Though The Painted Bird is set during the Holocaust, it is not strictly a Holocaust novel. The book is largely metaphorical and deals with the brutality of human nature and how the horrors we perpetrate on each other become part of us. The novel’s protagonist, a boy who is an outsider, or a “painted bird,” witnesses acts of subjugation and cruelty and seeks to understand why some people are more powerful than others. Thematically, the novel deals with the conflation of human and animal, and the interplay of violence and control.

The Painted Bird is told in the first-person from the point of view of an unnamed boy of unknown ethnicity. It takes place in Eastern Europe during World War II, beginning in 1939, when the boy is six years old, and spanning six years. When the novel opens, a third-person narrator explains that the boy’s parents fear arrest by the Nazis and decide to go into hiding. They arrange for their son to travel from their city to a village far away, in the countryside. The peasants there are isolated, poor, and superstitious, and without modern conveniences. While the boy is dark-haired and dark-eyed, the peasants are fair, and the boy’s educated language is unfamiliar to them.

The boy’s first caretaker is Marta, a hobbled, elderly woman who fears the boy casts dangerous spells. Marta passes away, and the boy accidentally burns down her hut. He escapes the fire and makes his way to another village, where he is beaten by the peasants. He is saved by Olga the Wise, the village healer, who teaches the boy how to mix ingredients and gives him elixirs to restrain the evil powers inside him. Though Olga is kind to him, the peasants fear him. They eventually throw him in the river, and he floats away.

From this point on, the boy wanders the countryside, finding shelter in villages when he can. While he stays in a miller’s hut, he watches as the miller gouges out the eyes of a plowboy, whom he suspects of having a sexual relationship with his wife. The boy leaves the miller’s house and next stays with Lekh, a bird catcher who, after being jilted by his lover, Ludmila, releases painted birds into the wild, where they are torn apart by their flocks. After Ludmila’s murder, the boy finds himself living with a carpenter who believes the boy’s dark hair will attract lightning and drags him out to a field during storms. When the carpenter’s barn burns down, the carpenter beats the boy and threatens to kill him; the boy saves himself by pulling the carpenter into a bunker filled with rats.

At his next stop, the boy lives with a blacksmith, who is eventually murdered by Polish partisans. The boy is then sent to a German outpost, where his life is spared by a German soldier who pretends to execute him and then sets him free. He stays in a village by the railroad tracks, where the peasants watch as trains full of Jewish prisoners head to concentration camps. A Jewish girl is found along the tracks and is taken to the house of a peasant named Rainbow. She is raped by Rainbow and then killed by the village healer.

The boy’s next village is raided by German forces. He is taken to a German SS officer whose beauty and authority fascinate and inspire envy in the boy. The boy’s life is spared again, and he’s delivered to Garbos, a cruel peasant who torments him by making him hang from the ceiling while his dog tries to attack him. The boy turns to prayer, which only earns him more beatings. When the boy is thrown by churchgoers into a manure pit, he becomes mute.

He next lives with the farmer Makar and his two grown children. Ewka, the daughter, begins a sexual affair with him, and the boy leaves after discovering the family engaging in incest and bestiality. In the frozen landscape, he is beaten by village boys and saved by Labina, a widow who entertains men each night as the boy listens on in disgust. Labina dies, and the boy flees to a new village.

The village is attacked by Kalmuks, who are then killed by Soviet soldiers. The soldiers set up camp in the field, and the boy, still mute, befriends them. He is cared for by Gavrila, an ardent member of the Communist Party, and Mitka, a sniper whose accomplishments are legendary. He respects both men and takes a keen interest in the Red Army. When the German occupation is over, the boy reluctantly goes to an orphanage, where he fends off attacks by other orphans. He befriends an orphan called the Silent One, and the two sneak away to cause mischief in the city. The Silent One derails a train he believes is carrying a dairy vendor who’d beaten the boy in a marketplace.

The boy’s parents come to claim him, and the boy regrets losing his freedom. He sneaks out at night, spending his time with criminals and underground political dissenters; he breaks the arm of the four-year-old boy his parents have adopted, and he takes violent revenge on a cinema attendant who offends him. His parents then send him to the mountains to live with a ski instructor. The boy is injured skiing and receives a phone call in the hospital. When he hears the voice on the other end, his own voice returns.

Jerzy Kosiński was born in Poland in 1933 and along with his Jewish family lived under a false identity to escape arrest during World War II. He later moved to New York City, where he graduated from Columbia University and taught at Yale, Princeton, and other universities. The Painted Bird, his first novel, is shrouded in controversy. Some believe the book was plagiarized from Polish folk stories unknown in the West. Additionally, while in the book’s Afterword Kosiński insists the boy’s journey is fictional, some hold that he’d claimed the book was autobiographical. Kosiński died by suicide in 1991.