Famous Polish Jew saver, Warsaw Zoo head Jan Zabinski dies 43 years ago
July 26 marks the 43rd death anniversary of Jan Zabinski, longtime head of the Warsaw Zoo, in which he and his wife Antonina hid Jews during World War II. In 1965 the Zabinskis received Israel’s Righteous Among the Nations medals for their aid to Jews.
Born in 1897, Zabinski studied agronomics and physiology in Warsaw, earning a post-doctoral degree in zoology in 1946. Before the war he helped found the Warsaw Zoo and in 1929 became its first director, a position he held until his 1951 dismissal on grounds of wartime activity in Poland's Home Army (AK) anti-German resistance (see: NOTE 1).
Earlier, he saw combat during the 1920 Polish-Bolshevik War (see: NOTE 2), for which he received the first of two Crosses of Valour (he received the second in 1944).
During World War Two Zabinski fought in the Home Army underground reaching Lieutenant's rank. A platoon leader in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising (see: NOTE 3), he was heavily wounded in the neck by a rifle bullet on September 15 and remained in hospital for the remaining part of the insurgency. He was subsequently imprisoned in German POW camps, where he lectured inmates on zoology.
In his lifetime Zabinski was known as a longtime head of the Warsaw Zoo, author of popular books and radio programmes about animal life, and co-author of a campaign to save the Polish Bison from extinction. After his death in 1974 he won international renown as a World War Two rescuer of Jews in German-occuppied Warsaw.
Zabinski and his wife Antonina helped save Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, many of whom survived in a hideout built on the zoo premises. In 1965, for their wartime aid to Jews, Zabinski and his wife were honoured by Israel’s Yad Vashem Institute with the 'Righteous Among the Nations' title. (see: NOTE 4).
Among the fellow Jewish citizens the Zabinskis helped save from the Holocaust were eminent personages like sculptress Magdalena Gross, attorney Maurycy Fraenkel, writer Rachela Auerbach, boxer Samuel Kenigswein and microbiologist Ludwik Hirszfeld, co-founder of the Polish Academy of Sciences. However, the Zabinskis helped not only prominent Jewish community members, as their hideout often housed poor Jewish fugitives and relatives of local tradesmen, whom the Zabinskis had known from before the war.
The Zabinskis wartime aid to Jews was the subject of the 2017 Hollywood production The Zookeeper's Wife, which focused on the history of Zabisnki's wife. Directed by Niki Caro, the film bases on a 2007 book of the same name by American author Diane Ackerman, which in turn based on the memoirs of Antonina Zabinska, the film's main character. The film stars Golden Globe winner Jessica Chastain as Antonina, and Broken Circle Breakdown's Johan Heldenbergh as Jan Zabinski.
The film also stars Tarantino's "Inglorious Bastard", "Goodbye Lenin!" and "Burnt" cinema hits' Daniel Bruhl as Lutz Heck, an infamous German zoologist assigned during the WW2 with pillaging living stock of the Warsaw Zoo. His task was to steal most valuable animals and transport them to German zoos.(PAP)
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NOTE 1: Founded in 1942, the Home Army was the largest underground resistance force in German-occupied Europe, with up to half a million soldiers fighting in its ranks. In his book 'God's Playground. A History of Poland', historian Norman Davies said that "the Home Army could fairly claim to be the largest of European resistance [organisations]".
Along with various combat activities, the AK was also widely involved in rescuing fellow citizens of Jewish descent, among others through the famous 1942-founded Council to Aid Jews (Rada Pomocy Zydom) codenamed 'Zegota' - the only organisation in Europe and the world established to defend and provide help to Jewish people in ghettos and outside.
The culmination of the AK's armed struggle came with the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 (see: NOTE 3). The AK's wartime losses totalled about 100,000 soldiers killed in fighting or murdered, and about 50,000 taken to the Soviet Union and imprisoned.
After the war many Home Army soldiers refused to lay down their arms and continued fighting against Poland's Soviet-imposed communist regime, winning the name "Enduring Soldiers".
The Enduring Soldiers, also called "cursed" for having been treated by communist authorities as outlaws and at best sentenced to oblivion, battled the Soviet-imposed regime well into the 1950s. The last known "enduring soldier", Jozef Franczak, nome de guerre "Lalek" died in an ambush as late as 1963.
However, on June 13, 2017, in the village Poplawy-Rogale in southeast Poland's Lublin province, the teams from the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) unearthed remains believed to belong to Antoni Dolega, a member of the post-World War II anticommunist resistance said to have remained in hiding until his death in 1982.
NOTE 2: The Polish–Soviet War (February 1919 – March 1921) was fought by Soviet Russia and Soviet Ukraine against the Second Polish Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic for control over an area covering today's Ukraine and parts of Belarus. The Soviets also hoped to invade and occupy Poland.
At the time, Poland's leader Jozef Pilsudski planned to expand the Polish borders as far east as possible pending the formation of a Polish-led Intermarium federation of East-Central European states, to serve as a rampart against Germany's and Russia's imperial ambitions.
For Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, Poland had to be crossed for his Red Army to aid European communist movements. The Soviets started to move westward, pushing Polish forces back to the Polish capital Warsaw. In August of 1920, the Polish side won an unexpected but important victory over the Red Army at the Battle of Warsaw. In the wake of the following Polish advance eastward, the Soviets sued for peace and a ceasefire was sealed in October 1920.
Many historians consider the Battle of Warsaw, which saved Europe from the communist deluge, to be one of the most important battles in history. Given that Poland was the underdog in the conflict, the victory went down in history as the "Miracle of the Vistula" - a term authored by the National Democrat MP Stanislaw Stronski.
Under the formal peace treaty ending the Polish-Soviet War (the Peace of Riga) of March 18 1921, the disputed territories were divided between Poland and Soviet Russia. Much of the territory that fell to Poland was reclaimed by the Soviet Union after World War II, when the Allies redefined Poland's eastern frontiers according to the 1920 Curzon Line.
NOTE 3: The Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944 as the biggest resistance operation in Nazi-occupied Europe. Initially intended to last several days, it continued for over two months before being suppressed by the Germans. The uprising claimed the lives of 18,000 insurgents and around 200,000 civilians.
After the insurgents surrendered and the remaining 500,000 residents were expelled, the Germans methodically burned down and blew up Warsaw house by house. By January 1945, app. 90 percent of the buildings and city infrastructure was destroyed.
NOTE 4: The Righteous Among the Nations distinction is awarded by the Yad Vashem Institute, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust. Most trees planted at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to commemorate those who saved Jews during the war are dedicated to Polish people. In all, among 26,000 Righteous Among the Nations worldwide, more than 6,700 are Polish people. (PAP)
