The Zoo Keeper’s Wife

By Diane Ackerman

(Non-Fiction 2007)

Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history...Diane Ackerman recreates Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their "Guests" - Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled
from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ackerman explores the role of nature in both kindness and savagery, and she unravels the disturbing obsession at the core of Nazism: both a worship of nature and its violation, as humans sought to control the genome of the entire planet.--BOOK JACKET. 268 p.