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The 's Wife By Diane Ackerman Essay

Decent Essays

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events, to ever occur in history. Hitler and the Nazi party started a genocide that killed millions of people because of their ethnicity. The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman tells the perfect story of how life was like during the Holocaust period, through a woman and her family. The main characters in the book are Antonina, the wife and mother, Jan, the husband, and Rys, the couple’s son. The Nazi’s invaded Poland, and took over the Jan and Antonina’s zoo. Throughout the whole novel, Jan and Antonina Zabinski play an active role in the underground network of both hiding Jews and taking care of animals within their Zoo. The main character, Antonina, finds herself managing various relationships during the novel, she’s a zookeeper, a wife, and a mother as well. Throughout the course of the novel, she reveals aspects of her relationship between the animals, and her husband.
Antonina’s passion for animals proves itself to be extraordinary. In fact, within the novel, zookeeping is her primary role in comparison to her other roles. Antonina directly thinks of the animals in the same nature as she would a human. On account of the German soldiers who went on a hunt, shooting the animals inside the Zoo, Antonina specifically says, “If German occupies Poland, what will become of the delicate lifeform of the zoo…the zoo animals are in a much worse situation than we are” (53). Her justification was simply that humans can pack up and move,

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