The Painted Bird

How does one come to terms with a book that depicts all of the evil of mankind through the eyes of a child?

In The Painted Bird a Jewish boy is sent out of harm's way to a foster home prior to Nazis invading his Eastern European country. His new foster mother dies and thereafter he lives by his wits and the occasional kindness of others. As he roams from village to village he experiences cruel mistreatment and witnesses others being cruelly treated. The amount of violence, cruelty, sexual depravity and misconduct is unbelievable ... and in fact, the tale is not to be literally believed as an autobiography would be. It is the bringing together of tales and metaphors to make sense of what happened to Jews and Gypsies in WWII.

The tale covers five years. Each chapter brings a new perversity. Some of the situations seem more native to the concentration camps than to a villages, and I wonder if he took the tales he heard and simply worked them to fit his book which never enters a camp. A small gripe - sexual scenes are sometimes over the top - and indeed author, Kosinski claimed to have had an obsession with sex.

Seeing all of this through the eyes of a child is quite powerful (just as it was in Room). The reader comes away with a certain understanding of how evil is perpetuated as well as how easy it is to indoctrinate a youth into a philosophy or way of life like communism (or Nazism) - and how hard it is to take that from him later.


The Painted Bird was written by Jerzy Kosinski although the authorship is controversial. It may have been written in Polish and then translated and polished extensively by an American editor. This piece of information makes one stop and think a little, but in the end it doesn't matter -- The Painted Bird is a great book.