cold-blue evening light, sunset was playing funeral bells for our just-buried animals. We could see our two hawks and one eagle circling above the garden. When their cage was split open by bullets, they'd flown free, but they didn't want to leave the only home they knew. Gliding down, they landed on our porch and waited for a meal of some horsemeat. Soon even they became trophies, part of the Gestapo officers' New Year's hunting party."
CHAPTER 11
L IFE IN THE ZOO STOPPED COLD FOR WEEKS, AND LOSS ECHOED around the cages once filled with familiar snorts and jabbers. Antonina's brain refused to accept the sad new reality, as everywhere a funereal silence hushed the grounds and she tried telling herself that "it wasn't a death sleep but hibernation," the lull of bats and polar bears, after which they would wake refreshed in springtime, stretch their scruffy limbs, and search for food and mates. It was only a rest cure during the icequake and frostbite days of winter when food hid and it was better to sleep in one's burrow, warmed by a storehouse of summer fat. Hibernation time wasn't only for sleep, it was also when bears typically gave birth to cubs they suckled and nuzzled until spring, a time of ripeness. Antonina wondered if humans might use the same metaphor and picture the war days as "a sort of hibernation of the spirit, when ideas, knowledge, science, enthusiasm for work, understanding, and love—all accumulate inside, [where] nobody can take them from us."
Of course, her family's Underground was no sleepy restorative shelter but a policy of hazards, and Antonina found the Underground state of mind a shared "brain-dead reaction" conjured up by the psyche. There was no alternative, really. One needed it to face the stultifying fear and sadness aroused by such daily horrors as people beaten and arrested in the streets, deportations to Germany, torture in Gestapo quads or Pawiak Prison, mass executions. For Antonina, at least, that flight, stoicism, or dissociation—whatever one labels it—never quite dispelled the undertow of "fear, rebellion, and extreme sadness."
As Germans systematically reclaimed Polish towns and streets, even speaking Polish in public became forbidden; in Gdańsk it was punishable by death. The Nazi goal of more "living space" ( Lebensraum ) applied pointedly to Poland, where Hitler had ordered his troops to "kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the Lebensraum we need." Those children thought to show the strongest Nordic features (and thus genes) were destined for Germany to be renamed and raised by Germans. Like the Hecks, Nazi biologists believed in appearances, that anyone who strongly resembled a target species could be bred back to a pure ancestor.
The racial logic went like this: A biologically superior Aryan race had spread across the world, and though various empires collapsed, traces of Aryans remained among the nobility, whose features could be identified and harvested from descendants in Iceland, Tibet, Amazonia, and other regions. Working on this theory, in January 1939, Reichsführer Himmler launched a German Tibet Expedition to locate the roots of the Aryan race, led by twenty-six-year-old naturalist, hunter, and explorer Ernst Schäfer.
"Himmler shared at least one passion with Ernst Schäfer," Christopher Hale writes in Himmler's Crusade : he "was fascinated by the East and its religions," going so far as to carry a notebook "in which he had collected homilies from the Hindu Bhagavadgita ('Song of the Lord'). To the unimpressive little man [Himmler] who sat inside the poisonous spider's web of the SS, Ernst Schäfer was an emissary from another mysterious and thrilling world." Himmler also brewed a deep hatred for Christianity, and since most of Poland was devoutly Catholic, all Poles drew punishment.
Antonina wrote that her world felt gutted, collapsing in slow motion, and that for a Blitzkrieg,
CHAPTER 11
L IFE IN THE ZOO STOPPED COLD FOR WEEKS, AND LOSS ECHOED around the cages once filled with familiar snorts and jabbers. Antonina's brain refused to accept the sad new reality, as everywhere a funereal silence hushed the grounds and she tried telling herself that "it wasn't a death sleep but hibernation," the lull of bats and polar bears, after which they would wake refreshed in springtime, stretch their scruffy limbs, and search for food and mates. It was only a rest cure during the icequake and frostbite days of winter when food hid and it was better to sleep in one's burrow, warmed by a storehouse of summer fat. Hibernation time wasn't only for sleep, it was also when bears typically gave birth to cubs they suckled and nuzzled until spring, a time of ripeness. Antonina wondered if humans might use the same metaphor and picture the war days as "a sort of hibernation of the spirit, when ideas, knowledge, science, enthusiasm for work, understanding, and love—all accumulate inside, [where] nobody can take them from us."
Of course, her family's Underground was no sleepy restorative shelter but a policy of hazards, and Antonina found the Underground state of mind a shared "brain-dead reaction" conjured up by the psyche. There was no alternative, really. One needed it to face the stultifying fear and sadness aroused by such daily horrors as people beaten and arrested in the streets, deportations to Germany, torture in Gestapo quads or Pawiak Prison, mass executions. For Antonina, at least, that flight, stoicism, or dissociation—whatever one labels it—never quite dispelled the undertow of "fear, rebellion, and extreme sadness."
As Germans systematically reclaimed Polish towns and streets, even speaking Polish in public became forbidden; in Gdańsk it was punishable by death. The Nazi goal of more "living space" ( Lebensraum ) applied pointedly to Poland, where Hitler had ordered his troops to "kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the Lebensraum we need." Those children thought to show the strongest Nordic features (and thus genes) were destined for Germany to be renamed and raised by Germans. Like the Hecks, Nazi biologists believed in appearances, that anyone who strongly resembled a target species could be bred back to a pure ancestor.
The racial logic went like this: A biologically superior Aryan race had spread across the world, and though various empires collapsed, traces of Aryans remained among the nobility, whose features could be identified and harvested from descendants in Iceland, Tibet, Amazonia, and other regions. Working on this theory, in January 1939, Reichsführer Himmler launched a German Tibet Expedition to locate the roots of the Aryan race, led by twenty-six-year-old naturalist, hunter, and explorer Ernst Schäfer.
"Himmler shared at least one passion with Ernst Schäfer," Christopher Hale writes in Himmler's Crusade : he "was fascinated by the East and its religions," going so far as to carry a notebook "in which he had collected homilies from the Hindu Bhagavadgita ('Song of the Lord'). To the unimpressive little man [Himmler] who sat inside the poisonous spider's web of the SS, Ernst Schäfer was an emissary from another mysterious and thrilling world." Himmler also brewed a deep hatred for Christianity, and since most of Poland was devoutly Catholic, all Poles drew punishment.
Antonina wrote that her world felt gutted, collapsing in slow motion, and that for a Blitzkrieg,
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