52 pages • 1 hour read
The Painted Bird
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Chapters 9-11Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
The boy is taken in by a peasant in a poor village. When the Germans come to collect food, the peasant hides the boy in a well-disguised cellar. During mushroom season the peasants take to the forest to gather their harvest; fearing he’ll be turned over to the Germans for housing a Gypsy, the peasant shaves the boy’s dark hair.
Railroad tracks run through the forest. The peasants line up and wave cheerfully at the Jews and Gypsies heading to concentration camps. The peasants hear rumors about the camps, how the bodies are burned and how the Germans take the Jews’ gold teeth and shave their hair for mattress stuffing. The peasants believe the Germans are God’s “instrument of justice,” and that the Jews are finally receiving God’s punishment “for refuting the only True Faith, for mercilessly killing Christian babies and drinking their blood” (96). They look at the boy with suspicion, telling him that he, too, will burn one day. Worried, the boy wonders whether only dark-haired people are punished by God.
Occasionally people throw children from the train in an attempt to save them, or crawl through the floor to their deaths. The peasants loot the bodies, careful not to touch them “lest they get soiled with the diseased blood of the unbaptized” (98). The bodies are left on the track to be burned by patrolling Germans. The boy examines the ashes of a victim in his fingers, fascinated, but fearful that the victim’s ghost will haunt him.
Personal items such as photographs and diaries are found along the tracks. The peasants collect and trade them, studying the unfamiliar clothing and giggling over attractive men and women.
When a Jewish girl is found by the tracks, the peasants determine she will be delivered to the German post the next day. In the meantime, she is brought to the home of a peasant nicknamed “Rainbow,” who rapes her. When he is unable “to detach himself from her” (105), the two hit and scratch each other until finally Rainbow calls for help. A small group gathers, including a midwife; they kill the girl and put her body on the railroad track. The boy, who’d witnessed the scene through a hole connecting his master’s barn and Rainbow’s hut, is haunted by dreams of “black strands of lank hair smelling of gasoline” (107) and circles of soot drifting to heaven.
Chapter 10 Summary
The boy flees to the forest one night when a German detachment raids the village in search of partisans. The next morning, the soldiers find him hiding in a field and, after laughing at and punching him, put him on a cart with a severely-wounded, dark-haired man who is to be taken to a nearby police station. For hours the boy and the man sit back to back, tired and hungry, until they arrive in a town with brick houses and painted fences. Here, as the cart moves along, they’re attacked by children who hurl rocks, cow dung, and dead birds at them and hit them with sticks. Finally, a priest fights the crowd off with a cane. He walks next to the cart, holding the boy’s hand. When the cart reaches the police building, the priest waits outside.
The wounded man now lies on the ground as the boy stands nearby. An SS officer approaches, and the boy is mesmerized by his crisp, gleaming black uniform. The officer tilts the wounded man’s head up and speaks; the wounded man forces himself to sit. Breathing hard, swaying with the effort of movement, he looks at the officer and exclaims “pig,” then falls back onto the concrete.
The soldiers are stunned. The SS officer issues a command, and the soldiers shoot the wounded man. When the officer approaches the boy, the boy feels unable to stop looking at him: “His entire person seemed to have something utterly superhuman about it” (113). His skin is polished, his hair is golden, and “[e]very movement of his body seemed propelled by some tremendous internal force” (113). He envies the officer, unconcerned with his own fate; he implicitly trusts this impeccable being.
An order is given, and the boy is thrown through the gate toward the priest who, compared to the officer, “looked even shabbier than before” (114).
Chapter 11 Summary
The priest leaves the boy with a farmer, Garbos, and Garbos’s dog, Judas. Garbos beats the boy constantly, and the boy lives in terror. He is unable to sleep for fear; exhausted, he falls asleep at his work, and Garbos beats him for idleness.
The boy begins going to church and learning about the Mass, which fascinates and confuses him. It feels like “magic” to the boy, “more splendid and elaborate than Olga’s witchcraft, but just as difficult to fathom” (120). He observes how “majestic” and “polished” (120) the church is in comparison to Olga’s hut.
Remembering a story he’d heard from Olga, the boy catches a moth with a death’s-head pattern and blows on it three times to bring about Garbos’s death. He eagerly awaits this event, but Garbos remains healthy. When he overhears the vicar explaining that praying earns days of indulgence from God, he believes he’s discovered his path to happiness, and he prays day and night. When the vicar becomes ill, the boy wonders how such a pious man could become sick like everyone else.
Praying earns the boy more beatings from Garbos, who believes he’s casting Gypsy spells. He begins “hanging” the boy, a daily ritual in which the boy hangs from the ceiling as the dog, Judas, leaps at his feet. Distracting himself with prayer, the boy survives each hanging, excited that “[t]housands of days of indulgence streaked through the thatched roof toward heaven” (132).
On Corpus Christi, the boy is ordered to fill in as an altar boy. Grateful that his prayers are being answered, and eager for “a life as smooth as the yellow fields of wheat waving under the gentle breath of the breeze” (136), he runs to church, only to be tormented by the other altar boys. During Mass, he drops the missal, to the horror of the peasants who, yelling that he is a “Gypsy vampire” (138), drag him from church and heave him into a manure pit. Terrified, and covered in muck, the boy frees himself and escapes into the forest, where he cleans himself with moss and leaves.
In the forest, he finds that his voice is gone. He wonders how this is possible, seeing as he’s collected so many indulgence days. He walks farther into the forest, noticing the tree stumps that “would rot slowly, the broken victims of the dampness and decay of the forest floor” (142).
Chapters 9-11 Analysis
In these chapters, readers are brought face to face with the realities of the Holocaust. The train transporting Jews to the concentration camps is a reminder of the dangers the boy has escaped. The five-year-old boy who dies after being thrown from the train could easily be the protagonist, and his parents could easily be among the people who are “stacked like cornstalks” (96).
The boy, seeming to sense this, is haunted. The peasants collect and trade photographs from the train tracks as if they’re baseball cards, unbothered that the subjects of the photos will likely die in the gas chambers. The boy, however, comments on “elegantly dressed parents” (101), “old men, who looked like apostles,” and “newlyweds kissing” (102), reminding us of the humanity of the victims. He also dreams of the ashes of the victims. Called “Gypsy-Jew” by the peasants—an insult that suggests even the peasants don’t understand their hate—he wonders whether “God’s wrath was reserved only for people with black hair and eyes, who were called Gypsies” (97). This carefully-worded passage suggests that “Gypsy,” as used by the peasants, is a meaningless term used merely to create a hierarchy of humanity in which those who look different are at the bottom.
At the top of this hierarchy are the Germans, exemplified by the SS officer. With “granite”-sounding language “ideally suited to order the death of inferior, forlorn creatures,” he is “armed in all the symbols of might and majesty” (113). The boy is indifferent to whether the officer allows him to live; he “has “infinite confidence” in the man who “possessed powers unattainable by ordinary people” (114). The boy’s “envy” of a man who may kill him at any moment is not as paradoxical as it may appear. The officer’s authority to kill, and his evident suitability for killing, means he, unlike the boy, is not a victim. The fact that he has control over the boy’s life makes his power more appealing, not less. The incident with the SS officer is the first tangible display of the conflation of violence and power in the boy’s mind.
While killing makes one powerful, prayer, the boy learns, is useless. When he overhears the vicar explaining indulgence days, he “understood why some people were strong and others weak” (125): those without power have not prayed hard enough. Because prayer is a practical plan, it offers hope that he can escape the torment of his everyday life. When prayer fails him, his hope is broken, and he becomes unable to speak. More devastating than the violence is the fact that he’d truly believed God would save him. He is left just as miserable as before, only now, he is disillusioned, too, so much so that he’s gone mute.
In this way, prayer appears no more efficient than Olga’s mysterious rituals. Back in Chapter 8, the boy wonders why a murderer did not meet his death upon stepping over the bloodstains. Similarly, blowing on the moth does not kill Garbos—and the vicar, the most pious man of all, can still succumb to physical illness. He is left with nothing to believe in; all faith seems empty. Unlike the Jews on the train, he has escaped the concentration camp, only to wander traumatized and voiceless in the forest alongside the “stunted mutilated bodies” of tree stumps, which are “broken victims” (142) like he is. Just as superstition and Christian prayer are equally pointless, escape from war is presented as no better than the war itself.
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