Includes bibliographical references (p. [343]-349) and index.

"Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Polish Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who managed to save over three hundred people. Yet their story has fallen between the seams of history." "Drawing on Antonina's diary and other historical sources, Diane Ackerman re-creates Antonina's life as "the zookeeper's wife," responsible for her own family, the zoo animals, and their "Guests" - Resistance activists and refugee Jews, many of whom Jan had smuggled from the Warsaw Ghetto. Ironically, the empty zoo cages helped to hide scores of doomed people, who were code-named after the animals whose cages they occupied. Others hid in the nooks and crannies of the house itself." "Ackerman explores the role of nature in both kindness and savagery, and she unravels the disturbing obsession at the core of Nazism: both a worship of nature and its violation, as humans sought to control the genome of the entire planet."-JACKET.

Not AR rated.