O ZWIERZETACH I LUDZIACH (OF ANIMALS AND MEN)
Watchable. The documentary is better than "The Zookeper's Wife" - it's told from the perspective of the zookeeper's wife and of then-children. Starts with a fabulous 7-minute footage from the late 1940s presenting how close the zookeeper's family were to the animals. It also contains a scene I wouldn't believe otherwise: some of the cute lion cubs - they all look like in "The Lion King" - get gloves on their clawed paws and suck on... a goat after their own lion mother rejected them. Later it turns horrid since you hear about atrocities committed by the Nazis on animals and see their dead bodies. The Jewish then-child's testimony strangely proves more comforting - he and his sister are still alive to this day. The only thing that detracts from this amazing recollection is the lack of captions and explanations. It's confusing who is speaking and on whose behalf, also some events and even one disease hark back to the times the history of which is not well-known outside Poland. Even I was perplexed.
I asked what had happened to the zoo animals during the war and whether the ones "rented out" to German zoos had been returned after the war. All animals apart from three small rodents were killed, a beaver returned but it wasm't sure if it was actually the same animal and the ones that were taken to Germany never returned. Instead the European Zoo Council decided to donate animals to the reconstructed Warsaw Zoo which is how it came into being all over again.
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