The Zookeeper's Wife

     Last night Tom and I went to The Drexel,

...to see "The Zookeeper's Wife," 

 ...a movie based on the true story of Antonina and Jan Żabiński, keepers of the Warsaw Zoo during the German invasion in 1939 who, after their animals were slaughtered and their zoo occupied by the Nazis for the purpose of animal research, devised a plan, brilliant in its simplicity,

for smuggling Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto,

...into the hidden cages and tunnels beneath the Zoo,

  ....where the zookeeper and his wife hid these refugees while they concocted for them fake identities, passports and modes transport - also sometimes absurdly brilliantly concocted -  to safe places.

     As you can imagine of a story  involving the suffering of children,

...and animals,

...caught up in the horrors of The Holocaust,

...this movie will tear greatly at your heart.  Or at least it did mine.  And Tom's.
     After the movie, after we'd dried ours eyes, we found much to talk about.

     We wondered, in amazed admiration, how it is that ordinary people such as the Zookeeper,

...and his wife,

...turn into extraordinary people who find the strength and courage to commit acts of civil disobedience against a harsh regime and risk their lives and the lives of their own children to save others.
     This story also exemplifies that special danger, that terrible fear of a particular kind of violence, that can only be understood by women,

...and, even more unfortunately,   girls.

     But most of all "The Zookeeper's Wife"  left us pondering the depths of meanness and cruelty, or indifference to meanness and cruelty,

  ...to which not only soldiers,

...but great numbers of a whole population can sink, especially when such behavior is given the blessing of a nation's leader.
    Woe to the people of any country who believe, "It can't happen here."