The Painted Bird is a 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosiński that describes World War II as seen by a boy, considered a "Gypsy or Jewish stray," wandering about small villages scattered around an unspecified country in Central or Eastern Europe (usually assumed to be Poland).
The story was originally described by Kosiński as autobiographical, but upon its publication by Houghton Mifflin he announced that it was a purely fictional account, although it was generally assumed that it was based on the author's experiences during World War II. The depicted events are now widely known to be fictional, having been the subject of a 1993 journalistic exposé (The Ugly Black Bird). The book was for many years regarded as an essential part of the literary Holocaust canon; since proven to be a work of fiction, it has lost much of its popularity.
The book describes the wandering boy's encounters with peasants engaged in all forms of sexual and social deviance such as incest, bestiality, and rape, and in other forms of extreme violence and lust. The book's title was drawn from an incident in the story. The boy, while in the company of a professional bird catcher, observes how the man took one of his captured birds and painted it several colors. Then he released the bird to fly in search of a flock of its kin, but when the painted bird came upon the flock, they saw it as an intruder and viciously attacked the bird until it fell from the sky.
Plot summary
In 1939, at the beginning of World War II, a six-year-old boy living in the largest city of an Eastern European country invaded by Nazi Germany is sent by his parents to hide in the countryside because of their past anti-Nazi activities. However, they lose contact with him because of the chaos of the war and he is left stranded. As a result of his black hair and olive skin he is constantly accused of being either a Jew or a Gypsy, although Kosiński's narrator denies this. He also has trouble understanding the local languages and dialects of the peasants he encounters. His first caretaker is a superstitious and unhygienic old woman named Marta, who refuses to allow him to look into her eyes because she is worried his "Gypsy eye" will curse her. Marta eventually becomes ill and dies, and the boy accidentally burns down her hut after spilling kerosene on it. Left to fend for himself, he wanders alone from village to village seeking shelter and food from adults in exchange for work. The boy endures various kinds of violence and cruelty, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for.
He is saved from an angry mob of villagers by Olga, an elderly folk healer, who takes him under her wing. Although she openly distrusts the boy because of his appearance, she gains his admiration for her cures. After he becomes infected with a local epidemic, she buries him up to his head in dirt and he is attacked by birds but recovers. However, he is caught by the villagers again and thrown onto a large catfish's air bladder, which floats him down the river away from the village.
He is then taken in by a miller and his wife, who frequently exposes herself to a young plowboy. After the miller beats his wife for her alleged infidelity one night, he invites the plowboy over for dinner and gouges out his eyes. The boy runs away again and seeks shelter with Lekh, a professional bird catcher in love with Stupid Ludmila, a promiscuous and scantily-clad woman who lives in the woods alone with a large dog after suffering a mental breakdown from a gang rape. After Stupid Ludmila does not return to Lekh for several days, he becomes enraged and starts killing random birds by painting them different colors and setting them loose to be killed by their own flocks. After Lekh leaves to search for her, Stupid Ludmila returns and attempts to molest the boy. They are found by the villagers and she is raped by all of the local men and beaten to death by their jealous wives. The boy leaves as Lekh inconsolably cradles her body.
From here, he journeys to another village where a local carpenter takes care of him, but during a storm he becomes worried that the boy's black hair will attract lightning and chains him to a cart in the field. The boy escapes and flees into a forest by stowing away on a train, finding an abandoned pillbox infested with rabid rats. However, the boy accidentally returns to the old village, where the carpenter, blaming him after his barn was hit by lightning and burnt down, captures him and prepares to drown him before the boy pleads to spare his life in exchange for showing him the pillbox, which he falsely claims is filled with military supplies. When they reach the pillbox, the boy accidentally pushes the carpenter into the pillbox and he is eaten alive by the rats.
The boy next stays with a kindly and well-respected blacksmith in a village with constant skirmishes and reprisals by rival bands of partisans and the Wehrmacht. The smith and his family are beaten and killed by nationalist partisans, who decide to turn him over to a German outpost as a goodwill gesture. He is taken to the woods by an old German soldier, who sets him free and pretends to execute him.
He escapes and travels to another village next to a German military railway, where the villagers discover Jews and Gypsies being deported to a nearby concentration camp. The villagers approve of this turn of events, seeing it as retribution for the crucifixion of Jesus. One day, a young widower named Rainbow captures an injured Jewish girl who managed to escape from the train. The villagers resolve to hand her over to the Germans the next day. As the boy watches through a knothole that night, Rainbow rapes the girl and they become stuck together, with a local healer killing the girl.
After German patrols intensify, the boy is forced to leave the village to avoid giving away the location of a Jew in hiding. He is captured by German soldiers and taken to a larger town where he is harassed by a mob before an SS officer hands him over to a Catholic parish priest. The priest treats the boy kindly, but the farmer Garbos and his dog Judas constantly beat and abuse him. After hearing the priest explain prayer and indulgences, the boy asks him to teach him how to pray so that he can accrue enough indulgences to save himself. After the priest dies, Garbos starts torturing the boy by hanging him from the ceiling above Judas, and the boy begins praying more. On the Feast of Corpus Christi, the priest makes him an altar boy, but he nervously botches the Mass and knocks over a missal. The angered congregation accuses him of being a vampire and attempt to drown him in a cesspit. Although he survives, he becomes mute.
In the forest he is caught by the local boys and given to the farmer Makar, whose family was ostracized by the village. Makar's 19-year-old daughter Ewka begins furtively having sex with the boy, which he enjoys. After the boy is unable to kill a rabbit, Makar beats and temporarily paralyzes him. A few weeks later, the boy finds Makar, Ewka, and her older brother Anton having sex with each other and a goat in the field. Deciding that both they and the Germans became invincible by allying with demons, the boy flees into the forest again. While skating on a marsh, the boy is accosted by several young villagers who try to drown him after he accidentally wounds several of them with his skates. He is rescued by a woman named Labina, who later dies of a heart attack.
In 1944, the tide of the war turns as the Wehrmacht begins losing ground to the Red Army, and the locals begin arguing over the merits of the impending Soviet occupation. The boy wonders why God would allow the Soviets to win the war if they intended to abolish religion and private property. After the Germans withdraw from a village, Kalmyk deserters in their service conduct a brutal raid before the arriving Soviets capture and execute them. The boy is treated in a field hospital and allowed to stay with the soldiers, where he is taught to read and indoctrinated into Stalinism and atheism by the political commissar Gavrila. The boy begins to hope to join the Communist Party and becomes preoccupied with others' opinion of him. After several soldiers are killed by local peasants with axes, the boy accompanies the respected crack sniper Mitka the Cuckoo as he takes revenge by shooting several of the peasants.
Afterwards the boy is taken to an orphanage in his old home city, where he denounces the principal and two nurses to the Soviets after they punish him for refusing to remove his military uniform. When the school officials refuse to discipline him further, he begins refusing to learn his own native language and getting in fights with the other children. He befriends another mute named the Silent One, and they begin sneaking out into the city and getting into mischief. After the boys discover how to operate a railway switch and later get beaten by a dairy vendor, the Silent One uses the switch to derail a train in an unsuccessful murder attempt against the vendor. Eventually, at age 12, the boy is finally reunited with his parents after they identify him via a birthmark. However, the boy frequently misbehaves, breaking the arm of his four-year-old brother. After the war ends, he begins sneaking out at night to hang out with criminals and political dissidents before he is caught by the Militia. When the boy grows sickly, the family moves westward into the mountains on a doctor's advice and the boy is sent to live with a ski instructor. After injuring himself skiing in a blizzard, the boy receives a telephone call to his hospital room and upon hearing the caller suddenly is able to speak again for the first time in years.
Literary significance and criticism
Early reception The initial reception of the book was generally positive. In his 1965 editorial review Elie Wiesel wrote that the book was "one of the best... Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity," a review written in The New York Times Book Review and quoted by the book's publisher. Richard Kluger, reviewing it for Harper's Magazine, wrote: "Extraordinary... literally staggering... one of the most powerful books I have ever read." And Jonathan Yardley, reviewing it for The Miami Herald, wrote: "Of all the remarkable fiction that emerged from World War II, nothing stands higher than Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird. A magnificent work of art, and a celebration of the individual will. No one who reads it will forget it; no one who reads it will be unmoved by it. The Painted Bird enriches our literature and our lives". Time magazine included the novel in its "Time 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005",Time Inc., 2005, "Critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present" by Lev Grossman accentuating the atrocities witnessed by the protagonist.
In 2011, American critic Ruth Franklin observed that the book, previously a prominent fixture in Holocaust studies, particularly in the context of literature studies, has seen a significant decline within curricula of American high school and colleges, which she attributed to concerns surrounding the work's authenticity.
Anti-Polish sentiment and reception in Poland The book's reception in Poland was far from uniform. Initially it was subject to much criticism from both the communist and émigré press due to its perceived anti-Polish sentiment, although there have been dissenting views. Since then the views about the book in Poland remain divided and the book is most often described as controversial. In the opinion of some critics, the book is a masterpiece and a parable of human fate, while in the opinion of others, it is an anti-Polish hoax.