His collaboration in rescuing Jews with a German ghetto employment agency is also not a proven fact. For example, it is a fabrication that Jan Zabinski smuggled Jewish refugees from the Warsaw Ghetto, by hiding them under potato and vegetable peelings in a truck. A result of this, the Heck cattle, is currently found in the Dutch nature reserve, the Oostvaardersplassen (for more information about Lutz Heck read: " War Zone Zoo").Īpart from the criminalisation of Lutz Heck, other elements in the film do not do justice to the truth either. Together with his brother Heinz, he wanted extinct animals, such as the primeval cattle and horse, to return to German nature areas, through the crossbreeding of animals with certain distinct "primitive" characteristics. What remotely corresponds to the truth in the film, is the breeding programme he was involved in. The zoologist, however, was never part of the Nazi regime in Warsaw and had no interest whatsoever in arresting Jewish people in hiding in the Warsaw zoo, as is true for his character in the film. In addition, he was a good (hunting) friend of Imperial Marshal Hermann Göring and he held a leading position within his Reichsforstamt (a kind of state forest management). You can safely consider Lutz Heck, as a member of the Nazi party and (inactive) member of the SS, as a Nazi. The villain cannot be missed in a Hollywood film, but the facts are deceitful and at the expense of a person who can't defend himself anymore, because Heck died in 1983. She had to tolerate the advances of the SS officer, for fear that he would have her and her husband removed from their home That would have meant the end of the people in hiding who were given a safe place in the zoo, in empty, underground animal cages. He makes an agreement with Antonina, which allows her and her husband to stay in the zoo, but for which the woman pays a high price. We see how he, in the uniform of an SS officer, occupies an important position within the German authorities in the Polish capital until 1944. In the film, however, his role is made much bigger than it was. Shortly after the German victory, he appeared at the zoo to take away several animals. It was the Lutz Heck, the director of the Berlin zoo, who contributed to the collapse of the zoo in Warsaw.
Other animals were killed by the Germans or taken to German zoos as spoils of war. The people in hiding were almost the only inhabitants of the zoo, since many animals perished during the German bombardment of the city in September 1939 or were killed because of the danger that they might escape. They stayed, for a short or long time, in hiding on the grounds of the zoo or in the villa of the Zabinskis. Around 300 Jews were rescued from the Nazis by the couple during the war. Released in the Netherlands as ''Antonina's Zoo - A War Story in Warsaw', this historical-based novel tells the special war story of the Polish Antonina, wife of Jan Zabinski director of the Warsaw zoo before the Second World War. It took ten years before the book "The Zookeeper's Wife" by the American writer Diane Ackerman was filmed. Jessica Chastain, Daniel Bruhl, Iddo Goldberg, Johan Heldenbergh et al.
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