The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman

This non-fiction book, based on the meticulous journals of Antonina, wife of the zookeeper in Warsaw, is easily read but not easily forgotten. The family managed to stay in the house on the city zoo property, through the zookeeper Jan's connections and his ability to convince authorities to keep the zoo operating in various forms including as a vegetable garden and a fur ranch and in doing so, they managed to save 300 people and help them make their way out of the ghetto to safety. Although Christian, they saw no difference in people based on their religion and put their own lives in jeopardy to care for Jewish Poles.

But the book is much more than a record of the family's life on the zoo grounds. Jan was an active member of the Polish underground, and Ackerman documents the activities of the Jews trapped in Poland and earmarked for the Nazi's most brutal treatment. She tells of an underground high school, a university and a hospital operating in the ghetto; she reveals the ways that people were able to move in and out of the ghetto; and how messages and supplies were sent back and forth between the ghetto and the Polish government in exile in London. There is also a wealth of information on the Nazis' attempts to recreate various extinct northern European animals that they considered properly Aryan.

Although I have read much about the Holocaust, this intimate portrait of life in Warsaw instilled admiration in me for the Poles--their history, their culture, and the devastation the Nazi's wreaked on Warsaw. And then, in what should have been their liberation at the end of the war, the Allies stood by while Russia pushed into Warsaw and continued the oppression of this proud people.