Part 1 of Essay
An obscure village in Poland, sheltered from ideas and industrialization, seemed a safe place to store one¹s most precious valuable: a 6-year-old boy. Or so it seemed to the parents who abandoned their only son to protect him from the Nazis in the beginning of Jerzy Kosinski¹s provocative 1965 novel The Painted Bird. ....

Part 2 of Essay
.... Even remote and ³backward² villages of Poland were exposed and sucked into the maelstrom of conflict. The significance of this point is that it leads to another logical progression: Reaching further than the Polish villages of 1939, the novel¹s implications extend to all of us. Not only did Hitler¹s stain seep into even the smallest crannies of the world at that time, it also spread beyond limits of time and culture. Modern readers, likewise, are implicated because of our humanity. The conscientiou ....