It is house in which zoo director, Jan Żabiński lived with his family from 1931. During the war Germans closed the zoo and organized a pig farm there. Jan Żabiński and his wife Antonina risking their own and their children’s lives, decided to provide shelter for those who were being persecuted solely for being Jewish. Some of them extended their stay in the villa for weeks or even months. Also participants of the resistance (Polish Home Army) were hiding in the zoo grounds. After the war Antonina Żabińska published her memoirs but it passed, also in Poland, almost unnoticed. Only Diane Ackerman's book „The Zookeeper's Wife” and a movie of the same name popularized this story in the world.
