Černé ptáče - Pravdivý příběh Nabarveného ptáčete – Siedlecka Joanna (2019)

This Czech-language book report by Joanna Siedlecka, first published in 1993, significantly influenced the reception of one of the most important works of Holocaust literature, Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird. Alongside James Sloan’s biography of Kosiński, it became a key milestone in the reassessment of his work. Until then, both the author and literary critics had presented The Painted Bird as an autobiographical story based on authentic wartime experiences. Siedlecka’s book follows the trail of Kosiński in a reportorial investigation with elements of detective work, undertaken in the early 1990s after an incident during Kosiński’s first visit to Poland following the fall of the Iron Curtain, when he was confronted by one of his childhood friends from the war years. It includes testimonies from numerous eyewitnesses to the wartime lives of Kosiński and his family. Together, these accounts create a radically different picture, in which rural inhabitants largely appear as rescuers rather than persecutors of the writer’s family. The book offers a unique insight into everyday life in the Polish countryside during the German occupation and into the lives of Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis. It also repeatedly returns to the relationship between reality and literary fiction, deception and manipulation, asking whether Kosiński had the right to present a fictional story as his own and whether a literary work’s timeless insight into human nature outweighs the authentic injury suffered by people whom the author distorted in his supposedly autobiographical text.