The Painted Bird

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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.