‘Zookeeper’s Wife’ and Shipwrecked Souls

Review by Bill Doughty––

In a village a circus lion suddenly died…

“The circus director asked a poor old Jewish man if he would pretend to be the lion, and the man agreed since he needed the money. The director said: ‘All you have to do is wear the lion’s fur and sit in the cage, and people will believe you’re a lion.’ And so the man did, muttering to himself, ‘What strange jobs I’ve had in my life,’ when his thoughts were interrupted by a noise. He turned just in time to see another lion creeping into his cage and fixing him with a hungry stare. Trembling, cowering, not knowing how to behave himself, the man did the only thing he could think of –– vociferously chant a Hebrew prayer. No sooner had he uttered the first desperate words, Shema Yisroel (Hear O Israel) … than the other lion lined in with adonai elohenu (The Lord our God), and the two would-be lions finished the prayer together.”

Zookeeper Jan Żabiński and real lion.

It’s an old folk story that Diane Ackerman heard as a young girl and shares in an introductory Author’s Note. And it’s a tale that became “oddly relevant” to the true story she tells in her amazing book, where art and storytelling come alive to become history.

“The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story” (W. W. Norton,  2007) is based on a true story in which brave people in Poland risked everything to help protect Polish Jews in World War II from the Nazis and the Holocaust. Like the lion-man in the folk story, “shipwrecked souls” eventually make their way to a zoo outside Warsaw for sanctuary.

And regarding relevance: Though the book was written in 2007 –– one year before Russia's Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia, seven years before he invaded Crimea, and 15 years before he began waging war in Ukraine –– readers in 2022 will likely think of Poland's role in Putin's current war in Ukraine as they read about what happened in Warsaw eight decades ago.

At first Ackerman lulls readers with her depiction of an idyllic human-animal bond, one of understanding, love, and respect for life. Innocence. Nature. Nurture. Peace. The pursuit of happiness in pre-war Warsaw. Ackerman beautifully depicts that world before the storm clouds of war start to destroy the way of life of the Żabiński family.

Antonina and family pet badger

Antonina Żabiński is the Zookeeper’s wife and a hero of this tale along with her husband, Jan, who served secretly with the Polish Underground to fight the Nazis. Ackerman dedicated the book “For Antonina and her family, human and animal.” The Żabiński matriarch helps manage the improbable zoo as well as schemes to hide and feed Jews they call “Guests.”

With the arrival of the Nazis, the sometimes-normal-occasional-calm of the zoo is shattered. Fascism brings iron-fisted and racist “law and order.” The Nazis build walls and deny freedom based on differences of religion and ethnicity. Casual cruelty leads inexorably to calculated genocide.

Ackerman depicts the banal evil of Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, Eugene Fischer, and others who valued the lives of other animals over the humans they condemned to camps, ovens, and mass graves.

Ackerman writes in a “narrative history” style. Her embellishments are sometimes well beyond David McCullough’s interpretive style. Yet, like McCullough, she imparts cold hard history. In "The Zookeeper's Wife" she builds her storytelling around actual facts published or contained in interviews, news stories, and diaries, including the diary of Antonina.

“‘How can this barbarity be happening in the twentieth century?!!!!!!’ Antonina asked herself, an outcry of disbelief with no fewer than six exclamation points.” Antonina saw the war as a return to the Dark Ages. She and her family counter their horrors with efforts to help those who were targeted by the Nazis for destruction. Along with housing and feeding castaways, the Żabińskis participated in a plot to feed Jewish residents in the Ghetto.

The Warsaw zoo helped make animal-human connections in 1938, before the arrival of the Nazis.

After most of the animals in their zoo were removed, released, or killed by the Nazis, the Żabińskis turned their enterprise into a pig farm. They secretly transported meat into the Ghetto. “If it felt a little off-color giving Jews pork, a taboo food, dietary laws had long since been waived, and everyone was grateful for protein, a scarce gift on either side of the wall,” Ackerman observes.

Such humanism and such audacity –– helping targeted victims of the Nazis –– was extremely risky.

“Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer’s family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed ‘collective responsibility.’ Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city’s underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist’s dummies.”

Diane Ackerman

Ackerman, author of “The Whale by Moonlight,” “Natural History of the Senses,” and “Dawn Light,” writes with heartbreaking brilliance of “The unbearable weight of Ghetto life.” Not surprisingly, her words include these metaphors of nature and the sea.

“During this time of seismic upheaval, more and more Ghetto dwellers washed up on the deck of the villa, arriving weatherbeaten, ‘like shipwrecked souls,’ Antonina wrote in her diary. ‘We felt that our house wasn’t a light, flimsy boat dancing on high waves, but a Captain Nemo’s submarine gliding through deep ocean on its journey to a safe port.’ Meanwhile, the war storm blew violently, scaring all, and ‘casting a shadow on the lives of our Guests, who fled from the entrance of crematoriums and the thresholds of gas chambers,’ needing more than refuge. ‘They desperately needed hope that a safe haven even existed, that the war’s horrors would one day end,’ while they drifted along in the strange villa even its owners referred to as an ark.”

Navy readers and their families who choose to read this book will identify with the core values of the Żabiński family: honor, courage, and commitment.

There is a familiar ethos in the character of the men, women, and children who participated in rescuing victims of the Nazis. Ackerman writes:

“Rescuers tended to be decisive, fast-thinking, risk-taking, independent, adventurous, openhearted, rebellious, and usually flexible –– able to switch plans, abandon habits, or change ingrained routines at a moment’s notice. They tended to be nonconformists, and though many rescuers held solemn principles worth dying for, they didn’t regard themselves as heroic. Typically, one would say, as Jan did: ‘I only did my duty –– if you can save somebody’s life, it’s your duty to try.’ Or: ‘We did it because it was the right thing to do.'"

Antonina had to deal with Nazis who invaded her home and threatened her; then she had to confront Russians who came to liberate Poland but tried to take what wasn’t theirs. Her inner strength, voice, and instincts proved to be all too powerful.

This is another treasured find I discovered in a used book store. It is also a book that gives a hopeful view of the human spirit, strength in resilience, and the power of righteousness in time of war.

Ackerman and W. W. Norton include comprehensive “details,” a bibliography, and index. The paperback version I scored comes with a “reading group guide” and list of other books with similar group guides. Blurbs are from an impressive list of reviewers, with standouts for me by Dava Sobel (“Longitude”), Jared Diamond (“Guns, Germs, and Steel”), and Donna Seaman of Los Angeles Times.

The Żabińskis in Warsaw, Poland, saved 300 Jews.

As of the autumn of 2022, Poland has accepted at least 1.4 million refugees who fled Ukraine due to Putin’s war and campaign of terrorism against civilians. This week, during a Russian missile onslaught against Ukraine, a Ukrainian defensive missile exploded on a grain farm in the rural village of Przewodow, five miles within Poland's border, killing two people. NATO nations, including the United States, met to consider additional options to deal with Russia’s continued aggression.

Chilling with ‘Icebound’

Review by Bill Doughty––

As the summer heats up literally, here’s a way to cool off literarily: Andrea Pitzer’s goosebumps-inducing history-science-adventure true story, “Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World” (Scribner, Simon & Schuster, 2021).

It’s the otherworldly true story of Dutch sailors, led by navigator William Barents, as they attempt to find an open polar sea in the Arctic in the age of sail.

Barents, who pioneered map-making in the Mediterranean, made three voyages for the Dutch Republic in the 1590s. This book covers all three ventures, but zeroes in on the third and final fraught attempt. The Dutch, along with other nations, wanted to discover a northern trade route to China.

It was time of growing empires and growing sea trade in slaves and spices.

It was also a time of war between Spain (Catholic and monarchistic) and the Netherlands (Protestant and based in liberty). While war raged in western Europe, Barents and other Dutch sailors headed East and North, hoping to find a warm sea beyond the ice.

Barents was considered a “magician” for his ability at celestial navigation. “He could look into the sun and fix their ship’s position not he globe. He could watch the stars and tell them the day of the year.”

Though no navigable route was found, the young Dutch Republic would continue to expand over the next hundred years –– thanks to the slave trade, spice trade, exploration, and art –– to become the largest economy and naval power in the world at the time, according to Pitzer.

“William Barents would play a role in that drama, but as he readied himself for his first voyage into the Arctic, his country was a blank slate, its sins and achievements still unwritten,” she writes.

Navy readers will appreciate Pitzer’s recounting of history and science, naval lore, and the courage and commitment of sailors in the face of seemingly impossible odds.

For example, as regards history and science…

We are reminded that Vikings “discovered” Ukraine and that the science of navigation relied on the discovery of trigonometry in 1080 by Arab Astronomers, as well as inventions by Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, and Scandinavians. What they knew in the late 16th century, though, was dwarfed by what Barents and the sailors didn’t know. Many great scientific discoveries were yet to be made.

“As they set forth, they knew some things. They knew how to set the sails on the ship to catch the wind. They knew how to steer. They knew how to work wood, and hunt, and trap. Barents could reckon latitude and knew the stars, and those he didn’t know, he had charts for. Sailors understood that icebergs haunted the northern regions and could stretch for miles. Sometimes rising more than two hundred feet above the waterline, they were capable of rewarding vessels and the tiny human presence guiding them.

“Barents and his fellow crew members knew some things, but it wasn’t enough. They possessed no scientific understanding of gravity, no telescopes, and no calculus. Though they could find their latitude, they couldn’t yet determine longitude from aboard a ship. They were centuries away from deciphering the germ theory of disease. More than a hundred years could pass before humanity would discover that lightning was electricity. Decades remained before doctors would realize that blood circulates in the body, and that a cell is the unit of life. As he sailed into the Arctic, Barents would, in time encounter wonders and terrors without understanding most of the forces at play in his universe.”

Nenets idols, Vaigach Island.

Naturally, in the absence of information and in the embrace of superstition, early sailors believed good –– and bad –– fortune was the will of God. They believed their religion condoned slavery, for example, and ordained “man” to overcome and rule over nature.

Pitzer describes interactions with indigenous people in the far north, including the Sami and Nenets, who worshipped wooden idols, which fascinated the sailors. One sailor stole an idol and took it aboard ship only to be forced to return it later.

As the Scientific Revolution was beginning to blossom in Europe with Copernicus, Descartes, Francis Bacon, Barents and his crew were collecting and measuring polar bear pelts and walrus tusks and studying flora and fauna –– three hundred years before Darwin. Barents explained mirages, experienced the gap between Earth’s magnetic pole and true polar north, and mapped the geography at the edge of the Arctic. He also resolved a centuries-old superstition about barnacle geese: that they did not spontaneously hatch from barnacles (because no one had previously seen their nests and eggs).

Pitzer hides her history and science within harrowing tales of survival aboard their ship, at Vaigach Island, on boats, and at then-ice-covered Nova Zembla.

We feel the cold chill the crew to the bone. We hear chunks of ice hit the hull of the ship, see the men fend off frequent attacks by polar bears, smell the stink of sickness, and taste the desperation as the men are trapped in the ice over the winter: “Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World.”

Arctic fox

Navy history readers will appreciate passages about sails, masts, knees, joint pegs, and planks; scurvy; mutiny; keelhauling; and generally what life was like for age-of-sail sailors at sea –– endless routines, fear of storms, and trying to thrive in a crowded space.

Ultimately, this is a story of perseverance, the strength of the human spirit, and the will to survive.

The sailors relied on trapping Arctic foxes and finding birds and eggs. They rationed what food they could salvage from their ship. And they built a cabin and collected drift wood to keep warm.

Hampton Sides, author of the great “In the Kingdom of Ice,” blurbs: “Engrossing … Andrea Pitzer brings Barents’s three harrowing expeditions to vivid life –– while giving us fascinating insight into one of history’s most intrepid navigators.”

Pitzer visits Nova Zembla in 2019.

Pitzer bases her research on journals, material in museums, and interviews with scholars. She relies on entries in the original diary of Gerrit de Veer, one of the sailors who returned to tell the story.

She also makes a remarkable visit in August 2019 to Nova Zembla, “a numbing, desolate place,” near the ruins of Barents’s cabin. The land is now a Russian Arctic preserve.

The book concludes with a sobering account of the effects of global warming in the Arctic and the loss of ice during summer and over recent decades. Pitzer gives a stunning conclusion about the intersection of Barents’s exploration, our understanding and acceptance of science, and a context for how humans impact the planet.

Survival of individuals, and perhaps the species, depends on the will to endure, adapt, and overcome.

“Icebound” can be a springboard to confront cold, inconvenient truths.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) prepares to replenish stores and fuel with the Henry J. Kaiser-class replenishment oiler USNS Laramie (T-AO-203) in the Barents Sea, Oct. 29, 2020. Ross is currently on its 10th Forward Deployed Naval Forces-Europe (FDNF-E) patrol in the U.S. Sixth Fleet area of operations in support of U.S. national security interests in Europe and Africa. (MCSN Christine Montgomery)

L'attitude on 'Longitude' & Sailing Island Earth

by Bill Doughty

"Longitude" by Dava Sobel is subtitled "The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time." It's a fun and easy book that opens with a quote by Mark Twain. Sobel introduces us to the book's hero, John Harrison, and his mastery of space and time. "He succeeded, against all odds, in using the fourth -- temporal -- dimension to link points on the three-dimensional globe. He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars..."

Harrison dedicated his life to the creation of an accurate seagoing clock, a marine chronometer, that could help sailors determine longitude in order to map commercial opportunities, prevent shipwrecks and avoid contact with enemy fleets or pirates.

In 2014, there are some notable milestones in the search for calculating longitude:

1514: Five hundred years ago this year, German astronomer Johannes Werner found a way to use the motion of the moon as a location finder.

1664: Three hundred and fifty years ago, Galileo's "intellectual heir," Christiaan Huygens's pendulum clock sailed aboard ship to and from the Cape Verde islands in the North Atlantic off the west coast of Africa and kept track of the ship's longitude. However the clock's pendulum would prove to have difficulty in long voyages and in rough seas.

John Harrison's H-1

1714: Three hundred years ago, the British parliament passed the Longitude Act and offered a prize of 20,000 pounds to anyone who could solve the problem of calculating longitude. This led to intrigue and controversy between those who tried to solve the problem through astronomy and others like clockmaker Harrison who tried through technology. He developed his land and sea clocks using intricate parts, new designs and innovative materials like tropical hardwood, diamonds and gridiron brass and steel. A replica of his breakthrough design, clock H-1, was produced by Larcum Kendall. Called K-1, it sailed with Captain James Cook in 1775 on his second voyage of HMS Resolution and helped Cook chart the South Sea Islands for the first time for England.

"So enamored was Cook of K-1 that he carried it out on his third expedition, on July 12, 1776 [eight days after our Declaration of Independence]. This voyage was not so fortunate as the first two. Despite the great diplomacy of the renowned explorer, and his efforts to respect the native peoples of the lands he visited, Captain Cook ran into serious trouble in the Hawaiian archipelago."

Captain Cook commemorative stamps from 2003.

In fact, Cook, originally hailed as an incarnation of the god, Lono, was drawn into hostilities on a return trip and was killed. According to an account of events, K-1 "also stopped ticking" at the time Cook died. But chronometers had proven their worth, and Harrison lived long enough to see the "infinite practicality" of his approach accepted and his life's work vindicated. His clocks "may have facilitated England's mastery over the oceans."

Sailors worldwide adopted the new technology at the end of the eighteenth century.

"By the turn of the century, the [U.S.] navy had procured a stock of chronometers for storage in Portsmouth, at the Naval Academy, where a captain could claim one as he prepared to sail from that port. With supply small and demand high, however, officers frequently found the academy's cupboard bare and continued to buy their own."

1814: Two hundred years ago, during the War of 1812, there were thousands of chronometers in use.

According to Sobel, on Charles Darwin's voyage aboard HMS Beagle in 1831, there were 22 chronometers on board to help fix longitudes of foreign lands, including the Galapagos.

John Harrison

"Longitude" is on the "recommended reading" list of the CNO's Professional Reading Program. It's packed with personalities of scientists involved in the search for an understanding of seagoing time and space: William Whiston, Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, Domenico Cassini, Ole Roemer, John Flamsteed, John Hadley, Thomas Godfrey, James Bradley and (the book's "antihero" to Harrison, Rev. Nevil Maskelyne).

Sobel includes snippets of poetry by Robert Burns, Diane Ackerman, W.H. Auden, Lord Byron, Samuel Coleridge, William Blake, Lewis Carroll and William Shakespeare. Her book is endorsed by the late William F. Buckley, Jr., who writes of "Longitude," "An exquisitely done narrative of the chronometer. It is a wonderful and engrossing achievement."

Throughout, the narrative is a yin-yang of nature/technology, time/distance and, in the case of the Prime Meridian, Greenwich/Paris (England/France), where there was some negative "l'attitude" about where the first line of longitude should exist. 

Sobel's is an understandably Eurocentric view of the tension, history, and art of ocean navigation, with most of the story focused on the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean. Of course, there's another side of the globe where Chinese and Polynesian voyagers were sailing accurately with nature's "star compass."

Yesterday members of the Polynesian Voyaging Society departed Oahu aboard two Hawaiian voyaging canoes for the beginning of a three-year tour around the globe. Dignitaries and well-wishers for master navigator/mentor Nainoa Thompson and his navigators and crew were Ocean Elders Captain Don Walsh, musician Jackson Browne and oceanographers Jean-Michel Cousteau and Dr. Sylvia Earle. Hōkūle’a was envisioned by legendary artist Herb Kāne, and voyages today were inspired by wayfinder and master navigator Mau Piailug and heroic Eddie Aikau, among others.

From Hokulea.com: "Hōkūle’a and Hikianalia, our Hawaiian voyaging canoes, are sailing across earth’s oceans to join the global movement toward a more sustainable future. Traveling through 47,000 nautical miles of Earth’s oceans and visiting 26 countries, Hōkūle’a carries a message of mālama honua (caring for Island Earth and each other)."

After a stop at Hilo on the Big Island of Hawaii, the first long leg of the journey is to Tahiti, and the voyagers plan to not use modern instruments -- no maps, sextants, clocks or GPS, only the sun, moon, waves, wind, sea life, and stars and their "houses." No Harrison's chronometer.

Again from Hokulea.com: "As we voyage, we bring together tradition and technology, timeless values and new visions, and the next generation of leaders that can build hopeful solutions for Island Earth’s and Hawaiiʻs future."

Nainoa Thompson looks at weather charts with Lt. Bill Karch in 1978.

The U.S. Navy is spiritually part of the journey. Sailors homeported in Pearl Harbor have worked with the Polynesian Voyaging Society over many years. They have helped refurbish canoes, offered advice on the dangers voyagers might face, and provided search-and-rescue training to navigators and sailors. The Navy shares some of the same interests: a sustainable future, environmental stewardship, love for the ocean, cooperation and partnership-building, STEM and leadership through empowering the next generation.

On land, people around the world, expecially young people in classrooms, can witness how Hōkūle’a and Hikianalia navigate and follow the journey through the Web and via social media, including Facebook.

“That piece about the navigation to me, it teaches perseverance," says master navigator Nainoa Thompson. "It teaches young people to be willing to take risks to train and prepare, to find their destination. It helps understand the power of vision, and it makes people work together. It teaches leadership.”

In 2011, U.S. Navy Sailors home-ported in Pearl Harbor sand pieces of a Polynesian canoe for the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Sailors helped restore the canoe, support vessels and work areas while learning about ancient Hawaiian culture in the process. (Photo by MC2 Paul D. Honnick)