WARSAW, Poland — It was World War II, Warsaw was under German occupation, and the wife of the director of the Warsaw Zoo spotted Nazis approaching the white stucco villa that she and her family inhabited on the zoo grounds.
According to plan, she went straight to her piano and began to play a lively tune from an operetta by Jacques Offenbach, a signal to Jews being sheltered in the house that they should be quiet and not leave their hiding places.
That scenario, repeated over years of war, was one of the tricks that allowed Jan and Antonina Zabinski to save the lives of dozens of Jews, a dramatic chapter in Poland’s wartime drama that was virtually unknown until an American author, Diane Ackerman, in 2007 published “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” a book about the Polish couple.
The Zabinskis’ remarkable wartime actions seem certain to gain even more renown with the inauguration Saturday of a permanent exhibition in the villa, an attractive two-story Bauhaus home from the 1930s still on the grounds of the Warsaw Zoo.
The exhibition pays homage to the couple with photos of them, sometimes with their beloved zoo animals, in rooms re-created to evoke the wartime period.
Among those who attended an opening celebration Saturday was Moshe Tirosh, 78, who was hidden there for three weeks in 1943, when he was just 6.
“Antonina is a great woman, a hero,” Tirosh said. “She was also beautiful, smart and wise.”
