The Zookeeper’s Wife (27 page)

"In Warsaw the Ghetto was no longer anything but an organized form of death" (106):
Michael Mazor,
The Vanished City: Everyday Life in the Warsaw Ghetto,
trans. David Jacobson (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1993), p. 19.

"mere mention of a threat" (106):
Grynberg,
Words to Outlive Us,
pp. 46–47.

Chapter 14

"just to facilitate your research, [and] to let you know what we think of you" (122):
After Karski,
p. 267, quoted in Davies,
Rising '44,
p. 185.

Chapter 15

president of Warsaw (126):
The president of Warsaw is equivalent to the mayor of a city.

any excuse to visit friends "to keep up their spirits and smuggle in food and news" (128):
See Rostal, "In the Cage of the Pheasant."

"a period of political repression, censorship, and infringement on personal liberties" (130):
Milton Cross,
Encyclopedia of the Great Composers and Their Music
, Doubleday, 1962, pp. 560–61.

the Warsaw Ghetto's Labor Bureau (131):
Workers deported to Germany by the Arbeitsamt had to wear a purple
P
on their sleeve, and were denied church, cultural pursuits, and public transportation. Sex with a German was punishable by death. (Davies,
Rising '44,
p. 106)

"when he saw the beautiful beetles and butterflies, he forgot all about the world" (135):
Polacy z pomoc
Żydom
(Poles Helping Poles), 2nd edition (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Znak, 1969), pp. 39–45.

"The creation, existence, and destruction of the Ghetto" (136):
Philip Boehm, introduction to Grynberg,
Words to Outlive Us,
p. 3.

"Frankenstein was a short, bull-legged, creepy-looking man" (137):
Jack Klajman with Ed Klajman,
Out of the Ghetto
(London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2000), pp. 21, 22.

Chapter 16

"I wanted to tell Jan—'Let's run.'" (150):
Lonia Tenenbaum, in
Polacy z pomoc
Żydom
(Poles Helping Poles).

about half of the full collection, which Jan told a journalist ran to four hundred boxes (151):
Jan E. Rostal, "In the Cage of the Pheasant,"
Nowiny i Courier,
October 1, 1965.

Chapter 17

"doctrine of blood and soil" (153):
Karl Friederichs quoted in Deichmann,
Biologists Under Hitler,
p. 160.

Epidemics Resulting from Wars
(154):
Friedrich Prinzing,
Epidemics Resulting from Wars
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916).

"Antisemitism is exactly the same as delousing" (154):
speech to SS officers, April 24, 1943, Kharkov, Ukraine; reprinted in United States Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality,
Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression,
(Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1946), vol. 4, pp. 572–78, 574.

he was "seized by the wish not to have a face" (155):
Hannah Krall,
Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
(New York: Henry Holt, 1977), p. 15.

the slogan
"jews—lice—typhus"
(155):
report by Ludwig Fischer quoted in Gutman,
Resistance,
p. 89.

"when the three horsemen of the Apocalypse" (156):
Stefan Ernest quoted in Grynberg,
Words to Outlive Us,
p. 45.

"When you eat and drink" (157):
Alexander Susskind, quoted in Daniel C. Matt, ed.,
The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism
(San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995; translated from Dov Baer, Maggid Devarav l'Ya'aquov), p. 71.

"One hears the [Teaching's] voice" (159):
Nehemia Polen,
The Holy Fire: The Teachings of Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto
(Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), p. 163.

one Ghetto inhabitant (159):
Marek Edelman in Krall,
Shielding the Flame
. After the war Edelman became a cardiologist, commenting that "when one knows death so well, one has more responsibility for life."

Chapter 18

"The personality of animals will develop" (165):
postwar interview by Danka Harnish, in Israel, translated from Hebrew by Haviva Lapkin of the Lorraine and Jack N. Friedman Commission for Jewish Education, West Palm Beach, Florida, April 2006.

"Consisting of 28,000 Jews" (173):
Gunnar S. Paulsson,
Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 5.

"Tenants visited each other" (173):
Alicja Kaczyńska,
Obok piekła
(Gdansk: Marpress, 1993), p. 48; quoted in Paulsson,
Secret City,
pp. 109–10.

Chapter 20

"Uncle is planning (God preserve us) to hold a wedding" (181):
from Ruta Sakowska, ed.,
Listy o Zagladzie
(
Letters About Extermination
) (Warsaw: PWN, 1997). Jenny Robertson,
Don't Go to Uncle's Wedding: Voices from the Warsaw Ghetto
(London: Azure, 2000).

"district of the damned" (183):
Janusz Korczak,
Ghetto Diary
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), p. x.

"adhesions, aches, ruptures, scars" (184):
Ghetto Diary,
p. 9.

"Thank you, Merciful Lord" (184):
Ghetto Diary,
p. 8.

"When I collect the dishes myself" (184):
Ghetto Diary,
p.107.

whose pure souls make possible the world's salvation (186):
Betty Jean Lifton, introduction to
Ghetto Diary
, p. vii.

Chapter 21

"The people of Zegota were not just idealists but activists, and activists are, by nature, people who know people" (188):
Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski,
Zegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland
(Montreal, Canada: Price-Patterson Ltd., 1994).

70,000–90,000 people (189):
from Gunnar S. Paulsson,
Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw 1940–1945
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 163.

a giant jar Jan had once used in a cockroach study (194):
Jan Żabíński, "The Growth of Blackbeetles and of Cockroaches on Artificial and on Incomplete Diets,"
Journal of Experimental Biology
(Company of Biologists, Cambridge, UK), vol. 6(1929): pp. 360–86.

Chapter 23

Surprisingly, sketchy telephone service continued (202):
Emanuel Ringelblum,
Polish-Jewish Relations During the Second World War
(New York: Howard Festig, 1976), pp. 89–91.

"a husk or shell that has grown up around a spark of holiness, masking its light" (203):
Michael Wex,
Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005), p. 93.

Yiddish's famous curses. . ."May you piss green worms!" (209):
Wex,
Born to Kvetch,
pp. 117, 132, 137.

"Here a terrible depression reigns" (210):
Judit Ringelblum,
Beit Lohamei ha-Getaot
(Haifa, Israel: Berman Archives); quoted in Paulsson,
Secret City,
p. 121.

Chapter 24

"For him, I would do anything," he once told a friend. "Believe me, if Hitler were to say I should shoot my mother, I would do it and be proud of his confidence" (211):
Otto Strasser,
Mein Kampf
(Frankfurt am Main: Heinrich Heine Verlag, 1969), p. 35.

"Nearby, on the other side of the wall, life flowed on as usual" (212):
Cywia Lubetkin,
Extermination and Uprising
(Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute, 1999); quoted in Robertson,
Don't Go to Uncle's Wedding,
p. 93.

"the Germans have removed, murdered, or burned alive tens of thousands of Jews" (213):
Stefan Korbónski,
Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State, 1939–1945
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 2004), p. 261.

Chapter 25

"There I saw a dozen more or less undressed ladies" (220):
From the account of Władysław Smólski in
Righteous Among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939–1945,
edited by Władysław Barloszewski and Zofia Lewin (London: Earlscourt Publications Ltd., 1969), pp. 255–59.

operated on Jewish men to restore foreskins (222):
Schultheiss, Dirk, M.D., et al., "Uncircumcision: A Historical Review of Preputial Restoration,"
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery,
vol. 101, no. 7 (June 1998): pp. 1990–98.

"Suffering took hold of me" (222):
a personal reminiscence deposited with the Jewish Historical Institute after World War II, and published in
Righteous Among Nations,
p. 258.

Chapter 27

"man as a sensitive receiver" (236):
Goodrick-Clark,
The Occult Roots of Nazism,
p. 161.

Chapter 28

"It is the imaginary perils, [the] supposed observation by the neighbour, porter, manager, or passer-by" (241):
Ringelblum,
Polish-Jewish Relations,
p. 101.

"A picture falling off a wall" (242):
Sophie Hodorowicz Knab,
Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore
(New York: Hippocrene Books, 1996), p. 259.

people "walking on quicksand" (244):
Janina in
Righteous Among Nations,
p. 502.

"I am lucky. . .I can do wonders" (244):
Rachela "Aniela" Auerbach, postwar testimony in
Righteous Among Nations,
p. 491.