The critically acclaimed cult novel The Painted Bird takes place during the Second World War
The "autobiographical" novel depicts the fate of an abandoned Jewish boy who spent the Second World War in the backward countryside somewhere in eastern Poland or Ukraine. The book was adapted into a film.
Once upon a time, in a large Polish city, there lived a little boy. He was six years old and the year was 1939. His frightened parents sent their child to the countryside to wait out the war in safety with a foster family. The swarthy boy with black hair and dark eyes, suspected of being a Jew or a Romani, is not welcome anywhere. He is a symbol of the enemy of the German Reich, and the superstitious villagers see him as an emissary of evil who attracts bad luck and misfortune. The boy never stays anywhere for long; he is forced to wander from village to village, fighting for his life.
He describes and narrates, simply and directly, everything he sees. Besides being drastically beaten and tortured himself, he also witnesses the many cruelties that people are capable of inflicting upon each other with monstrous ingenuity. The humiliation of human dignity, physical violence, and torture know no bounds.
The little wanderer, like the hero of some terrible fairy tale, scarred in body and soul, eventually survives the war, lives to see liberation, buries God and the devil, becomes attached to the soldiers of the Red Army, and is even reunited with his parents. However, there can be no talk of a happy ending.
