The Painted Bird: It takes a village to carry out the Holocaust
Look no Führer than the backwoods of Eastern Europe for an answer to one of history’s key questions
I hope you all enjoyed your Memorial Day weekend. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to kick off the summer reading season!
This book isn’t exactly a beach read, and while it’s now one of my favorites, I can’t say that I would recommend it exactly, but if you like what you read below, it might just be for you.
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński follows a young boy left in the care of a foster mother in a backwoods village of Eastern Europe at the outbreak of World War II. With his olive skin, dark hair, and black eyes, he looks like a Jewish stray or, as one villager gracefully puts it, a “Blasphemous Gypsy bastard, kin to the Devil." As fate would have it, the boy’s caregiver perishes shortly thereafter, leaving him alone in a country of ignorant, superstitious blond-haired, blue-eyed villagers who would eagerly kill him or hand him over to the Nazis if given the chance.
In a sort of picaresque novel, which reminded me of an ultra-graphic Candide or a twisted Gulliver’s Travels, the boy must live by his wits in a world where human beings are depicted at their very worst, consumed by superstition, prejudice, greed, sexual perversion, bestiality, and sometimes just good old-fashioned sadism, against the backdrop of World War II and the Final Solution. Kosiński hails from Poland, and while the country is never named in The Painted Bird, one imagines this to be the setting. Without place names, the book often feels like a surreal work of speculative fiction, a Narnian otherworld dominated not by enchanted animals who act like humans but by humans who act like animals.
This novel may be tied with American Psycho as the most violent book I’ve read. (There’s even a scene that competes with the notorious Habitrail chapter.) A man is eaten alive by a sea of rats, the village floozie is brutally tortured and beaten to death by jealous wives, a ploughboy’s eyes are gouged out of his eye sockets with a spoon by a jealous husband, an entire village is raped by a crazed horde of Kalmuks, and so much more. It’s like a phantasmagoria of human horror, which in a way World War II was anyway. And … it’s also one of the most beautiful examples of artistic empathy I’ve encountered.
Yes, I loved this book. Loved. This. Book. I haven’t been moved like this by a book in so long. But how could I love something so brutal?
First, a reader-friendly subhead
I don’t mind a little violence, or even gratuitous violence, if it feels essential to a work. The only violence that offends me is the kind that feels contrived by the author and thus offends my taste. In March I wrote a highly objective essay about the River of Aesthetics. The TL;DR version: True art comes from a mystical channel of images that flows from an enchanted land of Truth, whereas “content” (or not-art) originates from marketers (and I say this as a marketer myself).
There’s a genre of torture porn literature that seems to have been inspired by the likes of Dennis Cooper and Bret Easton Ellis. I’ve read little of this kind of work because many of its adherents, relishing their subversiveness, seem to elevate shock value over aesthetics. However, if the River runneth with blood and offal and eyeballs, well, so be it. I’m totally game for being triggered, as long as it’s in the service of Truth.
While he relentlessly forces readers to confront horribly violent scenes, Kosiński isn’t sadistic. As Elie Wiesel said, The Painted Bird was “written with a deep sincerity and sensitivity.” And the author is wonderfully invisible, a medium channeling the pain of a century.
The child, in his tabula rasa innocence, learns the laws of the new world order with a detached matter-of-factness. The result is a rare objective perspective on a period of history that defies dispassionate examination.
The superstitions of the villagers are often accepted at face value by the child. It’s well known that if the boy counts villagers’ teeth, he will subtract one year from their life for each tooth counted. As he walks by, peasants turn their heads away or cover their mouths and make the sign of the cross, if they don’t sick their dogs on him. His second caretaker, a wise folk healer, tells him she suspects he’s a vampire.
From her I learned for the first time that I was possessed by an evil spirit, which crouched in me like a mole in a deep burrow, and of whose presence I was unaware. … This evil spirit which dwelled in me attracted by its very nature other mysterious beings. Phantoms drifted around me.
The uncanny effect is that ghosts and goblins seem real even to the reader at times. Isn’t this a horror story after all?
Given their ignorance, how can anyone be surprised by the villagers’ reactions to the nearby extermination camps?
The peasants listened to these stories thoughtfully. They said the Lord’s punishment had finally reached the Jews. They had served it long ago, ever since they crucified Christ. … They were being justly punished for the shameful crimes of their ancestors, for refusing the only True Faith, for mercilessly killing Christian babies and drinking their blood.
While there’s irony, there’s no winking at the reader. Kosiński doesn’t play for laughs, but you have to laugh sometimes (unless it’s just me?).
When the trains carrying Jews went by in the daytime or at dusk, the peasants lined up on both sides of the track and waved cheerfully to the engineer, the stoker, and the few guards. … Seeing the friendly gestures of the peasants the people in the car must have thought that they themselves were being greeted.
The ultimate example of Kosiński’s use of dramatic irony takes place when the boy finds himself in the hands of a Nazi uber-hunk decked out in his sleek, black Hugo Boss uniform.
Against the background of bland colors he projected an unfadable blackness. In a world of men with harrowed faces, with smashed eyes, bloody, bruised and disfigured limbs, among the fetid, broken human bodies, of which I had already seen so many, he seemed an example of neat perfection that could not be sullied: the smooth, polished skin of his face, the bright golden hair showing under his peaked cap, his pure metal eyes. Every movement of his body seemed propelled by some tremendous internal force. The granite sound of his language was ideally suited to order the death of inferior, forlorn creatures. I was stung by a twinge of envy I had never experienced before, and I admired the glittering death's-head and crossbones that embellished his tall cap. I thought how good it would be to have such a gleaming and hairless skull instead of my Gypsy face which was so feared and disliked by decent people.
The officer surveyed me sharply. I felt like a squashed caterpillar oozing in the dust, a creature that could not harm anyone yet aroused loathing and disgust. In the presence of such a resplendent being, armed in all the symbols of might and majesty, I was genuinely ashamed of my appearance. I had nothing against his killing me.
When an artist can understand even the genocidal impulses of the Nazis, he has understood everything. This passage marks the very height of empathy, the kind that turns hate and fear into understanding while arousing hate and fear from the Twitter mob, who would rather not understand. But that’s okay because, The Painted Bird shows us, we can understand them.
When an artist can understand even the genocidal impulses of the Nazis, he has understood everything.
After spending nearly the last decade studying WWII, I’ve ventured very little beyond the front or outside the concentration camps and big cities. The Painted Bird uniquely gives a backwoods look at the war, a glimpse of human existence before the veneer of civilization was painted over it, a world dominated by ignorance and superstition — the worst of man’s deadly sins and the early cousins of ideology.
The book, however, doesn’t just limit itself to the ignorance of peasants in B.F.E., but it also explores the vulnerability of a more intellectually developed populace to destructive ideology in another delightful display of dramatic irony, when the boy falls into the hands of the Russians:
It was under his leadership, said Gavrila, that the Red Army was defeating the Germans and bringing to the liberated peoples a new way of life which made all equal. There would be no rich and poor, no exploiters and no exploited, no persecution of the dark by the fair, no people doomed to gas chambers.
This man’s name was Stalin. In the portraits and photographs he had a kind face and compassionate eyes. He looked like a loving grandfather or uncle, long unseen, wanting to take you into his arms. Gavrila read and told me many stories about Stalin’s life. At my age young Stalin already had fought for the rights of the underprivileged, resisting the centuries-old exploitation of the helpless poor by the pitiless rich.
As the villagers enact their sins, they project their own evil onto the black-haired child who finally absorbs it, letting the Devil inside. But rather than experiencing repulsion and hatred toward the boy, the reader (one would hope at least) is only heartbroken by the surrender of his spirit to darkness.
In exploring the backwoods view of World War II, The Painted Bird answers one of the key questions of the twentieth century: How could the Holocaust happen? Hitler rose to power by exploiting the existing biases of the German population. And while the Nazi party leadership conducted the planning, it was the people who carried out the Final Solution, while other parts of the world averted their eyes.
Rather than perpetuating hatred, The Painted Bird cautions against this impulse. As the author writes in the preface, “They were ignorant and brutal, though not by choice.”
In this way, Kosiński’s unrelenting violence doesn’t just get a pass, it’s part of the novel’s brilliance. By refusing to let us avert our eyes from the horrors that take place, he forces us to empathize not just with the child but also with the peasants, who have (aside from the occasional natural-born sadist) treated him brutally in their ignorance, and trains our eyes to look at evil head-on.
As always, thank you for subscribing. ❤️ what you’ve read? Don’t forget to share!
XO,
Jesse
There were allegations of plagiarism in his work, the claims that editors more proficient than him in English had written or re-written substantial portions of his books. I'm not really sure how I feel about these allegations, but I enjoyed the novels...whoever wrote them.