Filmmaker Niki Caro firmly believes that the star of her new film “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” is a bona fide “animal whisperer.” Ms. Caro, the New Zealander behind such earlier works as “Whale Rider” and “North Country,” said that it was Oscar-nominated actress Jessica Chastain’s easiness with the creatures populating the long-destroyed Warsaw Zoo of pre-World War II in her film that engendered a kinship with the film’s real-life subject, Antonina Zabinski.
“She absolutely shares the same essential quality as Antonina,” Ms. Caro told The Washington Times. “Antonina’s instinct to nurture and protect animals translated so seamlessly to the human species.”
As the film opens, Antonina (Miss Chastain) and her husband Jan (Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh) enjoy a relatively quiet life in Poland, where their days are spent in the care of the creatures of Warsaw’s zoo. But then the Nazis cross the border in 1939, setting the Second World War in motion and turning Poland into an occupied state.
When it becomes clear that Hitler’s “Final Solution” entails the extermination of Poland’s Jews, Antonina and Jan become part of a wartime underground railroad, shepherding as many of Warsaw’s Jews as possible through the cages and tunnels of their zoo, much of which was destroyed by the Nazis.
“Like pretty much everybody in the world, I had never heard the name Antonina Zabinksa, let alone the role she played in history,” Ms. Caro said. “It was obvious to all of us that her story would make a very unique movie.”
Based on the 2007 book of the same name by Diane Ackerman, “The Zookeeper’s Wife” has several early scenes of Antonina in rather close proximity with the film’s cast of animals.
“Antonina was extremely at home in the sanctuary that she had built for the animals, and then we see her create sanctuary for humans,” Ms. Caro said. “She does that with the same softness and compassion, [and populated] it with art and music and animals.”
“In order to play that, I had to figure out [that] nurture within myself,” Miss Chastain, whose work in “The Help” and “Zero Dark Thirty” earned her two previous Oscar nods, told The Times.
In researching Antonina, Miss Chastain — since she herself would be working closely with animals on “The Zookeeper’s Wife” set — spent time with animal wranglers to learn how best to interact with primates, animals and other large species.
“The thing that was the most helpful to me is that they never pushed themselves into an animal’s space until the animal invited them,” Miss Chastain, an avowed animal rights advocate and vegan, said. “You have to just be really present and follow the animal’s lead.”
Antonina Zabinski was in fact born in Russia, and fled to Poland after her parents were killed by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution. In the film, Miss Chastain and her co-stars affect Anglicized Polish accents.
“Her accent carries the history,” Ms. Caro said of Zabinski. “She found sanctuary in Poland and created sanctuary in the zoo.”
Perhaps it was this identity as an outsider that made Zabinski identify not only with her animal charges but also Poland’s Jews, who found themselves suddenly and violently declared “other” by the Third Reich.
“I realized that Antonina, in this time of darkness and ugliness of war, was creating softness and beauty and kindness,” Miss Chastain said of her character, who also uses animals as a way to reach out to some of the traumatized children she hides in her cellar.
Miss Chastain sat down with Antonina’s daughter, Teresa, who provided such details about her mother as that she only ever wore dresses and donned a necklace daily in memory of her homeland of Russia.
“The main thing I got from Teresa was how feminine Antonina was,” Miss Chastain said. “She loved nail polish, but her husband didn’t like it very much, so she rarely wore it.”
Poland’s Jews suffered horrifically in the Holocaust, with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the nation’s capital estimating that nearly 3 million of their number perished between 1939 and 1945. In addition, the Nazis’ reign of terror resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Poles in Warsaw itself. The city was nearly razed by the Luftwaffe’s bombing, leaving almost nothing of the pre-war city standing today.
“There was no question that we needed to be in Europe,” Ms. Caro said. “We couldn’t be in Warsaw because Warsaw was so destroyed in the war,” leading the production to “recreate” 1930s Warsaw in Prague, Czech Republic.
“It really was kind of this hidden story, even in Poland,” Miss Chastain said of the piece. “I was talking to some Polish people, and they said what was so exciting to them … was that a lot of depictions of World War II and the Holocaust depict Polish people in a very bad light. Millions of Polish people were killed in the concentration camps.
“They felt kind of ignored by that,” Miss Chastain said of the Poles. “They felt like maybe people weren’t acknowledging that part of World War II. And so they were very excited to make this story public.”
Miss Chastain said that one of the key elements that drew her to the film was the question of what does it mean for someone to be “in a cage.” She also pointed out that the family of Anne Frank, the Dutch girl whose diary of hiding out from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic is required reading in schools, was denied a visa to the United States.
“The Warsaw ghetto is a cage,” Miss Chastain said of the area where the Nazis forced all of Warsaw’s Jews before they were later shipped off to the death camps.
But Antonina saw every living creature as equal.
“Antonina was an ordinary woman who, because it was the right thing to do, saved hundreds of people’s lives. I wanted to do whatever I can to celebrate her heroism,” Miss Chastain said.
The actress felt it was equally important that audiences — in Europe and around the world — learn from the dark times on the 1930s and ’40s lest the errors of history be repeated in the future.
“When you just select history that puts people in the best light, you’re doing such a disservice,” she said. “You look at our history because it tells us where we are today and where we’re heading.”
• Eric Althoff can be reached at twt@washingtontimes.com.
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