The Ugly Black Bird

The Ugly Black Bird: The Real Story of Jerzy Kosiński's Wartime Childhood is the 2018 English-language version of a 1994 Polish-language book, Czarny ptasior by Joanna Siedlecka, about Jewish-Polish-American writer and Holocaust survivor Jerzy Kosiński. The book is Siedlecka's study of Kosiński's life during World War II, which had often been assumed to have resembled the life of the protagonist in his novel The Painted Bird.

Siedlecka concludes that, unlike that protagonist's life, Kosiński's in occupied Poland was less eventful – that he and his family managed to survive the Holocaust, hiding in the village of Dąbrowa Rzeczycka with the Polish villagers' help. Her analysis discredits the presumed autobiographical elements in The Painted Bird.

Initially some critics of Siedlecka's book viewed it as too unsympathetic to Kosiński. In Poland – according to Kosiński biography written by James Park Sloan – "to side against Siedlecka [was] to affirm one's stance as cosmopolitan, anti-Marxist and anti-anti-semitic". Criticism of Siedlecka's book lessened a few months later, after Sloan published an article in The New Yorker which corroborated most of her findings. Since then her book has drawn mixed reviews – criticism for its author's lack of sympathy for Kosiński, alongside praise for her having unearthed the historical truth and debunked assumptions that The Painted Bird was autobiographical.