Jan & Antonina Zabinski

v

Nationality Polish

This is a story of rescue and courage by the director of the and his wife. They saved the lives of 300 people, about 30 of whom were Jews who had escaped from the nearby .

3,500,000

3,000,000 This graph shows the size of the ten largest Jewish populations in in the early 1930s. 2,500,000 About two thirds of the 9,500,000 Jews in these

2,000,000 countries lived in and Russia…

1,500,000

1,000,000 ROMANIA

RUSSIA

GERMANY HUNGARY

500,000 UNITED

C’SLOVAKIA

FRANCE

KINGDOM

AUSTRIA

HOLLAND LITHUANIA 0 For hundreds of years the vast majority of European Jews lived in the eastern side of the continent. When Poland gained independence LITHUANIA after World War One it became the country with 150,000 RUSSIA the largest Jewish population in Europe. 3,000,000

UNITED GERMANY POLAND KINGDOM HOLLAND 505,000 300,000 140,000 3,400,000

CZECHOSLAVAKIA 357,000

AUSTRIA HUNGARY FRANCE 445,000 300,000 206,500 ROMANIA 757,000 That figure of 3,400,000 Jews represents POLAND 3,400,000 of the total Polish population. To illustrate what a HUGE proportion 10% is -

the current UK population is about 66,000,000.

10% would that would be 6,600,000.

The number of UK Jews is 270,000 -

which is less than 0.5% of the total population. In Warsaw, Poland’s capital city, the Jewish proportion of the total population was That’s people Warsaw’s Jewish population was the largest, and most diverse in Europe. There were religious and non- religious Jews, some that spoke Polish and others that only spoke Yiddish, a language spoken by many Jews in Europe. There were hundreds of synagogues in the city, the largest of which, The Great Synagogue of Warsaw could seat over 2,000 people. When it was built, it was the biggest synagogue in the world. So when the German army invaded Poland, triggering World War Two, they were occupying a country with six times more Jews than in Germany. When Hitler was saluting his victorious troops in Warsaw (right) he was doing so in a city with about the same number of Jews that lived in his entire country. During the first year of occupation the Germans built a wall that eventually enclosed an area of 1.3 square miles - The Warsaw Ghetto This was tiny – you could fit over 400 Warsaw Ghettos in London… Almost half a million Jews were forced to live in the ghetto – the conditions were dreadful. Practically all these inhabitants were transported from the northern part of the ghetto to Treblinka Death camp, where they were murdered.

The Warsaw Zoo was established in 1929 on the east side of the river, in a quiet part of the city called Praga.

Before the war it was the most popular visitor attraction in the city – especially after the birthof Tuzinka, the first (and still only) to be born in Poland. Jan and Antonina Zabinski, and their 6 year old son Ryszard, lived in a villa on the zoo grounds.

During the bombing in September 1939 they witnessed thedestruction of the zoo. Many animals were killed, and some escaped in the chaos. and tigers that roamed the streets had had to be shot to protect the residents. Most of the surviving animals were taken to in Austria and Germany by German zoologists. Jan had agreed to store the rare beetle collection of a Jewish zoologist friend, Szymon Tenenbaum (above) in the villa for safety. When one of the German officers arranged to come and see them, Jan immediately befriended him and exploited this contact to obtain permission to enter the ghetto. At first Jan smuggled food and supplies into the ghetto. But when the living conditions worsened, and the guards had become familiar with him, he offered shelter to Jews who were willing to risk escaping. This was highly dangerous for everyone involved…

The grounds of the zoo were frequently used by occupying German soldiers as a quiet space to relax in. If Jan and Antonina were caught hiding Jews they, and the Jews, would had been shot.

So they were smuggled in at night- time and entered the villa through an underground tunnel

and hidden in the basement rooms out of sight.

To risk their lives like this wasa remarkably courageous choice to make… German soldiers would sometimes come into the villa. This increased the danger everyonewas in even more. When this occurred Antonina would play a specific tune on the piano to warn those hiding in the basement to be as quiet as possible…

In 1965 Jan and Antonina were recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations and a tree was planted in their honour. Today the Zabinski Villa has been turned into a museum that tells this story. The grave of Symon Tenebaum, who died in the Ghetto in 1941, can be visited in the nearby Jewish cemetery.

Ryszard Zabinski is still in touch with some of the survivors his parents helped. Here he is with Moshe Tirosh at the official opening ceremony of the museum in the villa in 2015.