The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski [0]
BOOKS BY JERZY KOSINSKI
NOVELS
The Painted Bird
Steps
Being There
The Devil Tree
Cockpit
Blind Date
Passion Play
Pinball
The Hermit of 69th Street
ESSAYS
Passing By
Notes of the Author
The Art of the Self
NONFICTION
(Under the pen name Joseph Novak)
The Future Is Ours, Comrade
No Third Path
THE PAINTED BIRD
JERZY KOSINSKI
SECOND EDITION
with an introduction
by the author
To the memory of my wife Mary Hayward Weir
without whom even the past would
lose its meaning
Copyright © 1965, 1976 by Jerzy N. Kosinski
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First published in the United States of America in 1976 by Houghton Mifflin Company
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The painted bird/Jerzy Kosinski; with an introduction by the author.—2nd ed.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9575-3
1. Poland—History—Occupation, 1939-1945—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939-1945—Europe, Eastern—Fiction. 3. Abandoned children—Europe, Eastern—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3561.O8P3 1995 813’.54—dc20 95-19520
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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New York, NY 10003
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and only God,
omnipotent indeed,
knew they were mammals
of a different breed.
MAYAKOVSKY
This new edition of The Painted Bird incorporates some
material that did not appear in the first edition.
AFTERWARD
In the spring of 1963, I visited Switzerland with my American-born wife, Mary. We had vacationed there before, but were now in the country for a different purpose: my wife had been battling a supposedly incurable illness for months and had come to Switzerland to consult yet another group of specialists. Since we expected to remain for some time, we had taken a suite in a palatial hotel that dominated the lake-front of a fashionable old resort.
Among the permanent residents at the hotel was a clique of wealthy Western Europeans who had come to the town just before the outbreak of World War II. They had all abandoned their homelands before the slaughter actually began and they never had to fight for their lives. Once ensconced in their Swiss haven, self-preservation for them meant no more than living from day to day. Most of them were in their seventies and eighties, aimless pensioners obsessively talking about getting old, growing steadily less able or willing to leave the hotel grounds. They spent their time in the lounges and restaurants or strolling through the private park. I often followed them, pausing when they did before portraits of statesmen who had visited the hotel between the wars; I read with them the somber plaques commemorating various international peace conferences that had been held in the hotel’s convention halls after World War I.
Occasionally I would chat with a few of these voluntary exiles, but whenever I alluded to the war years in Central or Eastern Europe, they never failed to remind me that, because they had come to Switzerland before the violence began, they knew the war only vaguely, through radio and newspaper reports. Referring to one country in which most of the extermination camps had been located, I pointed out that between 1939 and