Veronica asked Diane Ackerman:

How did you learn the story of Antonia Zabinska and what made you decide to write a book about her?

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.

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