You will have a chance to visit the former villa of a director of the Warsaw Zoo, Jan Żabiński, and his wife Antonina, where nearly 300 Jews were sheltered during World War II.
The villa, the only Warsaw building not destroyed during the war, was a witness of great courage, humanity and fight against the inhuman system.
Filled with photographs, books and personal memorabilia of the Żabiński family, the villa still has a now renovated cellar in which the Jews were kept and an underground tunnel through which they could escape to an abandoned pheasant enclosure. The exhibits also include the grand piano on which Antonina Żabińska played an arrangement of musical pieces used as a code to warn the Jews of incoming danger.
The story of the Żabiński family became widely known in recent years after Diane Ackerman’s bestseller, “The Zookeeper’s Wife”, was turned into a movie under the same title.