Caged By Its Noble Intentions: 'The Zookeeper's Wife'
This historical drama, based on the story of a Warsaw couple who helped hundreds of Jews flee Nazi-occupied Poland, is more interested in their heroism than their humanity.
You'd think the absolute worst thing that a WWII movie could do is compare its huddled masses of Jews to animals. But The Zookeeper's Wife turns out to have a pretty good justification for equating the two.
It tells the story of the Zabinski family, who ran the Warsaw Zoo during the war and who secretly helped relocate hundreds of Jews fleeing German-occupied Poland. The Zabinskis used their abandoned cages in storage — which had held animals, until the Nazis either relocated the beasts to German zoos or shot them — as waystations for the refugees, who'd just escaped a much harsher caged
