls or crowded and damp underground. But as the Nazis imposed a tighter choke hold, the game of diverting eyes and cheating death became the art of making possibilities materialize and watching for signs. According to Polish folklore:
A picture falling off a wall, crunching noises beneath a window, a broom falling without cause, a clock ticking where there was none. A table that made cracking noises, a door that opened by itself—all foretold death drawing near.
To achieve safety brought many inconveniences, such as having to shop often and buy things in small quantities so as not to attract too much notice, or drying some clothes indoors because one didn't dare hang out laundry that couldn't belong to anyone in the house. Inevitably, fear raided everyone's mood. But as zookeepers, the Żabíńskis understood both vigilance and predators; in a swamp of vipers, one planned every footstep. Shaped by the gravity of wartime, it wasn't always clear who or what could be considered outside or inside, loyal or turncoat, predator or prey.
At first, no one knew about the zoo's custodial secret and they had to find extra food and improvise escapes entirely on their own. Luckily, they discovered that an old friend, Janina Buchholtz, a psychologist and devotee of the arts, was a key member of Zegota. During the occupation, Janina officially worked as a registered translator for the public notary, the office where Antonina had stopped for news after visiting the bombed-out zoo in 1939. Because she handled many documents, applications, and petitions, papers spilled from tables, mounded on shelves, rose in precarious stalagmites on the floor, and seemed ready to cascade everywhere. A bureaucrat's nightmare, the clutter camouflaged the office's real life as an Underground nerve center where Aryan documents were forged, safe apartments sought, messengers dispatched, cash distributed, sabotage planned, and letters sent to people in other ghettos. Contacts received their instructions and filed reports in her office, which meant lots of foot traffic, but like the Żabíńskis, she perfected the art of hiding things in plain sight, in this case among enough clutter to make snooping Nazis recoil, reluctant to sift through the dusty, never quite stationary piles. As one survivor recalled, the Nazis "aimed step by step, by means of interlocking decrees, to create a reporting and documentation system that would render any kind of machinations impossible and that would locate every single inhabitant of the city with appropriate precision." This necessitated elaborate false identities, documents, and provenances for people in hiding, because Polish Catholics, who mainly lived in housing blocks, could produce church and municipal records from before the war, including birth, baptism, marriage, tax, death, and inheritance documents. Fresh documents sometimes meant "solid" papers that could withstand Gestapo delving and sometimes flimsy ones (called lipne, from the word for linden, which later evolved into "white lies"), which wouldn't pass much scrutiny. As Gunnar Paulsson relates the process,
Setting yourself up as a homo novus required not only the creation of a new identity but the severing of all ties to the old, tainted ones. Therefore you had to move. Your former self could then vanish, while the new self registered in the normal way in the new quarters. . ..[Y]ou had to de-register at the registry office in the old district, receiving a coupon in return. You then registered with the building manager at the new place and again received a coupon. Both coupons then had to be taken to the local registry office, within a certain grace period, as proof of registration. . .. [T]o break the chain of evidence, it was necessary to have a forged de-registration coupon, and this needed to have backing in the files of the registry office.
Fortunately, Janina worked in the registry office, where she could confect identities and plant records to back them up. Some people claimed to have been born in the Soviet Union, or to Muslim Poles, or to have lost their papers in a church fire before 1939; others assumed the identity of a citizen living abroad or dead. All of these required forgery and finesse, generating, planting, and altering the records in long chains of evidence—hence the paper Alps in her office. In 1941, when Hans Frank decreed that identity cards (Kennkarte) be issued, complete with serial number and fingerprints, clerks managed to stall them until 1943, and then use the occasion to make fictitious identity cards. Hordes of people seemed suddenly to have lost their records. Greedy opportunists and Underground specialists alike crafted so many passports and other documents that by the summer of 1943 even Ziegler's office estimated 15 percent of all identity cards and 25 percent of all working papers had been forged. One cell of Zegota alone is credited with generating fifty to one hundred documents a day, papers that ran the gamut from birth and death certificates to the IDs of low-level SS and Gestapo officials. Janina pictured her clients as people "walking on quicksand."
"I am lucky. . .I can do wonders," she proudly told her friend and colleague Barbara "Basia" Temkin-Berman, while smiling and tapping a crooked finger on the cafe table to ward off bad luck.
Tall, heavyset, and elderly, Janina always wore the robelike black skirts of a prioress and a peculiar little veiled hat tied under her chin, and she carried a muff. Spectacles balanced on her long thin nose, over eyes brimming with such warmth that people typically referred to her as "the kindest person I've ever known," or "the perennial protector of the underdog."
In her double conspiracy of fighting the Germans and helping the Jews, Janina worked closely with Basia, a psychologist before the war and her physical opposite: a small, slender, nervous, volatile woman who always wore an old wine-colored coat, black beret, and veil to hide her Semitic features.
Janina and Basia conferred daily at the Miodowa Street office or at the cat-safe cafe at 24 Miodowa Street, and together they forged contacts among nuns and priests, railway workers, professors, market-stall owners, shopkeepers, maids, trolley drivers, farmers, beauticians, engineers, clerks and secretaries (willing to erase people from public files or issue bogus certificates). And, of course, a zoo director and his wife. One day Janina spoke with Underground leaders about Magdalena's risk at the zoo, and their decree, though disturbing, made sense to Antonina and Jan. Maurycy would remain in the villa and Magdalena would lodge with an engineer friend of Janina's who lived in Saska Kępa, on the east side of the river, in a lovely old parish complete with a park inhabited by statues: The Dancer, Rhythm, and nakedly voluptuous Bather. It was a district of neoclassical public buildings, newly built modernist houses with lots of shrubbery, and avant-garde villas of concrete and glass designed between the wars.
At first, the zoo had served only as a temporary shelter, one whistle stop in an elaborate Underground railroad, and Jan and Antonina hid only friends and acquaintances, but later, working with Janina, "things became more organized," as Jan put it in his understated way, by which he meant that, with the Underground's help, he amplified his efforts and began taking unearthly chances.
Of all the Guests to leave the villa, "high-spirited Magdalena, full of energy and laughter," was the one Antonina said she missed most. The two shared an extraordinary friendship, girlish and mature, intimate and professional. Both Jan and Antonina admired Magdalena as an artist, but they also treasured her as a buoyant, funny, generous friend. According to Antonina, losing Magdalena felt physically p
ainful, even though her departure made room for another Guest, another life saved. Jan and Antonina promised to visit Magdalena in Saska Kępa as often as possible; and Maurycy, who couldn't travel safely through the city, wondered if their goodbye meant months, years, or forever, and "took it especially hard."
By late June of 1943, Jan and Antonina figured no one had reported them to the Gestapo, and gingerly began accepting Guests once again. Janina sent them a young friend of hers, Aniela Dobrucka, who had "good looks," as locals said, meaning strong Aryan features, which had allowed her to spend days as a street seller of bread and croissants and nights lodging with an eccentric old woman. Antonina liked the spunky young woman with dark hair, sea-blue eyes, and a temperament both "sweet-natured and a bit mischievous." Coming to Warsaw from a poor farming village, Aniela had struggled to pay her own way through Lwów University. Rachela Auerbach was her real name, but that became buried in Underground life, where identities melted and one assumed fresh names, guises, and tasks, as required.
Polish emigre Eva Hoffman writes movingly about the psychic earthquake of having to shed her name: "Nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift. The twist in our names takes them a tiny distance from us—but it is a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters." Suddenly her given name and her sister's no longer existed, even though "they were as surely us as our eyes or hands." And the new names were "identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves."
Lucky enough to leave the Ghetto before the worst of times, Aniela dedicated her life to scrounging food for famished people and working at a hospital and a library, and she was one of the elite few who knew the secret of the milk churns. In the section of the Ghetto devoted to workshops, the OBW (Ostdeutsche Bauwerkstütte) carpentry shop was managed by Germans who obliged the original Jewish owners to continue running daily operations. One of those brothers, Alexander Landau, belonged to the Underground and hired many of its members, supposedly as trained craftsmen, though their lack of basic carpentry skills wasn't always easy to hide. The Halmann carpentry shop, at 68 Nowolipki Street, employed other so-called carpenters, and the houses assigned to them became the center of the Jewish Fighting Organization. Together, these two workshops, by employing many people, kept them from deportation, housed others on the run, and became sites of schools and the hub of much Underground activity.
Only a month after the Germans occupied Poland, historian Ringelblum conceived the idea of an archive, because he felt what was happening was unprecedented in human history, and someone should accurately report the facts and bear witness to the unspeakable suffering and cruelty. Aniela aided Ringelblum with the archives, though Janina read the documents first and hid them for a while inside the upholstery of the big couch in her office. Then this secret group of archivists, code name Oneg Shabat (because they met on Saturdays), hid the documents in boxes and milk churns under the Halmann workshop. In 1946, survivors combing through the ruins of the Ghetto found all but one of the milk churns, filled with vividly detailed accounts written in Yiddish, Polish, or Hebrew, which now reside in the Jewish Institute in Warsaw.
In time, Aniela brought to the villa her friend Genia (Eugienia Sylkes), who had organized secret schools in the Ghetto, fought in the Underground Army, and helped plan the Ghetto Uprising. Ultimately captured and forced to board a train for Treblinka, she and her husband jumped from the train near Otwock as it slowed down at a siding to let another train pass (some cars had small windows strung with barbed wire that could be cut or doors that could be forced). In a postwar interview with London's White Eagle-Mermaid, Genia recalled that after the jump
I was deadly tired and hungry, but I was too afraid to get closer to the buildings. . .. I couldn't find my husband and very slowly, using side roads, I went to Lublin. After two days I decided to go back to Warsaw. I traveled with blue collar workers and reached the Old City by early morning. My cousin, the wife of a Pole, was hiding with a Mrs. Kowalska. I went there and was welcomed as a ghost from the other world, I got food, took a bath and went to bed. After a few days, when I was on my feet again, they gave me clothes and I went to Miodowa Street #1, to Janina Buchholtz of Zegota. There I got documents and money. Later my cousin's husband found a room for me at Chłodna Street in a Polish policeman's apartment. I can only speak about all these people who helped me with the highest admiration and affection.
When the policeman's apartment grew unsafe, Janina brought her to the zoo, where, officially, she served as Antonina's tailor who repaired clothes and later, when Antonina was pregnant, sewed diapers and baby clothes. Tall and Aryan-looking with a short snub nose, she might have passed easily, but knew little Polish, so in public she pretended to be mute, or sometimes Estonian, as her false papers declared. Feigning mutism, she joined a cadre of other heavily accented people floating around the city, silenced by the unspeakable.
CHAPTER 29
SOON AFTER THE BLUEBELLS FADED IN SPRING, WILD GARLIC clusters grew in the damp shade of old trees, with tiny white flowers oozing a sweet vapor that poured through open windows at dusk, their leaves towering over two feet high in a scramble for light. Some farmers grazed sheep in garlic groves to scent the meat, and others cursed if their cows wandered in by mistake and browsed garlic, tainting the milk. Locals used wild garlic in rejuvenative potions and poultices to lower a high fever, warm fading ardor, dry acne, tune the heart, or ease whooping cough. They bruised the bulbs for cooking, and simmered a wild garlic soup.
"The zoo became immersed in a warm May night," Antonina wrote, sketching the scene in her diary: "Trees and shrubs, house and terrace were flooded by pale aquamarine, a cool and impassive moonlight. Branches of the lilac bushes bent low with heavy, faded clusters of flowers. The sharp, geometric outlines of sidewalks were highlighted by long black shadows. Nightingales sang their spring songs over and over, intoxicated by their own voices."
The villa-ites sat listening to Fox Man's piano concert, losing time and reality in a world lit by candle shadows and the constellations of notes hovering in darkness. "The silent romantic night swelled with the impetuous chords of Chopin's Etude in C Minor. The music spoke to us of sorrow, fear, and terror, as it floated around the room and through an open window," Antonina recalled.
Suddenly she heard a soft uncanny rustling coming from the bed of tall hollyhocks beside the window, a noise she alone seemed to decode between notes. When an owl screeched, warning something or someone away from its nest of fledglings, Antonina read the sign and discreetly told Jan, who went outside to investigate. Reappearing in the doorway, he gestured for her to join him.
"I need the key to the Pheasant House," he whispered. As housewife, she kept the keys, and there were many: some to doors at the villa, others to zoo buildings, still others to doors that once existed, and some that served no memorable purpose but nonetheless couldn't be tossed out. This key would have come easily to hand because they used it often—unlocking the Pheasant House usually meant a new Guest.
Silently questioning with her eyes, Antonina gave Jan the key, and together they went outside, where they caught sight of two boys diving for cover behind some bushes. Jan whispered that these members of the Underground's sabotage wing had set fire to German gas tanks and urgently needed to lie low. They'd been told to run for the zoo, and, unbeknownst to Antonina, Jan had been expecting them all evening with mounting worry. Recognizing their hosts, the boys suddenly stepped into view.
"For several hours we hid in the bushes next to the house, because we could hear German language being spoken," one said.
Jan explained that the lovely weather appealed to military policemen who visited the zoo for long walks, and several had left only about twenty minutes earlier. With the coast clear now, they needed to hurry inside the Pheasant House. Because pheasants were delicacies, a Pheasant House sounded quite grand to
the boys, and one teased: "We'll pretend we're a rare species, right, Mr. Lieutenant?"
"It's nothing special!" Jan warned him. "Not luxurious quarters by a long shot. Only rabbits live in the building now. It's located close to our house, where we can keep an eye on you and bring you food. But I must remind you: from daybreak on you have to practice the silence of the tomb!" He said sternly: "Don't talk or smoke. I don't want to hear any noise coming from there! Is that understood?"
"Understood, sir!" they said.
Silence reigned, the jacket of silence one sometimes finds on a still, moonless night. The only sound Antonina heard was a key clicking in a lock hidden beneath the wild vines on the Pheasant House.
The next morning, when Ryś took Wicek into the garden and strolled toward the aviary, Antonina watched him pause to pet Wicek's long ears and say:
"Be ready now, you old horse! We're going to the Pheasant House! So, remember: Be very quiet!" He raised a shushing finger to his lips. Together they made their way to the small wooden building, with Wicek at Ryś's heel.
Inside, Ryś found two boys sleeping on beds of hay, surrounded by rabbits of all sizes, which, like trolls, were busily watching and sniffing at the sleeping humans. Ryś locked the door behind him, quietly set a basket of milkweed on the floor, and tossed around handfuls of the pods and stems for the rabbits to eat. Then he took out a pot of milk with noodles in it, a big chunk of bread, and two spoons.
Studying them as they slept was irresistible for a boy curious about animals and humans, so he edged his face close to theirs and considered how best to wake them, since he wasn't supposed to stomp, clap, or yell. Squatting, he tugged one boy's sleeve, which didn't stir the exhausted sleeper, then he tugged harder and harder, and still the boy slept. Since the hands-on technique didn't work, he tried something subtler: filling his lungs with air, he puffed at the boy's face until at last he lifted his hand to swat an imaginary insect and his eyes finally opened.