a lightning-fast war, "it had many long-drawn-out phases." Food stamps entered their lives and costly black-market food, though luckily Antonina could still bake bread from the grain she had bought from her sister-in-law in the fall.
At winter's end, she and Jan started receiving the first shipments of sows, and by March of 1940 the pig farm began, mainly fed on scraps donated from restaurants and hospitals, as well as garbage Jan collected in the Ghetto. Grossly overqualified, the old keepers looked after the pigs and the animals thrived, producing several hundred piglets during the summer, which provided the household with meat and served Jan's main objective of using the zoo as an Underground depot.
One spring day, Jan brought home a newborn piglet whose mother was just butchered, thinking that Ryś might like it as a pet, and Antonina found him a bristly scramble of energy, hard to bottle-feed, especially when he started gaining weight. They named him Moryś, and at two and a half weeks, Moryś looked like "a piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh . . .very clean, pink and smooth, with a marzipan beauty," she wrote. (In Poland, children usually received little pink marzipan pigs for Easter.)
Moryś lived in the so-called attic of the villa, really a long narrow closet that shared a terrace with the upstairs bedrooms, and each morning Antonina found him waiting outside Ryś's bedroom door. When she opened it, Moryś "ran into his room, oinking, and started jostling Ryś's hand or foot until Ryś woke, stretched out a hand, and scratched Moryś's back. Then the pig arched, catlike, until he looked like the letter C , and grunted with great contentment," uttering a quiet noise between a snort and a creaking door.
On rare occasions Moryś risked going downstairs into a stew of smells and voices, a maze of strange human and furniture legs. The clinking of a dinner table being set usually lured him to the top of the staircase, where he parked himself and "blinked his buttery blue eyes with long white eyelashes, looking and listening," Antonina wrote. If someone called him, he edged down the polished wooden stairs, carefully, hooves slipping now and then, skittered into the dining room, and circled the table, hoping for a handout, though scraps were few.
After dinner each evening, Moryś and Ryś repaired to the garden to gather grass and weeds to feed the rabbits living in the old Pheasant House, which gave Moryś a chance to hunt for tubers and greens. That scene incandesced in Antonina's memory, the icon of her little boy and his pig playing in the lavender twilight: "Ryś and Moryś on a field of green, which captivated everyone. Watching them, we could forget the war's tragic events for long moments." Her son had lost so much childhood, so many pets, including a dog, a hyena pup, a pony, a chimpanzee, and a badger, that Antonina cherished his daily flights with Moryś into the vegetable garden's vest-pocket Eden.
One puzzle of daily life at the villa was this: How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society? Killers passed them daily on zoo grounds, death shadowed homely and Underground activities alike, and also stalked people at random in the streets. The idea of safety had shrunk to particles—one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heighten the senses. Trusting one's hunches only seems a gamble if one has time for seem ; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks.
CHAPTER 12
"H OW CAN THIS BARBARITY BE HAPPENING IN THE TWENTIETH century?!!!!!!" Antonina asked herself, an outcry of disbelief with no fewer than six exclamation points. "Not long ago the world looked on
At winter's end, she and Jan started receiving the first shipments of sows, and by March of 1940 the pig farm began, mainly fed on scraps donated from restaurants and hospitals, as well as garbage Jan collected in the Ghetto. Grossly overqualified, the old keepers looked after the pigs and the animals thrived, producing several hundred piglets during the summer, which provided the household with meat and served Jan's main objective of using the zoo as an Underground depot.
One spring day, Jan brought home a newborn piglet whose mother was just butchered, thinking that Ryś might like it as a pet, and Antonina found him a bristly scramble of energy, hard to bottle-feed, especially when he started gaining weight. They named him Moryś, and at two and a half weeks, Moryś looked like "a piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh . . .very clean, pink and smooth, with a marzipan beauty," she wrote. (In Poland, children usually received little pink marzipan pigs for Easter.)
Moryś lived in the so-called attic of the villa, really a long narrow closet that shared a terrace with the upstairs bedrooms, and each morning Antonina found him waiting outside Ryś's bedroom door. When she opened it, Moryś "ran into his room, oinking, and started jostling Ryś's hand or foot until Ryś woke, stretched out a hand, and scratched Moryś's back. Then the pig arched, catlike, until he looked like the letter C , and grunted with great contentment," uttering a quiet noise between a snort and a creaking door.
On rare occasions Moryś risked going downstairs into a stew of smells and voices, a maze of strange human and furniture legs. The clinking of a dinner table being set usually lured him to the top of the staircase, where he parked himself and "blinked his buttery blue eyes with long white eyelashes, looking and listening," Antonina wrote. If someone called him, he edged down the polished wooden stairs, carefully, hooves slipping now and then, skittered into the dining room, and circled the table, hoping for a handout, though scraps were few.
After dinner each evening, Moryś and Ryś repaired to the garden to gather grass and weeds to feed the rabbits living in the old Pheasant House, which gave Moryś a chance to hunt for tubers and greens. That scene incandesced in Antonina's memory, the icon of her little boy and his pig playing in the lavender twilight: "Ryś and Moryś on a field of green, which captivated everyone. Watching them, we could forget the war's tragic events for long moments." Her son had lost so much childhood, so many pets, including a dog, a hyena pup, a pony, a chimpanzee, and a badger, that Antonina cherished his daily flights with Moryś into the vegetable garden's vest-pocket Eden.
One puzzle of daily life at the villa was this: How do you retain a spirit of affection and humor in a crazed, homicidal, unpredictable society? Killers passed them daily on zoo grounds, death shadowed homely and Underground activities alike, and also stalked people at random in the streets. The idea of safety had shrunk to particles—one snug moment, then the next. Meanwhile, the brain piped fugues of worry and staged mind-theaters full of tragedies and triumphs, because unfortunately, the fear of death does wonders to focus the mind, inspire creativity, and heighten the senses. Trusting one's hunches only seems a gamble if one has time for seem ; otherwise the brain goes on autopilot and trades the elite craft of analysis for the best rapid insights that float up from its danger files and ancient bag of tricks.
CHAPTER 12
"H OW CAN THIS BARBARITY BE HAPPENING IN THE TWENTIETH century?!!!!!!" Antonina asked herself, an outcry of disbelief with no fewer than six exclamation points. "Not long ago the world looked on
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