Diane Ackerman - The Zookeeper's Wife

Many Poles believed in signs and witchery. It was once common for Warsawians to read their fate in a deck of regular (not tarot) cards, or predict the future, especially marriage, by melting wax on a spoon and slowly pouring it into a bowl of cold water. Supposedly, the shape the wax took revealed one’s fate—a hammer or helmet shape told a boy he’d be soldiering soon, and a girl that she’d marry a blacksmith or soldier. If a girl dripped wax resembling a cabinet or other furniture, she’d marry a carpenter; if it looked more like wheat or a wagon, she’d marry a farmer. A violin or trumpet meant the person would become a musician.

According to Polish lore, Death appears to humans as an old woman in a white winding sheet carrying a scythe, and dogs can easily spot her. So one can glimpse Death “by stepping on a dog’s tail and looking between his ears.”

Polish Customs, Traditions, and Folklore

Stefan Korbónski, Fighting Warsaw: The Story of the Polish Underground State, 1939–1945 , trans. F. B. Czarnomski (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2004), p. 352.

Jacek Fedorowicz quoted in Davies, Rising ’44 , p. 360–61.

The wild-eyed Russian soldiers, known as “Wlasowcy,” were soldiers of the Russian general Wlasow, who was collaborating with the Third Reich.

Korbónski, Fighting Warsaw , p. 406.

archival photographs reproduced in Davies, Rising ’44 .

Joseph Tenenbaum, In Search of a Lost People: The Old and New Poland (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1948), pp. 297–98.

Davies, Rising ’44 , p. 511.

Rostal, “In the Cage of the Pheasant.”

Heck, Animals , p. 61.

Herman Reichenbach, International Zoo News , vol. 50/6, no. 327 (September 2003).

Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles , trans. Celina Wieniewska (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), pp. 27–28.