The director of Warsaw zoo and his wife always carried cyanide during World War II. Danger was ever-present but they were ready to take their secret to the grave. The couple hid nearly 300 Jews and resistance fighters on zoo grounds during most of the war, under the noses of the German Nazis occupying Poland. It sounds like a Hollywood movie, and now it is. But `The Zookeeper`s Wife`, which opens in Polish cinemas this week before rolling out internationally, is based on actual events. Inside the zookeeper`s villa, whose windowless cellar had a secret tunnel leading to the garden, Jan Zabinski and his wife Antonina gave refuge to the mostly Jews smuggled out of the city`s ghetto. `I remember squatting under this concrete shelf in the basement and keeping my hand over my sister`s mouth to muffle her cries because she was constantly crying, day and night,` said Moshe Tirosh, aged five at the time. `When someone slammed the door upstairs, fear would pass through me, lest they find us,`
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