The Zookeeper’s Wife

1 PM LOS ANGELES • 4 PM NEW YORK

Jan and Antonina Zabinski were the managers of the Warsaw Zoo.  There, thanks to their efforts, 300 Jewish men, women, and children were hidden in animal cages and in their home from 1939 to 1945. This remarkable couple was named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. On the panel will be Diane Ackerman, author of the bestselling book The Zookeeper’s Wife, filmmaker Slawomir Grunberg and Stefania Sitbon, a living witness to this story.

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To order a signed and inscribed copy of the New York Times best-selling book, scroll down to the bottom of this page.

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THE SCHEDULE

⇒ November 8-11, watch the short film Hiding Like Animals on your home device. A link will be provided to all who register.

⇒ Sunday, November 10 at 4:00 p.m. US Eastern Time, tune into the program with our distinguished panel of speakers. A link will be provided to all who register.

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MEET THE SPEAKERS

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Diane Ackerman is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Zookeeper’s Wife, that was made into a feature film. Several of her books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Circle Critics Award finalists. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, received an honorary doctorate from Kenyon College, and was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. She holds MFA and PhD degrees from Cornell University, and has taught at Columbia and Cornell. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, American Scholar, Smithsonian, National Geographic and many other journals. She hosted a five-hour PBS television series inspired by her book, A Natural History of the Senses.

Slawomir Grunberg, director of Hiding Like Animals, is an Emmy-Award winning documentary filmmaker and a graduate of the Polish Film School in Lodz. His films include: Everything is in Your Hands, Still Life in Łódź, Karski & The Lords of Humanity, Shimon’s Returns, Castaways, and many more. His film School Prayer: A Community At War, screened on PBS, received an Emmy Award and the Jan Karski Award for moral courage. Grunberg is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and New York Foundation for the Arts and Soros Justice Media Fellowships. His credits as director of photography include: Legacy (Academy Award nomination for best documentary feature) and Sister Rose’s Passion, which won best short doc at the Tribeca Film Festival and received an Academy Award nomination for best documentary short.

Stefania Sitbon was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1939 and grew up in the Warsaw Ghetto. In 1942, her family was smuggled into the Warsaw Zoo by Jan and Antonina Zabinski. From there Stefania and her family were separated and sent to convents and surrounding villages. They were liberated in 1945 and reunited in Austria and Poland. In 1957 they emigrated to Israel, Stefania was married. and she later moved to Canada. In 2014 she went back to the Warsaw Zoo for an emotional meeting with Teresa, the Zabinskis’ daughter. Stefania and her brother Moshe are the only Warsaw Zoo survivors known to be alive today. She has three children and seven grandchildren.

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Registration for this program is closed.

Signed and inscribed books available!

For more information, click here.