The True Story of the Painted Bird
Joanna Siedlecka's book reportage was first published in 1993, and has had a profound influence on the reception of one of the most important works of Holocaust literature - Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird.
Alongside Kosiński's biography by James Sloan, Blackbird was a key milestone on the road to reassessing Jerzy Kosiński's work. So far, both the author and literary critics have presented The Painted Bird as an autobiographical story based on authentic experiences during the war. Siedlecka's book is a reportage-detective journey in the footsteps of Jerzy Kosiński. The author conducted this research in the early 1990s, following an incident that took place during Kosiński's first trip to Poland after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when he was confronted with one of his childhood friends from the war.
It contains the testimonies of a number of eyewitnesses to the wartime existence of Kosinski and his family. These stories form a radically different picture, in which the inhabitants of the countryside largely play the role of saviours rather than tormentors of the writer's family. Siedlecki's book provides a unique insight into everyday life in the Polish countryside during the German occupation, as well as the lives of Jewish refugees from the Nazis.
At the same time, it is also a text that cyclically returns to the question of the relationship between reality and literary fiction, mystification and manipulation. Did Kosinski have the right to pass off a fictional story as his own? What carries more weight: a literary work with its timeless insight into human nature, or the authentic injustice of the people whom the author has rather mercilessly disfigured in his supposedly autobiographical text?
