Don asked Diane Ackerman:

I had the pleasure of attending the author talk and shoeing of the film at ALA in January 2017. I was impressed by the adaptation of the book. I read the book when it first came out and it was a favorite that year. Have you done much reasearch into the recovery of the zoo and the family after the war? It can't have been easy.

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.

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