The National Socialists were compulsive looters. In addition to systematically ransacking Europe’s great art collections, they also helped themselves to the rare breeds that survived in occupied zoos. Perhaps the most notorious case was the plundering of the Warsaw Zoo, led by the formerly respected zoologist Lutz Heck.
However, Dr. Jan and Antonina Zabinski responded with secret defiance, sheltering hundreds of Jewish fugitives within zoo grounds. Diane Ackerman’s bestselling nonfiction account of the Zabinskis’ heroic resistance gets the big screen treatment in Niki Caro’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” which just opened.
The film gets the broad strokes right.
