The Zookeeper's Wife Essay

The Zookeeper’s Wife was a very emotional film taking place in Warsaw, Poland. The couple featured were in charge of a very prestigious zoo containing many different animals ranging from rabbits, to monkeys, to elephants. After being bombed by Nazis, many of the animals died, escaped, or were seized by Hitler’s lead zoologist, Lutz Heck. With the realization of the enormity of their zoo, and the danger that many faced, they decided to take in one of their Jewish friends, hiding her in a spare room in their house. Eventually, they decided it would be best to house more residents of the ghettos. Under the guise of a new pig farm, and gaining the favor of Lutz Heck, the Warsaw Zoo managed to gain entry to the ghettos to obtain scraps for their pigs. These scraps are what they used to smuggle over 300 innocent people out of the ghetto throughout the course of the war. By the end of the movie, they were caught. Heck locked Antonia in a cage and feigned shooting her son before leaving, as punishment for her treason. Had she, her son, and her daughter not fled, he most likely would have been back to kill them. By the end of the movie, Antonia, her children, and many of the people they had rescued made their …show more content…
Discussing these topics and learning about their relation to the world allows a listener to view movie’s such as The Zookeeper’s Wife with a completely different set of “literary lens.” The realization that many of these chemicals were meant for pests only deepens the metaphor between the Jewish culture and the dehumanization that all of them faced during this