In the nineteen-sixties, writer
Jerzy Kosinski had become famous in Manhattan literary circles for his astonishing tales about the brutalities he had allegedly suffered during the Second World War. Abandoned by his parents at the age of six, he claimed he had roamed the countryside alone, witnessing rape, murder, and incest, constantly fearing for his life. Kosinski turned those stories into his first novel, "The Painted Bird" (1965), which, for a time, was considered a major work of Holocaust literature. Kosinski's autobiographic claims were later debunked when it was revealed that he and his parents had all been sheltered by religious Polish people who had never handed him over to the Nazis.