She was able to see the film completed before dying earlier this year. Teresa Zabinska-Zawadzki, who was born in 1944, offers commentary and insight into her parents' lives and motives for hiding Jews and others fleeing the Nazi death machine. (His younger sister, also living, was too young to remember and did not participate in the film.)
One of them, Moshe Tirosh, adds a chilling dimension of his experience as a 5-year-old child who said their job at the zoo was to be scared - morning and night - and to be quiet. It was a timely decision, for by the time he began filming, only two survivors of those who found refuge with Antonia and Jan were still living. As Polish director Lukasz Czajka tells us in the short documentary on the making of "Of Animals & Men" that is shown at the end, he read Antonia Zabinska's memoir and decided that a film telling her story and that of the Warsaw Zoo needed to be made. Now, for a one-night-only Fathom event on June 22, " Of Animals and Men," a new documentary, will be released at select theaters across the United States. "The Zookeeper's Wife" was a fictionalized feature film based on the 2007 nonfiction book by Diane Ackerman. Antonina and Jan, the Warzaw Zoo's director, saved about 300 Jews during World War II.
In 2017 the moviegoing world was introduced to the inspiring story of Antonina Zabinska and Jan Zabinski, her husband.