Film about how Nazis hid us in zoo ‘should get Oscar’
STEFANIA SITBON was just a baby when war broke out in her home country of Poland in 1939 — but the story of how she survived the Nazi occupation is now being talked about around the world.
Ms Sitbon was saved by a Polish couple, the Zabanskis, who hid her family and many others in the basement of the Warsaw Zoo. The story has been turned into a film, The Zookeeper’s Wife, starring Jessica Chastain and currently on show in the UK.
Ms Sitbon said the film was more condensed than the book but she still believed it stayed true to reality, and praised Ms Chastain for her performance.
“If I’m on the commission that gives the Oscar, I would give it. She just played very nice, she was kissing, you know, the animals, like Antonia did.”
At the beginning of the war, for about three and a half years, Ms Sitbon’s family lived in the Jewish ghetto.
As the war dragged on, her father told her mother they had to leave the ghetto before the uprising.
“He said to my mum that they knew they will be killed,” she said.
Her parents knew the Zabinskis well before the war. Ms Sitbon’s grandfather used to sell fruit and vegetables and he gave the leftovers to the zoo; her mother would go with him to translate from Yiddish to Polish.
Ms Sitbon was four years old when they moved into the basement of the zoo. They were there for two and a half months. She said: “People [ask] where you are? …Between the kids, I say.” As depicted in the film, Antonia Zabinski would play her piano to alert others when the Germans came to visit. Ms Sitbon said Jan Zabinski, Antonia’s husband, was normally away, fighting for the resistance.
Eventually, the Zabinskis became worried that the workers in the zoo had become suspicious of the extra food that was being consumed and that they would raise their concerns with the Germans. So Ms Sitbon’s family left and found separate places to stay near Warsaw. Remarkably, the entire family survived.
A couple years after the war, Ms Sitbon’s farther died and the rest of the family moved to Israel in 1957. Later on, she followed her son and moved to Toronto with her husband. In 2014, she went with the March of the Living to visit the Warsaw Zoo, where she met the Zabinskis’ daughter, Teresa.