War, Wives and Whitewash: The Zookeeper and his Aryan Animals

Abstract

In 2008, Steven Conte’s World War II novel The Zookeeper’s War (2007) received the inaugural Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction. This was an impressive feat for the first-time novelist, whose book was selected ahead of high-calibre Australian writers Tom Kenneally and David Malouf. At about the same time, on the other side of the world, a book entitled The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story (2007) by American writer Diana Ackerman emerged as a best seller on the prestigious New York Times bestseller list. Both tales of wartime deprivation, bravery, resistance and sacrifice demonstrate that the magnetic pull of a good World War II story (preferably involving resistance to Nazis) is as strong as ever in the Anglo-American world. Ackerman’s narrative — marketed as non-fiction — is about the Warsaw Zoo, and the attempts of the zookeepers Antonina and Jan Žabinski to provide refuge to Jews and members of the underground, while continuing to care for animals. All of this occurred in the face of the fierce military bombardment and the animal-grabbing sorties of villainous Nazi zookeeper Lutz Heck (Ackerman, 47–51). Director of the prestigious Berlin Zoo, Heck followed the Nazi forces into Eastern Europe collecting (by stealing) animals from zoos and nature parks in an attempt to recreate by selective breeding the original ‘pure’ strains of wild horse, prototypes of domesticated horses and cattle and to breed up larger numbers of the endangered European bison (Ackerman, 80–6).