Warsaw, Poland – The Warsaw Zoo is opening a Holocaust museum for children in April to honor the zoo owner and his wife, who his Jews during the Nazi invasion.
Jonny Daniels, founder of From The Depths, a Holocaust commemoration, initiated the museum project with the Panda Foundation, reports i24 News (http://bit.ly/1xtB6N6).
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The museum will include the villa where the zoo’s director, Jan Zabinski, a lieutenant in the Polish resistance, lived with his wife, Antonina. The couple hid
Jews in underground pathways that connected the animal cages. Zabinski also stored arms in the underground area. The museum will also include the piano Antonina used to warn hidden Jews from Nazis approaching the zoon. She would play one song to signal them to be very quiet and another to signal that the Nazi’s left and the danger was gone.
Israeli Moshe Tirosh was one of the 300 Jews who was hidden at the zoo. He, along with his sister and parents, spent three weeks there, getting help and food from the Zabinski’s and their son, Ryszard.
Tirsoh said many of the animals were gone by the time he was at the zoo, either killed by Nazi hunting parties or shipped to zoos in Germany. To keep the zoo running, Zabinski turned it into a pig farm.
Antonina died in 1971 and Jan died in 1974. Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust museum recognized both as Righteous Among the Nations in 1965. Their life is also outlined in the 2007 book, “The Zookeeper’s Wife.”
What a story. To stand up to evil at your own peril is quite something. May they be included in Gan Eden with other righteous people.