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statements on Ukrainians or Palestinians, I find Dershowitz's thinking fully as primitive and as childishly self-serving and as duplicitous as that
of the other nine.
The incongruity between low desert and high reward is particularly great in the case of Jerzy Kosinski; the evidence below will demonstrate
that in addition to lacking academic capacity, and in addition to lacking literary skills, every area of his life was crippled by immaturity,
irresponsibility, deception, and perversion.
What picture emerges?
Is there any way of tying all of the above generalizations into a single coherent picture? Why should it be the case that the leading
slanderers of Ukrainians are all Jewish? How can it be that Jewish leaders are so prone to lying, and have such palpable intellectual
shortcomings, and sometimes even remarkable character defects? How does it come to pass that they are permitted to incite hatred against
Ukrainians with impunity? The answers to these questions can be found throughout the Ukrainian Archive.
An individual Pole is persecuted by Simon Wiesenthal
Jerzy Kosinski calumniated the Polish people collectively. Simon Wiesenthal persecuted a single Pole - Frank Walus - individually.
Time For the Quotes
And now for the quotations from Sloan's article:
Jerzy Kosinski's "Painted Bird" was celebrated for its "overpowering
authenticity":
"Jerzy was a fantastic liar," said Agnieszka Osiecka, Poland's leading pop lyricist and a familiar figure in Polish intellectual
circles.... If you told Jerzy you had a Romanian grandmother, he would come back that he had fifteen cousins all more Romanian
than your grandmother ... and they played in a Gypsy band!"
Osiecka was responding to a recent expose by the Polish journalist Joanna Siedlecka, in which she argued that Jerzy Kosinski,
Poland's best-known Holocaust survivor, had profoundly falsified his wartime experiences. According to Siedlecka, Kosinski
spent the war years in relatively gentle, if hardly idyllic, circumstances and was never significantly mistreated. She thus
contradicts the sanctioned version of his life under the German occupation, which has generally been assumed to be only thinly
disguised in his classic first novel, "The Painted Bird," published in this country by Houghton Mifflin in 1965. ...
In stark, uninflected prose, "The Painted Bird" describes the disasters that befall a six-year-old boy who is separated from his
parents and wanders through the primitive Polish-Soviet borderlands during the war. The peasants whom the boy encounters
demonstrate an extraordinary predilection for incest, sodomy, and meaningless violence. A miller plucks out the eyeballs of his
wife's would-be lover. A gang of toughs pushes the boy, a presumed Gypsy or Jew, below the ice of a frozen pond. A farmer
forces him to hang by his hands from a rafter, just out of reach of a vicious dog. In the culminating incident of the book, the boy
drops a missal while he's helping serve Mass and is flung by the angry parishioners into a pit of manure. Emerging from the pit,
he realizes that he has lost the power of speech. ...
"Written with deep sincerity and sensitivity, this poignant account transcends confession," Elie Wiesel wrote in the Times Book
Review. At the time of Kosinski's suicide, in 1991, Wiesel said, "I thought it was fiction, and when he told me it was autobiography
I tore up my review and wrote one a thousand times better."
Wiesel's review sanctified the work as a valid testament of the Holocaust, more horrible, more revealing - in a sense, truer
than the literature that came out of the camps. Other writers and critics agreed. Harry Overstreet wrote that "The Painted Bird"
would "stand by the side of Anne Frank's unforgettable 'Diary'" as "a powerfully poignant human document," while Peter Prescott,
also comparing it to Anne Frank's "Diary," called the book "a testament not only to the atrocities of the war, but to the failings of
human nature." The novelist James Leo Herlihy saluted it as "brilliant testimony to mankind's survival power."
"Account," "confession," "testament," "document," "testimony": these were the key words in the book's critical reception. What
made "The Painted Bird" such an important book was its overpowering authenticity. Perhaps it wasn't exactly a diary
six-year-olds don't keep diaries - but it was the next best thing. And in one respect it was better: Kosinski was Anne Frank as a
survivor, walking among us.
"The Painted Bird" was translated into almost every major language and many obscure ones. It was a best-seller in Germany
and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger in France. It became the cornerstone or reading lists in university courses on the
Holocaust, where it was often treated as a historical document, and, as a result, it has been for a generation the source of what
many people "know" about Poland under the German occupation. At the height of Kosinski's reputation, there were those who
said that somewhere down the road Kosinski was a likely candidate for the Nobel Prize.
(Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, pp. 46-47)
But turned out to be fabricated out of whole cloth:
According to Joanna Siedlecka ..., Kosinski's wrenching accounts of his wartime experiences were fabricated from whole cloth.
... Siedlecka contends that Kosinski spent the war with his family his mother, father, and later, an adopted brother - and that
they lived in relative security and comfort.
The Kosinskis survived, she suggests, in part because Jerzy Kosinski's father, whose original name was Moses Lewinkopf, saw
bad times coming and acquired false papers in the common Gentile name of Kosinski; in part because they had money ... and
were able to pay for protection with cash and jewelry; and in part because a network of Polish Catholics, at great risk to
themselves, helped hide them.
Siedlecka portrays the elder Kosinski not just as a wily survivor but as a man without scruples. She maintains that he may have
collaborated with the Germans during the war and very likely did collaborate with the N.K.V.D., after the liberation of Dabrowa by
the Red Army, in sending to Siberia for minor infractions, such as hoarding, some of the very peasants who saved his family. Her
real scorn, however, is reserved for the son, who turned his back on the family's saviors and vilified them, along with the entire
Polish nation, in the eyes of the world. Indeed, the heart of Siedlecka's revelations is her depiction of the young Jerzy Kosinski
spending the war years eating sausages and drinking cocoa - goods unavailable to the neighbors' children - in the safety of his
house and yard....
(Jerzy Kosinski, Kosinski's War, The New Yorker, October 10, 1994, p. 48)
Right from the start, Kosinski wrote under duress - an impecunious young man,
particularly situated to be of use to clandestine forces, he could leapfrog to
advancement only by cooperating with these forces. Thus, his first book, the
Future is Ours, Comrade (1960), was published under the pseudonym Joseph
Novak, and appears to have been sponsored by the CIA:
Czartoryski recommends Kosinski to the CIA.
Between Kosinski's penchant for telling more than the truth and the CIA's adamant insistence on telling as little as possible, the
specific financial arrangements concerning the "book on Russia" may never be made public. Indeed, full documentation probably
does not exist. A number of facts, however, argue strongly that there was CIA/USIA intermediation on behalf of the book, with or
without Kosinski's full knowledge and understanding. One major piece of evidence is the name of the original titleholder on the
Doubleday contract: Anthony B. Czartoryski. A further clue was the address to which communications for "Czartoryski" were to be
delivered: the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America at 145 East Fifty-third Street.
The clear presumption is that Czartoryski became aware of Kosinski's notes, suggested the possibility of a book to his contacts
within the CIA, and then had the manuscript delivered to Doubleday, which already was quite familiar with arrangements of this
nature; Gibney served unwittingly to protect the author's identity and the manuscript's origin.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 112)
Surprisingly quick production.
As for the book, not only its instant acceptance but its quick production would remain a mystery for many years. How could a
graduate student at Columbia - struggling with his course work, engaged in various side projects as a translator, and busy with
the details of life in a strange country - how could such a person have turned out a copy that could be serialized in the editorially
meticulous Reader's Digest in less than two years?
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 117)
Exactly what the CIA would have wanted.
All in all, the book is everything an American propaganda agency, or the propaganda arm of the CIA, might have hoped for in its
wildest dreams. In broad perspective, it outlines the miserable conditions under which Soviet citizens are compelled to live their
everyday lives. It shows how the spiritual greatness of the Russian people is undermined and persecuted by Communism. It
describes a material deprivation appalling by 1960s American standards and a lack of privacy and personal freedom calculated to
shock American audiences. The Russia of The Future is Ours is clearly a place where no American in his right mind would ever
want to live.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 129-130)
As Kosinski's veracity in The Painted Bird came increasingly under question, his
support came most noticeably from Jews, reinforcing the hypothesis of a Jewish
tendency to side with coreligionists rather than with truth, despite the consequent
lowering of Jewish credibility:
Byron Sherwin at Spertus also checked in with his support, reaffirming an invitation to Kosinski to appear as the Spertus award
recipient at their annual fund-raiser in October, before 1,500 guests at Chicago's Hyatt Regency. He mentioned a list of notable
predecessors including Arthur Goldberg, Elie Wiesel, Philip Klutznick, Yitzhak Rabin, and Abraham Joshua Heschel himself; the
1978 recipient, Isaac Bashevis Singer, had recently won the Nobel Prize. Kosinski was deeply moved by this support from
Sherwin and Spertus, and its direct fallout was a move to make Spertus the ultimate site for his personal papers, with Sherwin
serving as coexecutor of his estate. At the same time it accelerated his movement back toward his Jewish roots. In his greatest
moment of crisis, the strongest support had come not from his fellow intellectuals, but from those who identified with him as a
Jew.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 389)
Not only did the Jews get mileage out of The Painted Bird, but so did the
Germans, at the expense of the Poles, of course:
The German edition was a hit.
The book was doing reasonably well in England and France, better certainly than in America, but the German edition was an
out-and-out hit. For a Germany struggling to shuck off the collective national guilt for World War II and the Holocaust, its focus on
the "Eastern European" peasants may have suggested that sadistic behavior and genocide were not a national trait or the crime
of a specific group but part of a universally distributed human depravity; a gentler view is that the book became part of a
continuing German examination of the war years. Perhaps both views reflect aspects of the book's success in Germany, where
Der bemalte Vogel actually made it onto bestseller lists.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 234)
Attempt to dilute German guilt.
The Warsaw magazine Forum compared Kosinski to Goebbels and Senator McCarthy and emphasized a particular sore point for
Poles: the relatively sympathetic treatment of a German soldier. Kosinski, the review argued, put himself on the side of the
Hitlerites, who saw their crimes as the work of "pacifiers of a primitive pre-historic jungle." Glos Nauczycielski, the weekly
publication of the teaching profession, took the same line, accusing The Painted Bird of an attempt "to dilute the German guilt for
the crime of genocide by including the supposed guilt of all other Europeans and particularly those from Eastern Europe."
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, p. 236)
Although Sloan does not speculate that the French may have had similar motives
to the Germans for promoting Kosinski's book, we have already seen the French
buying protection from accusations of complicity in the Holocaust, and wonder
whether the high honor they paid The Painted Bird may not have been motivated
to further deflect attention from their own collaboration:
Kosinski returned to New York on April 14, and only two weeks later received the best news of all from Europe. On May 2,
Flammarion cabled Houghton Mifflin that L'Oiseau bariole had been awarded the Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger - the annual
award given in France for the best foreign book of the year. Previous winners included Lawrence Durrell, John Updike, Heinrich
Boll, Robert Penn Warren, Oscar Lewis, Angus Wilson, and Nikos Kazantzakis. New York might be the center of publishing, but
Paris was still, to many minds, the intellectual center of the universe, and Kosinski had swept the French intellectual world off its
feet. Any who had doubted the aesthetic merits of The Painted Bird were now shamed into silence. The authority of the "eleven
distinguished jurors" was an absolute in New York as in Paris; Kosinski's first novel had swept the board.
(James Park Sloan, Jerzy Kosinski: A Biography, Dutton, United States, 1996, pp. 234-235)
The question has been raised on the Ukrainian Archive of what
conditions are likely to lead to the creation of a great liar. One such
condition might be a modest intellectual endowment which limits the
achievement that is possible by legitimate means. In Jerzy Kosinski's
case, Sloan drops many clues indicating that Kosinski's academic
career was a disaster, among these clues being political maneuvering
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