Holocaust Author Rebutted

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henryk
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Holocaust Author Rebutted

#1

Post by henryk » 17 Apr 2019, 21:58

http://www.thenews.pl/1/11/Artykul/4163 ... y-Kosinski
Book aims to ‘debunk lies’ by Holocaust survivor and writer Jerzy Kosinski

Polish Radio 17.04.2019 14:00

A book that aims to “debunk lies” by Polish American writer and Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosinski is set to hit bookstores in the United States, a website has reported. The book, penned by Polish journalist Joanna Siedlecka and entitled The Ugly Black Bird, challenges the depictions Kosinski, a Polish Jew who survived World War II, offered in his controversial 1965 novel The Painted Bird, Poland’s dorzeczy.pl website reported.

According to Siedlecka, Kosinski created a false picture of German-occupied Poland in his book, which portrays the experiences of a Jewish boy during World War II. In an interview with the dorzeczy.pl website, Siedlecka argues that her book, which has been translated into English by Chester Kisiel, shows that Kosinski “lied about the Holocaust” and “Polish crimes.”

She told dorzeczy.pl that Jewish groups tend to treat Kosinski as a “Holocaust icon” and are tempted to “play this card” every now and then.
Siedlecka also said the book is appearing in America at a time when a Hollywood production based on Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in the making. She said the Hollywood film would be a “distorted version” of the real story of wartime Poland. She added that Kosinski "accused Poland of persecuting Jews.”

“Of course, Kosinski was a victim of the Holocaust, a victim of war,” Siedlecka told dorzeczy.pl. “But Poles—a priest and peasants from the Polish countryside—saved him.” She added: “We have something to be proud of.” Siedlecka was quoted as saying in the interview that she hoped her book “will debunk the lies ofThe Painted Bird in the West. Because the world believed in the story of [Kosinski's] tormented boy. I must admit I believed it myself until I investigated the matter.”

Jerzy Kosinski was born Józef Lewinkopf to Jewish parents in Łódź, Poland in 1933. He survived World War II and emigrated to the United States in 1957. He is known for novels including Being There, which was made into a film in 1979. He died of an apparent suicide in 1991.
(gs/pk)
Source: dorzeczy.pl

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#2

Post by steve248 » 18 Apr 2019, 10:20

Mmmm, a novel being debunked.
As I tell my wife when watching tv shows, It's only make believe.
Why bother to debunk make believe.


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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#3

Post by henryk » 18 Apr 2019, 21:20

Many believe what is written must be true.

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#4

Post by Sergey Romanov » 18 Apr 2019, 23:38

It was "debunked" decades ago. How is this news?

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#5

Post by henryk » 19 Apr 2019, 20:17

Siedlecka also said the book is appearing in America at a time when a Hollywood production based on Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in the making. She said the Hollywood film would be a “distorted version” of the real story of wartime Poland. She added that Kosinski "accused Poland of persecuting Jews.”

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#6

Post by history1 » 20 Apr 2019, 17:16

Too much got published what the author calls "Holocaust Remembrance" while it´s only produced to make money.
Just a couple days ago an American woman did advertise her book (on Facebook in "The International School for Holocaust Studies" from Yad Vashem) which she wrote about her uncle who spent some time in Auschwitz before transfered to Sachsenhausen and later to Dachau, resp. Kaufering. The clou is on the back cover of the book "...he was one of the first eight inmates of Auschwitz". But the truth is that the first Auschwitz inmates where German inmates from the KL Sachsenhausen, and not a Polish Jew from Warsaw with the inmate number 31000+ which he was registered in spring 1942. She didn´t even get the right DOB in her book even while she talked and visited her relatives a lot. In all the files I did research his DOB was the same, from Auschwitz over Sachsenhausen to Dachau. Even the post WWII from a DP camp had the same and of course the files/requests of naturalisation. Only in her book it´s incorrect. She even claimed that her uncle did adopt a new name when as soon as he arrived with his wife Sonja (which he married in the DP camp Landsberg in 1946) in the USA. I provided files from years later where he did still use his native Polish name. And even the date of immigration did she not get correct!
And her reaction: "That´s a different man."
A different man with the same name, the same profession, from the same city imprisoned with the same inmate number in Au , Sa and Da and who married after the liberation a woman with the same name as her uncle did, did live in the same state and even city and did adopt the very same name as her uncle!?
And when one reads the reviews of her book on Amazon, even from some Holocaust associations, one could think this is a standard work. And naive people with no knowledge about the Holocaust think that her story is even true.
I´ve never seen/read a bigger nonsense than her response!

But no wonder, there is even a Rabbi who claims that he was the youngest inmate of Auschwitz while he was 6 years old when he arrived with his family. Of course he was selected by the infamous Mengele which neither his family nor he himself did knew earlier and claims that Mengele alone did select 6 Million Jewish children for the gas chambers in Birkenau, etc.
And all the chassidic Jews standing around him admire and worship/adore him!
While it´s simple history falsification at it´s best!

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#7

Post by wm » 25 Apr 2019, 20:17

The problem is that:
For years Kosinski passed off The Painted Bird as the true story of his own experience during the Holocaust.
Long before writing it he regaled friends and dinner parties with macabre tales of a childhood spent in hiding among the Polish peasantry. Among those who were fascinated was Dorothy de Santillana, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, to whom Kosiński confided that he had a manuscript based on his experiences.
Upon accepting the book for publication Santillana said, "It is my understanding that, fictional as the material may sound, it is straight autobiography." Although he backed away from this claim, Kosiński never wholly disavowed it.
Another (moral problem) is exploiting the Holocaust and genocide for personal gain by writing artsy books in the vein of Painted Bird, House of Dolls, or even Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS.

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#8

Post by Sergey Romanov » 26 Apr 2019, 21:27

> a Hollywood production based on Kosinski's The Painted Bird is in the making

Link?

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#9

Post by henryk » 27 Apr 2019, 20:48

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Bird_(film)
The Painted Bird (Czech title Nabarvené ptáče) is an upcoming Czech-Slovak-Ukrainian film directed by Václav Marhoul. It is an adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński's novel The Painted Bird.[3][4] It is also the first movie that features the Interslavic language.[5]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1667354/?ref_=ttrel_ql
Production Notes from IMDbPro
Status: Completed | See complete list of in-production titles »
Comments: Completed on Monday, 4th March 2019

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#10

Post by henryk » 27 Apr 2019, 20:56

https://jewishjournal.com/news/81/the-p ... revisited/
The Painted Bird – Revisited

BY Tom Teicholz | Dec 5, 2005 | News    

Forty years ago this Oct. 15, Houghton Mifflin published “The Painted Bird” by Jerzy Kosinski. The book was immediately acclaimed as a must-read text on the Holocaust and the nature of human cruelty. In the years leading up to and following Kosinski’s 1991 suicide, his reputation was tarnished by a series of revelations that the author employed uncredited editors and associates to produce his novels, and that much of Kosinski’s personal history was fabricated. Nonetheless, the reputation of “The Painted Bird” has endured. Grove, which has published “The Painted Bird” in paperback since 1995, won’t divulge sales figures, but a sales rep called it “one of the mainstays of our backlist.”

Recently, I re-read the 1965 original first edition, as well as the edition currently on the shelves, which Kosinski revised and published with a new introduction in 1976. (There are notable differences between the two.) I wanted to understand the novel’s continued appeal.

“The Painted Bird” is the story of a young boy, age 6 when the novel begins, whose parents, to protect him, consign him to a family in the country at the start of World War II. When his caretaker dies, he wanders from village to village until the war’s end, witnessing and suffering acts of cruelty and perversion. After one particular incident, he becomes mute. After liberation, he falls under the spell of a few Red Army soldiers, who leave him at an orphanage until his parents reclaim him. At age 16, after a skiing accident, he regains his speech.

The novel spends almost the first hundred pages without even mentioning the Nazis, detailing instead the lives and folk beliefs of rural peasants. Actually, the word Nazis is never used, only “the Germans.” A short section, about halfway through the book, describes the trains to the extermination camps — and they are cited toward the end of the book, as well. But for the most part, on its surface, the book has little to do with the Holocaust. This is all the more interesting, given that we now know that “The Painted Bird” is not inspired by literal events in Kosinski’s life, as some originally assumed. Kosinski spent the war years in relative safety, living with his parents under false papers.

In relation to both the Holocaust and the author’s own life, “The Painted Bird” presents a series of metaphors and allegories through its vignettes of cruelty, perversion and humiliation — all tinged with sadism — more often than not culminating in rape. The book’s title refers to a tale of a bird whose feathers are painted, and because it is different, other birds attack it and kill it.

Some scenes are repulsive — I had recalled the episodes, but I had not remembered them as being so detached and gratuitous. More than once I put the book down, wondering why more readers were not offended by the book’s contents, particularly at the time it was originally published. Yet once I had finished the novel, I felt differently. I understood why the novel succeeds and remains popular to this day. In part because ‘The Painted Bird” does not describe the Holocaust as we have come to know it, or any world as we know it, the reader implicitly accepts that the novel operates metaphorically.

Adolescents relate to this tale, in particular, because they are themselves in a state of war, a time of us vs. them, a time when youths feel most acutely that they are “different.” It’s a time when they feel besieged, tormented by peers and estranged from the adults surrounding them.
Adolescence is a time when children are beginning to separate from their parents; this separation occurs literally within the book. Moreover, children in adolescence stand on the threshold of sex. Their notions and ideas and their introduction to what sex is, to how sexual relations are conducted, all are informed by the yearnings of hormonal surges.

For many children, their first glimpses of sexual acts — whether it be of animals or from pornographic or erotic materials — can convey a graphic vision of sex that is seemingly detached, demeaning, abusive or even violent. And yet, these images remain powerful and stimulating nonetheless. Again, this captivating repulsion is consistent with the scenes in “The Painted Bird,” which present a heightened, more shocking version of reality, but one that resonates.

In the novel, Kosinski explains the murderous and deviant impulses of his characters within the context of the powerless and the powerful. At some level, Kosinski, who had a life-long fascination with S & M, presents the homicidal urge as an exercise of feeling power over another person.

At a remove of more than 60 years, the images we have of the Holocaust in Poland, of the ghettos and the camps, have an expected quality to them. Yet, “The Painted Bird” continues to offend, to disgust — and its haunting tales have an unexpected quality — in part because they remain unfamiliar to us. At the same time, these stories derive an added dimension, added power if you will, from being set during the war years and the period immediately following the war.

The novel’s artistry is such that its ugliness rises to the level of importance. After reading the novel, one is prepared to accept, in a way one resists while reading it, that Kosinski’s novel has served a purpose — that in an abstract way, it has explained something of the cruelty that caused humans to participate in the Holocaust, some with glee, some as a matter-of-everyday existence.

In this way, “The Painted Bird” rightly assumes its place as a work about the Holocaust — despite some troubling aspects. In one scene, a Jewish girl escapes from a train bound for the death camps, only to be raped to death. Kosinski seems to assert that it is better to die raped as a woman than incinerated as a Jew.

Beyond that, “The Painted Bird” argues that brutality against those who are different is part of nature — like the fate of the painted bird — and that the Holocaust was, sadly, not so unnatural. It was an all-too-possible aspect of human nature above and beyond the part played by the philosophy of National Socialism or by racism or by a Final Solution. Acceptance of the Holocaust, and participation in it, was part and parcel of the natural inclination of the peasantry who abhorred people different from themselves and often acted perversely and cruelly even among their own.

To universalize his message, Kosinski obscures specificity. Kosinski implies the boy is Jewish but never says so, hiding behind the possibility that he is Jewish or Gypsy or might just look Jewish or like a Gypsy. Significantly, Kosinski changed the location of where the boy was wandering from Poland in the first edition to “Central Europe” in subsequent editions. Also during the war years, the two people who show mercy to the boy and let him escape are German soldiers — leaving us to wonder whether the peasants are not worse than even the Nazis. Similarly, although the boy falls under the spell of Red Army soldiers, life under communist rule seems no less cruel than under the Germans. The boy takes to wandering his home city at night and exacts revenge on a boy by dropping a brick on his head.

In the revised edition, the novel ends with the boy regaining his speech. However, the original first edition concludes with a postscript that describes life under the communists as a place where the inner life is imprisoned as much as outer life was restricted under the GermansKosinski’s attempt to take a universal or sociological perspective to his narrative creates moments of moral relativism that belie the uniqueness of what the Nazis perpetrated against the Jews and the Gypsies and diminishes the role of their collaborators.

Today, the novel comes with a preface, called an “Afterword,” written for the 1976 edition. In it, Kosinski explained that he wanted to write something that was separate from an autobiography. For one thing, he intended the novel as a blow against the communist establishment. And it was received as such — Kosinski and his work were banned and attacked behind the Iron Curtain. He also pointed out that what happened in “The Painted Bird” was credible and sometimes less violent, horrible and cruel than what happened in the Holocaust itself.

In effect, Kosinski wanted it all: If it didn’t happen to him, it was true nonetheless, and he was heroic in writing it, as he suffered and was attacked for having done so. Given Kosinski’s actual biography, this makes some sense. He wanted to write about what he knew — which was not the details of the Holocaust but a more detached experience within wartime Poland; he saw himself as both hero and victim of his own narrative.

As James Park Sloan details in his thorough 1996 biography of the author, Kosinski was born into an intellectual, assimilated Jewish family in Lodz, Poland. Although his extended family lost more than 60 members in the Holocaust, Kosinski did not personally witness atrocities. During the war, he learned that lying was survival and that standing out could mean death. After the war, he grew up in a communist society devoid of religious practice or identity, where the state’s interests outweighed those of the individual.
Kosinski came to the United States in 1957 as a sociology graduate student, and within a few years, he was writing nonfiction, explaining the Soviet collective mind to Western audiences.

It is not surprising that when Kosinski sat down to write fiction in the early 1960s, he chose to write about what he knew best. As he could not write about the Holocaust itself, Kosinski confabulated childhood and war. Taught as a child to lie about his life, he did so again, ironically, in a work of fiction. He wrote about the dangers of being a painted bird — while playing the part himself by writing a novel in America about torture, sodomy and rape. Having been powerless, he became the master of his own destiny, playing out his fascination with sadism and with power. The resulting novel, “The Painted Bird,” continues to fascinate, shock, disgust and compel us transcendently to this day.

Tom Teicholz is a film producer in Los Angeles. Everywhere else, he”s an author and journalist who has written for The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Interview and The Forward. His column appears every other week.

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#11

Post by wm » 27 Apr 2019, 21:25

That the Holocaust was not so unnatural is a legitimate opinion.

But brutality against those who are different is part of nature is naive pseudo-Darwinism,
Brutality against those who are defenseless is part of nature, i.e. weakness invites aggression, opportunity makes the thief.

You can observe that by strolling alone through a bad neighborhood in your city, at night.

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#12

Post by Mark in Cleveland, Tn. » 28 Apr 2019, 05:40

history1, I read your above reply and agree with your assessments. I read about these accounts and events as well,and the timelines and facts did not add up. here in Chattanooga we have often old vets from WW2, and here and there holocaust survivors giving lecturs etc, and when I read the accounts, as the area newspapers and universities will post the entire lecture, I see facts and timelines not adding up to known history and facts, and I will reply saying it cannot be old age or senility, but these people wanting somwething from the public. Kind of sad..

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#13

Post by Mark in Cleveland, Tn. » 28 Apr 2019, 05:41

history1 wrote:
20 Apr 2019, 17:16
Too much got published what the author calls "Holocaust Remembrance" while it´s only produced to make money.
Just a couple days ago an American woman did advertise her book (on Facebook in "The International School for Holocaust Studies" from Yad Vashem) which she wrote about her uncle who spent some time in Auschwitz before transfered to Sachsenhausen and later to Dachau, resp. Kaufering. The clou is on the back cover of the book "...he was one of the first eight inmates of Auschwitz". But the truth is that the first Auschwitz inmates where German inmates from the KL Sachsenhausen, and not a Polish Jew from Warsaw with the inmate number 31000+ which he was registered in spring 1942. She didn´t even get the right DOB in her book even while she talked and visited her relatives a lot. In all the files I did research his DOB was the same, from Auschwitz over Sachsenhausen to Dachau. Even the post WWII from a DP camp had the same and of course the files/requests of naturalisation. Only in her book it´s incorrect. She even claimed that her uncle did adopt a new name when as soon as he arrived with his wife Sonja (which he married in the DP camp Landsberg in 1946) in the USA. I provided files from years later where he did still use his native Polish name. And even the date of immigration did she not get correct!
And her reaction: "That´s a different man."
A different man with the same name, the same profession, from the same city imprisoned with the same inmate number in Au , Sa and Da and who married after the liberation a woman with the same name as her uncle did, did live in the same state and even city and did adopt the very same name as her uncle!?
And when one reads the reviews of her book on Amazon, even from some Holocaust associations, one could think this is a standard work. And naive people with no knowledge about the Holocaust think that her story is even true.
I´ve never seen/read a bigger nonsense than her response!

But no wonder, there is even a Rabbi who claims that he was the youngest inmate of Auschwitz while he was 6 years old when he arrived with his family. Of course he was selected by the infamous Mengele which neither his family nor he himself did knew earlier and claims that Mengele alone did select 6 Million Jewish children for the gas chambers in Birkenau, etc.
And all the chassidic Jews standing around him admire and worship/adore him!
While it´s simple history falsification at it´s best!
I remember this from somewhere before..and agree with your assessment of the details and facts not adding up

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#14

Post by David Thompson » 28 Apr 2019, 05:42

An off-topic opinion post from Phaing, dealing with present day political issues, was removed pursuant to forum rules. Do not make this mistake again, Phaing.

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Re: Holocaust Author Rebutted

#15

Post by Sergey Romanov » 30 Apr 2019, 19:36

henryk wrote:
27 Apr 2019, 20:48
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Painted_Bird_(film)
The Painted Bird (Czech title Nabarvené ptáče) is an upcoming Czech-Slovak-Ukrainian film directed by Václav Marhoul. It is an adaptation of Jerzy Kosiński's novel The Painted Bird.[3][4] It is also the first movie that features the Interslavic language.[5]
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1667354/?ref_=ttrel_ql
Production Notes from IMDbPro
Status: Completed | See complete list of in-production titles »
Comments: Completed on Monday, 4th March 2019
Not this one, but rather the above-mentioned Hollywood production. Thanks in advance!

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