BEFORE: I'm in Massachusetts at my parents' house, which means that the cel phone service is unreliable, and I have to type on a PC instead of a Mac, so in many ways this is crazy backwards land. There's a DVD player, but I have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it to work, like finding both remotes, fiddling with both remotes, replacing dead batteries in the remotes. It's a process - both parents would rather watch whatever is on TV than try to figure out how to play a DVD. My mom wants to watch "Hidden Figures" tomorrow night, so to do that I had to bring the DVD with me from NYC, and I have to play it for them, I don't think they know how.
In the meantime, I can stay up late, after everyone else goes to bed, and watch a movie - it's just like things were when I was a teenager in that respect. I'm very lucky tonight that I found two movies on almost exactly the same theme, and Iddo Goldberg carries over from "Defiance".
THE PLOT: The account of keepers of the Warsaw Zoo, Antonina and Jan Zabinski, who helped save hundreds of people and animals during the German invasion.
AFTER: I'll try to keep my comments short today, because my Dad's probably waiting to use the computer to play solitaire. This is another powerful true story about people who (mostly) outsmarted the Nazis, in the style of "Schindler's List". Hiding Jews, making phony passports for them, and getting them out of the ghettos and occupied territories through a system of safe houses, hidden passages and other devices.
In this case, the director of the Berlin Zoo was put in charge of the Warsaw Zoo, and under the pretense of protection, took the rarest animals to Berlin for "safekeeping", at least the ones that didn't run away after the first bombing of Warsaw. This is a city that was in chaos after the invasion, and what probably didn't help was the increased chance of being attacked by a lion or a cheetah in the streets, or getting trampled by a runaway camel.
The bottom line here is that you just can't trust Germans - not the Nazi ones, anyway. This zoo-happy Nazi had a secret agenda, which was to cross-breed certain species of European bison in order to bring back the aurochs, which I've learned was an extinct species of wild cattle. Now, of course, we know a little bit more about genetics, and I'm pretty sure you can't reproduce a vanished species unless you've got some preserved DNA and you place that in a similar embryo, "Jurassic Park" style. Which reminds me, didn't they find some preserved wooly mammoth some years ago, and wasn't someone going to try to put that DNA in an elephant embryo to try to bring that species back? I'll have to check later on how that process went, because who wouldn't want to eat some BBQ mammoth for the first time in about 10,000 years?
(I remember a few years back when my wife and I were in Las Vegas, and we went to Caesar's Palace, and we visited the exhibit called "Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden", which was essentially a zoo. But if you remember Siegfried and Roy, they were magicians famous for working with white tigers. While there, we took the audio tour of the zoo, and I got a rather creepy feeling listening to these two magicians, in their thick German (or were they Austrian?) accents, talking about the beauty and purity of the white tigers, and how the white tigers were superior to the orange ones, and I couldn't help but make the connection to Hitler's championing of the white Aryans as superior to other races. I found this very chilling.)
But the zookeeper and his wife come up with a plan to get back at the Nazis, and to keep control of their zoo, which had been turned into a daytime armory/barracks for German soldiers. They turned the place into a pig farm, ostensibly to create pork to feed the soldiers - but then to feed the pigs, they offered to drive into the Jewish ghetto to collect garbage. And if a couple of Jews happened to fall into the garbage truck, well, they could hardly be held responsible for that, now could they? And then they also had plenty of cages, kennels and underground rooms that were used for storing animals, add a couple of cots and those rooms could easily be repurposed for living quarters for Jewish refugees.
As with "Defiance", the secret to defeating Nazis came in figuring out their patterns. The soldiers would occupy the zoo during the day, to store weapons and materials there, but would leave at night to barracks elsewhere. If there's one thing that Germans are, they're well-organized and they live and die by their rules and routines, OCD-like. It turns out that the sitcom "Hogan's Heroes" wasn't that far off, if you could just figure out the routines of the Nazi army, you could just work around them to your advantage, and make the best of this terrible situation with the resources and personnel that you had. That comedy was set in a German prison camp, but they had underground rooms, working radio equipment, and they were always smuggling prisoners in and out or disguising themselves as Nazi officers because they had a whole disguise shop and printing operation in the back room.
This film adds the extra wrinkle of a love triangle, because the Nazi zookeeper/officer seems to have the hots for the Warsaw zookeeper's wife, and she couldn't exactly reject him, because that might tip him off to how many Jews they were smuggling out of the ghetto under his nose. So she had to be flirty with him without exactly giving in.
Also starring Jessica Chastain (last seen in "A Most Violent Year"), Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Bruhl (last seen in "2 Days in New York"), Michael McElhatton (last seen in "Albert Nobbs"), Efrat Dor, Shira Haas, Val Maloku, Timothy Radford, Martha Issova, Goran Kostic, Arnost Goldflam.
RATING: 5 out of 10 escaped monkeys
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