forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, just out of reach of a vicious dog. In the culminating incident of the book, the boy
drops a missal while he's helping serve Mass and is flung by the angry parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging from the pit,
he realizes that he has lost the power of speech. ...
"Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity, this poignant account transcends confession," Elie Wiesel wrote in the Times Book
Review. At the time of Kosinski's suicide, in 1991, Wiesel said, "I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography
I tore up my review and wrote one a thousand times better."
Wiesel's review sanctified the work as a valid testament of the Holocaust, more horrible, more revealing - in a sense, truer
than the literature that came out of the camps. Other writers and critics agreed. Harry Overstreet wrote that "The Painted Bird"
would "stand by the side of Anne Frank's unforgettable 'Diary'" as "a powerfully poignant human document," while Peter Prescott,
also comparing it to Anne Frank's "Diary," called the book "a testament not only to the atrocities of the war, but to the failings of
human nature." The novelist James Leo Herlihy saluted it as "brilliant testimony to mankind's survival power."
"Account," "confession," "testament," "document," "testimony": these were the key words in the book's critical reception. What
made "The Painted Bird" such an important book was its overpowering authenticity. Perhaps it wasn't exactly a diary
six-year-olds don't keep diaries - but it was the next best thing. And in one respect it was better: Kosinski was Anne Frank as a
survivor, walking among us.
"The Painted Bird" was translated into almost every major language and many obscure ones. It was a best-seller in Germany
and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France. It became the cornerstone or reading lists in university courses on the
Holocaust, where it was often treated as a historical document, and, as a result, it has been for a generation the source of what
many people "know" about Poland under the German occupation. At the height of Kosinski's reputation, there were those who
said that somewhere down the road Kosinski was a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize.
(Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, pp. 46-47)
But turned out to be fabricated out of whole cloth:
According to Joanna Siedlecka ..., Kosinski's wrenching accounts of his wartime experiences were fabricated from whole cloth.
... Siedlecka contends that Kosinski spent the war with his family his mother, father, and later, an adopted brother - and that
they lived in relative security and comfort.
The Kosinskis survived, she suggests, in part because Jerzy Kosinski's father, whose original name was Moses Lewinkopf, saw
bad times coming and acquired false papers in the common Gentile name of Kosinski; in part because they had money ... and
were able to pay for protection with cash and jewelry; and in part because a network of Polish Catholics, at great risk to
themselves, helped hide them.
Siedlecka portrays the elder Kosinski not just as a wily survivor but as a man without scruples. She maintains that he may have
collaborated with the Germans during the war and very likely did collaborate with the N.K.V.D., after the liberation of Dabrowa by
the Red Army, in sending to Siberia for minor infractions, such as hoarding, some of the very peasants who saved his family. Her
real scorn, however, is reserved for the son, who turned his back on the family's saviors and vilified them, along with the entire
Polish nation, in the eyes of the world. Indeed, the heart of Siedlecka's revelations is her depiction of the young Jerzy Kosinski
spending the war years eating sausages and drinking cocoa - goods unavailable to the neighbors' children - in the safety of his
house and yard....
(Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, p. 48)
Right from the start, Kosinski wrote under duress - an impecunious young man,
particularly situated to be of use to clandestine forces, he could leapfrog to
advancement only by cooperating with these forces. Thus, his first book, the
Future is Ours, Comrade (1960), was published under the pseudonym Joseph
Novak, and appears to have been sponsored by the CIA:
Czartoryski recommends Kosinski to the CIA.
Between Kosinski's penchant for telling more than the truth and the CIA's adamant insistence on telling as little as possible, the
specific financial arrangements concerning the "book on Russia" may never be made public. Indeed, full documentation probably
does not exist. A number of facts, however, argue strongly that there was CIA/USIA intermediation on behalf of the book, with or
without Kosinski's full knowledge and understanding. One major piece of evidence is the name of the original titleholder on the
Doubleday contract: Anthony B. Czartoryski. A further clue was the address to which communications for "Czartoryski" were to be
delivered: the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America at 145 East Fifty-third Street.