A Zookeeper's Wife

“Do you want to see a movie,” my wife asked, hoping for some semblance of a date night. 

“Sure,” I replied, thinking of some action or uplifting flick.

It turned out to be neither. 

The Zookeeper’’s Wife takes place in Warsaw, Poland during World War II, and tells the story of the Warsaw Zoo director and his wife who used the bombed out remains of the zoo to harbor Jews from the Nazis. Kind of a Shindlers List, less shocking but just as mystifying.

Mystifying as a study in human behavior and the extent to which that behavior can be warped. The holocaust is well documented, but recently there have been concerns expressed that so much time has passed that younger generations are not becoming exposed to the reality of it. Not to mention the deniers. Watching the movie was not comfortable, of course, less because of the depicted atrocities than of the risks the zookeepers were willing to, and did, take. Living with the possibility of discovery and the corresponding lethal consequences for a young family is a feeling we never have and hopefully never will experience. Even just watching it on the silver screen fostered high anxiety.

That is the other side of the mystifying behavior. What makes people expose themselves to that level of insecurity on behalf of others, with no likely personal gain and, in fact, the potential of losing everything when they could have just kept their heads down. That kind of courage is far less prevalent in those circumstances than the more common behavior of going along, and even becoming complicit in the inhumane treatment of others to avoid harm. If faced with those kinds of choices how would we fall? The courage to follow the zookeepers path would fail me, I think.

As I'm always reminded by my father, it’s impossible to guess how you would react in a given historical circumstance. Just as it is impossible to fairly judge the behavior of others when the circumstances are of another time, another place, and under unrelatable conditions. He feels that way to the extent of not sharing details of some of his own experiences with the Japanese during the war. It's likely to be interpreted correctly by hearts and minds of those of us born and raised in a completely different social and psychological environment. 

This does not excuse the behavior of those that committed the kinds of atrocities we saw in WWII. It only serves to remind us of the capacity of human nature to severely warp the boundaries of decency when faced with emotionally charged fervor, intimidation or hopelessness. We can still see that in modern day headlines. But, as demonstrated in this film, human nature also has the capacity to selflessly resist those influences on behalf of humanity.