The Zookeeper’s Wife sounds rather grim on the surface: it’s about the keepers at the Warsaw Zoo hiding Jews during the holocaust. As the blurbs on the back say, it’s a rough subject to find in such a beautiful book, and yet, beautiful is what this story is.

Antonina and Jan live in a modern glass house inside the zoo. When the Nazis arrive in Poland, many of their animals are sent to German zoo’s, while others are slaughtered for sport, and yet, because one of the ranking officers is a zoologist, of sorts, the pair are allowed to remain in residence for most of the war, and eventually the zoo houses both a munitions station, and a fox farm.

At the same time, Jan and Antonina are smuggling Jewish people out of the ghetto, using their zoo as an initial stop on a sort of “underground railroad.” Some of these Guests are housed in the old aviary, in the rabbit house, in the pheasant house, and are referred to by the names of the animals whose cages they occupy. Others are hidden in closets, walls, tunnels, etc. around the the house, and still others move in, hiding in plain site.

Throughout this book, which reads like a novel though it is not fiction, even when things are at their worst, Antonina holds her strange family together, and a thread of hope runs through it all.

Goes well with: a bowl of hearty soup, artisan bread, and a cold gray day.

• Grab your current read.
• Let the book fall open to a random page.
• Share with us two (2) “teaser” sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12.
• You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you’ve given.

My teasers are:

But spring floated outside the small rupture in time the war had gouged. For people attuned to nature and the changing seasons, especially for farmers or animal-keepers, the war snagged time on barbed wire, forced them to live by mere chronicity, instead of real time, the time of wheat, wolf, and otter.
– The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story, by Diane Ackerman. Page 223.