Ask the Author: Diane Ackerman
Answered Questions (10)
Diane Ackerman
First of all, I loved attending the ALA screening also! I’ve spent a lot of my life in libraries and I love libraries, especially book mobiles. The book mobiles were my Aladdin’s cave when I was growing up. I am happy to report that I’ve met both of the children who are very much alive and thrilled to be able to celebrate what happened in their family, and to recognize their parents as rescuers. And, the zoo I’ve been to, at a time when most of Warsaw was destroyed and there were very small population left in Warsaw after the war, they rebuilt that zoo right away. The zoo is now a world-class zoo. As a result, the zoo recently turned the villa that the Żabiński’s lived in into a museum. They remodelled it to look the way it looked during the war and now it educates people about what happened there.
Diane Ackerman
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Diane Ackerman
I do. The time and place may vary, but the human saga remains the same. We’re facing some of the same forces and moral questions today that the Żabiński’s faced during World War II and it seems to resonate. The book and the film seem to resonate today with people as it did 10 years ago because we’re still dealing with some of the same challenges. I hope that people reading the book and watching the film will discover the depth of humanity that is possible. And, that there are different forms of heroism and compassionate heroism is one to be celebrated above all.
Diane Ackerman
Follow your curiosity. Follow your passion. Don’t get caught up in worrying about success or fame. It’s easy to because we live in a culture in which we see a lot of celebrities. So, you can’t really get caught up in that aspect of it. Instead, what you need to do is follow your curiosity. Write what you’re most fascinated by, write what enchants you and put your heart and soul into it. Then, probably you will be successful, but even if you’re not you will have had a fulfilling and interesting life.
Diane Ackerman
While I was working on The Zookeeper’s Wife I didn’t typically have a writing day because I began writing the book right after my late husband had a stroke, and I was his caregiver. I’m sure this had something to do with why I was drawn to the story of a caregiver like Antonina. Of course, I was only looking after one person, but she had the responsibility of looking after so many lives. She was my heroine. It also meant that I had to work in attention gulps and in fragments of time. However, if I had children that I was looking after the same thing would be true. So, I would have to find moments during the day when I wasn’t needed in looking after him where I could then announce, “I’m going to Poland,” and I would go down to my study room. In fact, working on the book became my sanctuary during that time and I did that regularly everyday. I would say during each day I worked on the book for around three or four hours, but not consecutively. Whereas, when I’m normally writing I begin when I get up first thing in the morning and work for five or six hours at a time.
Diane Ackerman
I loved discovering how the soul of the book was made visually into the movie such as the telling of the story, the main players in the story, the interaction of the characters and especially seeing the values of the people. Those all became three-dimensional and visible in front of me, and I loved that! Women’s stories transcend time and place, they tie us together as well as inspire us. That’s true in all their different versions. So, I was inspired by Antonina in writing the book and then re-inspired by her in watching the movie.
Diane Ackerman
It really wasn’t all that hard and I find research fun. Actually, I love learning about everything and I knew nothing. I am happy starting from a place of total ignorance and having to come up to speed on what happened during World War II in Poland, the rest of the world, the natural history of Poland and all of these different things. There are fortunately many people who have kept records of things. So, I could read the writings of the people who were in the ghetto because some of them kept diaries and hid them in milk churns, which they buried. Those churns were found and were actually dug up after the war. As a result, we have them available to us. I could get a lot of insight about what was happening in the ghetto because we have the sermons from the ghetto Rabi and all different kinds of accounts. The underground has been written about and members of the underground have also written accounts. I was able to speak with two women who were in their 80s at the time, but who had been girl cyclist messengers between the underground in the zoo during the war and I could ask them about different things including sensory things. I asked them things like, what did the air smell like, what kind of food did you eat, were there dogs and cats around, were there birds, what songs did you listen to and all different aspects of daily life. It was possible to verify the diary to make small corrections if she got the date wrong or place wrong. I also spoke with her son, and both of her children are still alive. I’m very excited that they’re going to see their parents on screen. So, it wasn’t all that hard to do.
Diane Ackerman
I came to the story through the animals. I first heard that there were ancient horses running around the forest in Poland and I had been writing books about endangered animals that I was working with around the world. I wanted to see these horses and write about them, but I didn’t speak Polish and I couldn’t even do the Polish alphabet. So, I asked a neighbor who was Polish and spent her first 26 years in Warsaw if she would help me e-mail the park service in Poland. She said, “You know, incidentally one of my uncle’s was a vet at the zoo before the war.” So, we got in touch with him. He remembered that Antonina had kept a diary and published it. We asked him to find it. He did. When he sent it to me and my friend translated it, I began to see the extraordinary sensibility of Antonia who was very keenly attuned to animals and to the sensuous spectacle of everyday life and of nature. I found her utterly fascinating and wondrous. But, the more I read, the more glimpses I got that she wasn’t just welcoming endangered orphan animals into her villa and raising them there; she was also protecting endangered humans as well. She didn’t write in enormous length about that in her diary, but it was possible to piece together (beginning with that) the story through interviews, other books that they wrote, biographies and histories of the Polish underground. I just kept putting together fragments of a mosaic until the story came together.
Diane Ackerman
The Żabiński’s as Christians could easily have survived the war. They didn’t have to risk their lives and the life of their child, but they were so disgusted by Nazi racism that they felt that it was the only decent human thing to do. I’ve read the accounts of all of the Polish rescuers and they all say exactly the same thing. They say, as the Żabiński’s did, we weren’t heroes, anyone in our situation would have done the right thing. It was what any decent person would do. Now, then you can ask yourself what informed that sense of humanitarian responsibility. Is it their religious background? Is it their inherent goodness? These are the questions that are hard to answer, but there are people all over the planet everyday who are performing acts of mercy and heroism for others. It’s a very strong drive in human beings to help one another, to feel compassion with one another, to be able to put yourself in one another’s shoes and want to make life better for them.
Antonina had a mystical relationship with animals. Also, she felt intimately woven into the fabric of nature in the ways I felt a deep kinship with her the second I started reading what she wrote about how she felt about animals and nature. I felt that she was a sister. Of course, we differed in so many different ways. She was tall, blonde and Catholic to mention just a few, and grew up in wartime of course. She was a caregiver for so many people, but in some vital ways in her belief in the essential goodness of people and her willingness to help them. To not just survive, but thrive. I identified with her and I know that the other women in the film identified with her also. The film is very sumptuous to watch and exquisite in sensory detail that allows the viewers to be immersed in the era. That’s exactly what I was trying to do in the book as well. Create the sensory experience of being Antonina and of the world that she was moving through from day to day. The story is inherently rich. Her story is rich with moral courage, love and compassionate bearing. She was very determined, intelligent, clever, brave and she was afraid. I think we sometimes get confused and think that heroes and heroines are people who aren’t afraid, but that’s not true. They’re afraid, but they perform these extraordinary acts for others anyway. She was an otherwise so called “ordinary person” who could reach deep into herself and identify with the plight of others and want to help them, which allowed her to rise to heights that she might not have realized she could.
Antonina had a mystical relationship with animals. Also, she felt intimately woven into the fabric of nature in the ways I felt a deep kinship with her the second I started reading what she wrote about how she felt about animals and nature. I felt that she was a sister. Of course, we differed in so many different ways. She was tall, blonde and Catholic to mention just a few, and grew up in wartime of course. She was a caregiver for so many people, but in some vital ways in her belief in the essential goodness of people and her willingness to help them. To not just survive, but thrive. I identified with her and I know that the other women in the film identified with her also. The film is very sumptuous to watch and exquisite in sensory detail that allows the viewers to be immersed in the era. That’s exactly what I was trying to do in the book as well. Create the sensory experience of being Antonina and of the world that she was moving through from day to day. The story is inherently rich. Her story is rich with moral courage, love and compassionate bearing. She was very determined, intelligent, clever, brave and she was afraid. I think we sometimes get confused and think that heroes and heroines are people who aren’t afraid, but that’s not true. They’re afraid, but they perform these extraordinary acts for others anyway. She was an otherwise so called “ordinary person” who could reach deep into herself and identify with the plight of others and want to help them, which allowed her to rise to heights that she might not have realized she could.
Diane Ackerman
Well, the film actually stays very close to the book. It’s been fascinating for me to discover how one art form gets translated into another art form. For example, I had the luxury of being able to write at length about the unfolding of events over four years, but the film had to somehow compress that into two hours and still retain the soul of what happened, and the daily sense of urgency and danger. It’s been really fascinating for me to see how that happens. So, when I visited the set for four days in Prague I was riveted just to see the exchange of facial expressions, the gestures, how scenes got compressed and tinkered with in different ways, and yet stayed very close to the original. It’s been fascinating. However, I didn’t actually work on the screenplay because I don’t have a background in screenplay writing. So, I thought that should be left to people who are stellar at that form of art and I think Angela Workman did a fabulous job on it. I did read the screenplay though in one of its final forms and commented on that, and I spoke with Workman at great lengths early on and the producers as well. So, we really were all on the same page about what we wanted the film to express.
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