The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
"The Painted Bird" is a novel by Jerzy Kosinski, published in 1965, that tells the harrowing story of a young boy during World War II. Fleeing Nazi persecution, the boy is sent by his parents to a remote village, where he quickly finds himself lost and isolated after the death of his foster mother. As he travels from village to village, he is perceived as either a Jew or a Roma due to his appearance and faces brutal treatment from the peasants he encounters. The narrative unfolds as a series of traumatic experiences, including violence, exploitation, and loss, reflecting the horrors of war and the impact of human cruelty.
Throughout his journey, the boy witnesses unimaginable brutality, from acts of jealousy and murder to sexual violence, all while struggling for survival in an unforgiving world. His experiences contribute to a profound sense of alienation and trauma, which culminates in his mute state at the end of the war. Eventually, he is reunited with his parents but finds it difficult to reconnect, emphasizing the lasting scars left by his experiences. Ultimately, "The Painted Bird" serves as a poignant exploration of the effects of conflict on the human spirit and the complexities of identity and survival in a world marked by violence and division.
On this Page
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
First published: 1965
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Social morality
Time of plot: 1939-1945
Locale: Eastern Europe
Principal characters
The Young Boy , a war refugeeMarta , an old woman with whom the boy first livesOlga , a wise old woman who saves the boy from deathLekh , a peasant who traps and sells birdsGarbos , a sadistic farmer who tries to kill the boyEwka , a young woman who introduces the boy to sexGavrila , a Soviet army political officer who teaches the boy to readMitka , a Russian sniper who teaches the boy self-relianceThe Silent One , a resident of the orphanage where the boy is placed after the war
The Story:
In fear of Nazi reprisals, the parents of a six-year-old boy send the youngster to a distant village. The parents lose touch with the man who had placed the child in the village, and when the boy’s foster mother dies, the young boy, left on his own, begins a series of travels from village to village. Considered to be either a Jew or a Roma (Gypsy) because of his dark hair and olive skin, the boy is treated horribly by the brutal and ignorant peasants he meets in his travels.
The young boy first lives in the hut of Marta, a disabled and superstitious old woman. When she dies of natural causes, the boy accidentally burns down her house. He is saved from villagers, who want to kill him, by Olga, a woman called “the Wise” for her knowledge of folk medicine. After being tossed into the river by the villagers and carried downstream on an inflated catfish bladder, the young boy lives with a miller and his wife, and witnesses a scene of unspeakable brutality. Jealous of a young farmhand’s attraction to his wife, the miller gouges out his eyes with a spoon. The boy runs away and finds refuge with Lekh, who traps and sells birds, and who is in love with Ludmila. When villagers kill Ludmila, Lekh is heartbroken, and the young boy is forced to flee again.
The boy next stays with a carpenter and his wife who are afraid that the boy’s black hair will attract lightning to their farm. Whenever there is as storm, the carpenter drags the boy out to a field and chains him to a heavy harness. When the carpenter threatens to kill him, the boy leads him to an abandoned bunker and pushes him into a sea of rats. Next, the young boy stays with a blacksmith who is helping the partisans; when the blacksmith is killed, the boy is turned over to German soldiers, but the one charged with his execution lets him escape into the woods. The young boy finds a horse with a broken leg and returns it to a farmer, who briefly shelters the boy, but he is forced to escape again when he witnesses a murder at a wedding celebration.
The terror is unrelenting. The boy is now staying with a giant farmer and first witnesses the trains carrying Jews to the death camps. A Jewish girl is found along the tracks. She is kept at the house next door, and the boy witnesses her gang rape and murder. When Germans search the village for more Jews, he flees, but is captured and given to an old priest, who delivers him to Garbos, a sadistic farmer with a huge and vicious dog named Judas. Garbos beats the boy daily and then hangs him from two hooks over Judas, hoping that he will fall and be killed by the dog. Garbos is afraid of killing the boy himself, for religious reasons. Meanwhile, the boy had been taking religious instruction from the old priest, but one day, as an acolyte, he trips and drops the missal during a service. The enraged congregation throws the boy into a large manure pit. At this point, the boy loses his voice.
The boy escapes again and lives with another cruel farmer named Makar and his family. The daughter, Ewka, initiates the boy into sex—what he thought was love. He witnesses Makar forcing the girl into sexual acts with her brother and a goat, and loses his love for Ewka. He escapes on skates he had made, but a gang of boys captures him and throws him into a hole in the frozen river. He is saved by a woman named Labina, but she dies. The eastern front of the war is pushing closer, and the boy witnesses another gruesome scene. A band of Kalmuks—mostly Soviet deserters aligned with the Germans—takes over a village and wantonly rapes and slaughters its inhabitants. The boy’s first moment of stability comes when the advancing Soviet army captures and executes the Kalmuks and adopts the boy. He becomes a kind of mascot to Gavrila, the political officer of the regiment, and Mitka, a crack sniper. Gavrila teaches the boy to read and explains socialism to him, while Mitka teaches the boy revenge. When several Soviet soldiers are killed by drunken villagers, Mitka enacts his own vengeance with his high-powered rifle.
World War II ends, and the boy reluctantly leaves his Russian friends to be placed in an orphanage in the city from which he was first exiled. Six years pass; the boy is now twelve years old. The city has been damaged in the war, but not more severely than the children in the orphanages. The narrator befriends another orphan named the Silent One, and together they wander the city. When the Silent One sees the boy humiliated by a peasant merchant, he causes a terrible train wreck in a failed attempt to kill the man.
The boy is finally located by his parents, but he is not ready for the reconciliation, and he is still unable to speak. He is taken to the mountains for his health, and he learns to ski. He wakes up in a hospital room after a skiing accident, and picks up the phone and begins to speak. His speech convinces him that he is alive, and able to communicate.
Bibliography
Everman, Welch D. Jerzy Kosinski: The Literature of Violation. San Bernardino, Calif.: Borgo Press, 1991. Everman maintains that in The Painted Bird, Kosinski intends to show “that the boy’s experience is not unique; what happened to him also happened to many others and could happen again to anyone.”
Gladsky, Thomas. “Jerzy Kosinski: A Polish Immigrant.” In Living in Translation: Polish Writers in America, edited by Halina Stephan. Atlanta: Rodopi, 2003. Focuses on Kosinski’s acculturation to American culture and how his writing is influenced by having lived in two very different countries—the democratic United States and a totalitarian Poland.
Kosinski, Jerzy. Notes of the Author on “The Painted Bird.” 3d ed. New York: Scientia-Factum, 1967. In this pamphlet, Kosinski explains the novel as made up of “fairy tales experienced by the child, rather than told to” the child.
Lavers, Norman. Jerzy Kosinski. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Lavers identifies the themes of freedom, revenge, and education, identifying The Painted Bird as a picaresque bildungsroman.
Lazar, Mary. Through Kosinski’s Lenses: Identity, Sex, and Violence. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2007. Lazar interviewed Kosinski scholars and friends to write this examination of the themes of identity, sex, and violence in Kosinski’s work. The book includes excerpts from those interviews, as well as a bibliography and an index.
Lilly, Paul R. Words in Search of Victims: The Achievement of Jerzy Kosinski. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1988. Lilly maintains that Kosinski’s fiction “is about the art of writing fiction” and The Painted Bird is “primarily a book about language testing.”
Lupack, Barbara Tepa, ed. Critical Essays on Jerzy Kosinski. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. Collection of reviews of Kosinski’s novels, including Elie Wiesel and Robert Coles’s reviews of The Painted Bird, as well as essays analyzing this novel and Kosinski’s other works.
Sherwin, Byron L. Jerzy Kosinski: Literary Alarmclock. Chicago: Cabala Press, 1981. Sherwin argues that “Kosinski prefers to convey the horror of the Holocaust by shocking us into feeling the terror of a single individual rather than by asking us to try abstractly to comprehend the pain, death and suffering of . . . millions.”
Vice, Sue. “Autobiographical Fiction: Jerzy Kosinski The Painted Bird.” In Holocaust Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2000. Vice examines The Painted Bird and other Holocaust novels that were both praised and deplored by critics and describes how these controversial receptions affected the ethics and practice of Holocaust literature.