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,"[1] 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 [by whom?]

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

"[3] 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.

He had to protect his myth.”[8] Polish author and critic Stanisław Lem wrote a review of "The Painted Bird", which he titled "The Career of a Counterfeit".

Lem further adds about Kosiński: "Since the realism of German genocidal practices does not suit the sexual sadist very well, as it is a kind of industrialized slaughterhouse, and not an orgiastic panopticum, there comes to the rescue of authenticity the pseudologia pornographica".

He also wrote that "This book, as a bestseller, received positive opinions from famous critics; what was abominable in it was interpreted as "delirium" and "phantasmagoria" of its child protagonist; the copulatory marathon of Polish peasants was seen as a dark reveal of the primitive wild "Balkan" community; even some of our compatriots who realized that it was a lampoon [...] were ready to see a certain greatness in The Painted Bird, due to its boundless boldness and violence.

[12] Finkelstein wrote in The Holocaust Industry (2003) that Kosiński's book "depicts the Polish peasants he lived with as virulently anti-Semitic" even though they were fully aware of his Jewishness and "the dire consequences they themselves faced if caught.

[14] In 2022 the Polish critic and University of Rzeszów professor Elżbieta Rokosz [pl] in her chapter on controversies about Kosiński's book noted that "the novel was read as strongly anti-Polish".

Kosiński famously liked to pretend he was someone he wasn't (as do many of the characters in his books), he occasionally published under a pseudonym, and, apparently, he plagiarized and forged left and right.

],[21] wrote a 6,000-word feature article in The New York Times defending Kosiński, which appeared on the front page of the "Arts and Leisure" section in November 1982.

[23] The Painted Bird was published and marketed as a fictional work although it was generally assumed that it was based on the author's experiences during World War II.

D. G. Myers, Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, reviewing a biography of Kosiński noted that initially, the author had passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own life during the Holocaust: "Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry.

"[24] Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, to whom Kosiński confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences.

[25][26] Kosiński nonetheless continued to assert that characterizing the novel as autobiographical "may be convenient for classification but is not easily justified" (the same language he used in his author's note and his pre-publication correspondence with de Santillana) in later interviews during his life.

[27] The Village Voice article presented a different picture of Kosiński's life during the Holocaust[failed verification] – a view which was later supported by Joanna Siedlecka, a Polish biographer, in her 1993 exposé The Ugly Black Bird[28] and Sloan.

[29] Reviewing James Park Sloan's biography of Kosiński for The New York Times Book Review, Louis Begley wrote: "Perhaps the most surprising element of this aspect of Kosiński's mystifications is that he obtained from his mother, who was still alive in Poland – the father had died by the time The Painted Bird was published – a letter corroborating the claim that he had been separated from his family during the war.

The problem was perhaps that he was a successful, worldly author who played polo, moved in fashionable circles and even appeared as an actor in Warren Beatty's Reds.

Myers responded to Blacker's assertions that much of Kosinski's behaviour was the result of "compensating for 'the hollowness at the core of his being'" in his review of Jerzy Kosiński: A Biography by James Park Sloan: This theory explains much: the reckless driving, the abuse of small dogs, the thirst for fame, the fabrication of personal experience, the secretiveness about how he wrote, the denial of his Jewish identity.

[20]Finkelstein wrote: "Long after Kosiński was exposed as a consummate literary hoaxer, Wiesel continued to heap encomiums on his 'remarkable body of work.

[34] The novel inspired the band Siouxsie and the Banshees who wrote a song called "Painted Bird" in 1982, on their album A Kiss in the Dreamhouse.