The Zookeeper's Wife

I admit it, when I heard that the book group was reading this book called The Zookeeper's Wife, I immediately thought of the book Goodnight Gorilla. I think it's a function of having read this book about 675,000 times. And I love this book. This is a wonderful book. It's just not the book they were talking about reading in book group. 

Not the tired zoo keeper's wife, putting all the animals back to bed after her husband has failed to notice them following him home. So I asked what it was about- a war story. A World War II story.  I didn't really want to read it. I think I've always shied away from the Holocaust and the WWII stories. But now that I'm here in Hungary, I feel like it makes it more real in many ways. And it makes me more interested in learning about what happened. It's the story about Jan and Antonina Zabinski, the people who ran the Warsaw Zoo. It's taken from Antonia's journals and details the way in which the Polish resistance fought the Germans and how they helped Jews escape from the ghetto and deportation to the death camps. 


It's an amazing story. I had heard more about the French Resistance, but the stories here about the way in which the Polish resistance was organized and how they operated were amazing. It's a fascinating read, with some cool images of the family badger and other exotic creatures, and some wonderful stories about the people they saved.