‘The Zookeeper’s Wife’: 15 Facts About the Real Story Not in the Movie

The real Antonina Zabinski

Born in Russia in 1908, Antonina Zabinski lost both her parents in the Russian Revolution. As an adult, she was a teacher and also wrote many children’s books about animals. She was never trained as a zoologist but learned how to care for animals from her husband, Jan. She seemed to really cherish and relate to animals because, in her mind, most humans couldn’t be trusted.

The real Jan Zabinski

Dr. Jan Zabinski was the director of the Warsaw Zoo. He had written numerous books about animal behavior and biology. His daughter, Teresa Zabinski, said this about him: “My father was not a sentimental man and he was quite serious. But at the same time, he had an incredible sense of humor.”

Clearly, he also had an incredible sense of compassion, since he was willing to risk his life to save strangers.

The real Ryszard

Antonina and Jan’s oldest child, Ryszard, was put into the position of having to keep big secrets. Surely, this must have been stressful on the boy.

When the Germans invaded Poland, nearly all of the schools closed, so Ryszard was home all day. He spent his time bringing food to the people who were hiding in underground animal cages and plotting to destroy all the weapons the Nazis were storing at the zoo. When his mother discovered his plan, she had to stop him immediately or else he’d jeopardize the whole lifesaving operation.

Antonina’s style

“I was a bit shocked to see how feminine Antonina was,” Jessica Chastain said in press materials provided to SheKnows by Focus Features. Chastain said that Teresa, Antonina’s daughter, “told me that her hair was always done and she loved lipstick. She also said she liked nail polish but Jan didn’t like it so she rarely wore it. Everything that Teresa told me helped me get at the nature of the woman who was taking care of all these people; she is trying to bring any joy and happiness she can, and she takes care in her appearance because that is her not wanting anyone to forget that they are human.”

The zoo before the war

This photo was taken at the Warsaw Zoo in 1938. Kasia, the mother Indian elephant, was the first to ever give birth to a baby elephant in a Polish zoo. Sadly, Kasia and a giraffe were killed when the Germans bombed the zoo in 1939.

Code name “squirrels”

In the movie, we see Antonina bleach the hair of two women in an effort to hide their Jewish identity, but it didn’t always work out. In real life, she attempted to bleach many people’s hair, but sometimes it was no use if a person’s hair was very dark. When she bleached the hair of young Moshe Tiroche and his sister, Ryszard commented that their hair was the color of squirrels. Antonina gave the siblings the code name “squirrels.”

Aryan cattle

Lutz Heck, a German zoologist and Nazi, not only pillaged the Warsaw Zoo, sending many animals to German zoos, but also had a strange fascination with aurochs, the extinct bison that used to roam Germany. Aurochs were much larger and much fiercer than the cattle we have today. Heck started a breeding program of bison that physical features similar to aurochs, hoping to breed the beast back into existence. He also did this with horses and other animals. The purpose was to create a forest of massive, ancient-looking animals to be hunted for sport by the Nazis. Some of the “Heck cattle,” descendants of the ones he bred, were transferred to England and can be seen grazing on the hillside at the Devon/Cornwall border. 

Heck was wild about Antonina

Heck knew the Zabinskis before the war started, since both Heck and Jan went to meetings for the Association of Zoo Directors. In her memoirs, Antonina wondered if all Heck wanted to do was “win her heart and prove his nobility.” A friend told Antonina that Heck had commented that she reminded him of his first girlfriend.

Ryszard was put in danger

In the film, we see Nazi officer Heck threaten young Ryszard with extreme violence. While the incident happened in real life, it wasn’t Heck who tormented Ryszard; it was another Nazi officer. The Nazis were also quite menacing to Antonina. They often threatened her and would show up at her house drunk and rowdy.

The pig farm

In a brilliant plan to go back and forth between the zoo and the Jewish ghetto, Jan turns the zoo into a pig farm and claims he needs to get the ghetto’s food scraps to feed the pigs. Of course, his secret plan was to smuggle out Jews and smuggle in some pork for them to eat. Typically, Jews don’t eat pork because their religion forbids it, but they were happy to get any sustenance at all, since they were forced to live on 187 calories a day.

‘Winter sleep’

After the zoo was bombed by the Germans, many of the animals that were still alive escaped, and others were “hunted” by Nazi soldiers or shuffled off to German zoos. Some of the predators left at the zoo were so dangerous, Jan had to shoot them himself, for fear they would escape in another bombing. This must have been a grueling decision to kill the animals he wanted to protect. Antonina wrote in her journal, “There was this gloomy, dead calm everywhere, and I kept telling myself that it is not the dream of death and extinction, but merely ‘winter sleep.'”

Why we’ve never heard this story

In an interview with NPR, the book’s author, Diane Ackerman, revealed two reasons why this story has gone mostly uncelebrated.

The first reason she gave is that “we tend to think of heroes only in terms of violent combat against enemies or natural disasters, but we don’t think of them in terms of radical acts of compassion.”

Second, “The Soviets came in after war and then it was not at all popular to be a freedom fighter,” she said, which Jan was. “It’s really only recently that the Poles are getting in touch with their own history of that era.”

Most movie animals were real

According to press materials, the filmmakers’ goal was to use as many real animals as possible.

There were two instances where they had to rely on CGI, however. One was to show some of the animals getting shot. Another was when the mother elephant playing Kasia was supposed to give birth.

“There was no way we were going to get an elephant to give birth on cue for us,” production designer Suzi Davies said. The art department created a prosthetic baby elephant for the scene. “We had this baby elephant built with a little hole behind its ear where you could put a hand in and move all the different structures inside, making it seem to breathe and seem real.”

Working with real animals

The Zookeeper’s Wife screenwriter Angela Workman told SheKnows about a funny incidenct with a camel when she visited the set.

“Camels make really funny noises,” she said. “When you’re on the headsets, trying to be silent in the producer tent, you can hear the camels groaning. They sound like old men with gas. I was trying to be the quiet screenwriter who’s very professional, but I burst out laughing. Then everyone burst out laughing. It was so funny and no one else felt they could acknowledge it, but then we did acknowledge it and I think we ruined a take.” 

Hidden treats

In the scene where Antonina is trying to save the baby elephant, we see the mother’s trunk roving around Jessica Chastain’s body. To film this, Chastain hid apples in all her pockets, and the elephant was simply trying to find them.

The Zookeeper’s Wife is now playing in theaters.