The Zookeeper’s Wife: True WWII Story Hitting the Screen

By Kristine Garcia on Feb 15, 2017 11:36 AM EST

Best-selling and acclaimed storyteller Diane Ackerman combines extensive research and an exuberant writing style to re-create the fascinating, true-life story that shares Antonina’s life as The Zookeeper’s wife, while examining the disturbing obsessions at the core of Nazism.

According to New York Times, despite the fact that the writer focuses more on Antonina, her husband Jan lived more dramatic life. Jan was a lieutenant in the Polish Army and a professor in Warsaw’s secret university. He was smuggling Jews out of the Warsaw Ghetto to the zoo. It was Antonina’s job to safeguard them once they arrived at the zoo. She provides them with room and food, keeps their spirits up, and most of all hide them from the Nazis. They had animal names for the guests, and human names for the animals, that’s why the zoo’s code name became The House Under a Crazy Star. The Zookeeper’s Wife is an absorbing book. It is diminished by the way Ackerman tries to balance Antonina’s life with the largest story of Warsaw Holocaust. Antonina was not a housewife, she was the alpha female in a unique menagerie.

Deadline reports, that Jessica Chastain will be leading the role in the upcoming movie The Zookeeper’s Wife. She will play Antonina Żabińska, while Johan Heldenbergh will play the husband Dr. Jan Żabiński. They are forced to report to the Reich’s appointed chief zoologist that will be played by Daniel Brühl, while working with the Resistance. Their plan is to save lives out of what has become the Warsaw Ghetto while risking their own lives in the process. Angela Workman is the one that penned the script based on the bestselling book by Diane Ackerman, while Michael McElhatton co-stars. Focus Features is releasing the movie on March 31, 2017.