I just finished reading The Zookeeper's Wife, by Diane Ackerman, 2008. It's the story of a very brave and risk-taking couple in Warsaw during WWII who used the zoo they managed to strengthen the Underground and hide Jews for several years. Their story is beautiful and harrowing and almost unbelievable, except that we have already accepted all that came with the Holocaust, and that makes their story even more rich.
Ackerman is a successful nature writer, and she was the perfect author to write the story of the zookeeper's wife, Antonina, who did talk with animals and could calm the animal in people, too. The book is peacefully written with lots of scents of flowering trees and details about animal fur and feathers, mingled between the family's events and timelines.
My favorite line in the book is a quote by Arthur Schopenhauer, "If I maintain my silence about my secret it is my prisoner, if I let it slip from my tongue, I am its prisoner."
I also love this Yiddish saying, also quoted in the book:
You should own a thousand houses
with a thousand rooms in each house
and a thousand beds in every room.
And you should sleep each night
in a different bed, in a different room,
in a different house, and get up every morning
and go down a different staircase
and get into a different car,
driven by a different chauffeur,
who should drive you to a different doctor
- and he shouldn't know what's wrong with you either!
