i24 News wrote:A Holocaust memorial museum for children will be launched next month at the Warsaw Zoo, where Jews were hidden and saved from the Nazis.
“This museum is not going to be a huge one, but from a commemoration point of view it’s among the most important of its kind because of the target audience — children,” said Jonny Daniels, the founder of From The Depths, a Holocaust commemoration organization that initiated the museum project together with the Panda Foundation, the zoo’s charitable arm.
It will include the villa of the menagerie’s director, Jan Zabinski, and his wife, Antonina. A lieutenant in the Polish resistance, Zabinski sheltered the Jews in underground pathways connecting the animal cages. He also used the zoo to store arms for the resistance. The museum will also house the renovated maze of tunnels and the piano on which Antonina warned her charges of approaching Nazis, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported.
- Museum will commemorate zoo keeper and wife who hid hundreds of Jews from Nazis under cages.
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Israeli Moshe Tirosh, one of 300 Jews whose lives were saved thanks to the couple's little-known heroism, spent three weeks at the zoo, where he lived in a windowless underground room with his younger sister receiving food from the Zabinskis and their son, Ryszard. For safety reasons, Tirosh’s parents stayed in a different chamber in the underground maze.
By the time Tirosh reached the zoo, many of the animals had been killed — some in hunting parties that Nazi officers held there — or shipped off to German zoos. Determined to keep the zoo running because of its value for the resistance, Zabinski turned it into a pig farm, according to “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” a 2007 book about the Zabinskis. Sometimes Zabinski would smuggle pig meat into the Jewish ghetto, where the prohibition on its consumption had been largely abandoned because of a Nazi starvation policy that had Jews living on a diet of 187 calories a day.
"At the zoo, Antonina communicated with her Jewish guests through a musical code," Tirosh recalls in an interview with JTA.
“She played for us one piano tune and told us to sit tight and be very quiet if we heard that music, and then another tune to indicate the danger was over,” he said.
Tirosh says his confinement at the zoo was one of the few periods during the war when he remembers no pain or suffering.
After leaving the zoo, Tirosh and his sister went to live with Christian foster families, where he suffered abuse and disease and nearly died. After the war, Tirosh was reunited with his family. His father died of a heart attack in 1948 and the rest of the family immigrated to Israel in 1957.
Antonina died in 1971 and her husband in 1974. The Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem recognized both Zabinskis as Righteous Among the Nations in 1965.
