Review: The Zookeeper’s Wife. A War Story - Diane Ackerman

I picked this book up because I thought the premise sounded interesting. It tells the tale of the Warszava Zoo and how it was used as a hideout for Jews and resistance members during the Second World War. It is based on a true story and mainly gets its details from the diary of the director’s wife, who chronicled her life and work during the years of the occupation. 

I was under the impression that this would be a fictionalized account based on the facts in the diary, but I soon discovered that it was actually more of a retelling of the events in the diary interspersed with facts and stories from other sources. I had looked forward to a retelling of an interesting, personal story from the war, as I always find these kinds of stories interesting, but instead I essentially ended up reading a non-fiction book. I kept waiting for the story to shift into “fiction-gear” but it never happened. Once I resigned myself to that fact, the story was still interesting, but I did not much care for the style of writing. As I said the book is based on the diaries of the director’s wife, but it is interspersed with all sorts of other information. For example there is a recurring story of a Jewish professor’s bug collection, which seems to me to take up an inordinate amount of space, along with a number of other asides and tangents. 

Given the title I found that there was very little told about the actual zoo and its use as a hideout. Sure, it’s mentioned that it was used as a hideout for certain people, and it is superficially stated how it was done practically, with food and such, but I really wanted the nitty gritty bit of it. Instead I felt like the entire book was pretty superficial when it came to the details of how anything was actually done. 

There are a number of interesting facts in the book along with the tale of the zoo as a hideout, for example how people were smuggled out of the Jewish ghetto, how the Nazis wanted to breed their way back to the “original” Stone Age horse and bison, the resistance movement and the politics of the Allied forces. But it felt like this book tried to deal with too many things at once and hence only dealt with everything superficially. At the end of the book there are 2 small chapters that seem completely out of place and unnecessary; one about a forest in Poland which the Nazis wanted to use in their breeding experiments and a walk through the city by the author and her reflections on said walk. I just found these to be out of place and skimmed most of them. 

In the end I gave this book 2 stars out of 5 on Goodreads. I just expected so much more from it.