On a cold November evening in 1984, I was sitting on a stepstool in the ‘H’ section of the Coliseum bookstore near Central Park in Manhattan, cradling a volume of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories in my lap. Busy imagining myself on the hot plains of Africa in sight of snow-capped Kilimanjaro, my thoughts were interrupted when a pair of brown safari boots edged into view beside the page. I glanced up. The man leaning over me was the writer Jerzy Kosinski, author of The Painted Bird (1965), a terrifying novel about an abandoned, mute boy who drifts alone through a bleak, dangerous countryside, alternately sheltered or abused by the local peasants in what readers assumed was war-torn Poland during the Holocaust.

Polish American author Jerzy Kosinski in 1973. Photo courtesy National Archives

Kosinski was a man in trouble when we chanced upon each other. Two years earlier, with tens of millions of copies of his novels in print, Village Voice reporters charged him with literary fraud. Based more on innuendo than fact, their article derailed his literary career. Those details were not on my mind as he leaned over my shoulder, stretching out his arm to tap the spines of each of his novels as if he were counting. I tried to make it seem like I hadn’t noticed him, but all I was thinking was that certain books leave fingerprints on the mind, ready to be dusted with the memories of one’s life. The Painted Bird felt like a desperate note sent in a glass bottle that broke in my hands and made me bleed. It was almost three years after I’d read it, but I still could not shake the feeling that a private emotion lurked beneath the text, a leviathan of grief.

Back home, I wrote him a letter. I was a Wall Street analyst at the time, and accustomed to scrutinising business documents of publicly traded companies, examining them for the obvious story their CEOs and CFOs were intent on telling investors but also probing for the story they tried to hide. Oddly, this skill turned out to be useful when reading Kosinski’s novels.

Months later, in March 1985, he telephoned and invited me to dinner at an Italian restaurant near his apartment. For 90 minutes, we traded stories and laughter. Everything was fine until I asked a series of questions that startled him.

Naming his first novel, The Painted Bird, and his third, Being There (1971) – about a naive, reclusive gardener called Chance who finds himself suddenly thrust into the modern world where everyone mistakes his silence for wisdom – I set down my fork and said: ‘They both feel as if there’s a subtext, a hidden story beneath the surface.’ I wondered out loud if it was one of his writerly strategies to hide wartime details in female characters. The question made him so upset that he leapt from his seat as if to flee the restaurant. I grabbed his wrist and held on till he sat down again. Five or 10 minutes of absolute silence followed while, heads down, we both pecked at the remnants of broiled fish and potatoes on our plates.

To my surprise, when we were saying goodbye afterwards, he asked to meet again. I promised myself to tell no one what had happened that night. Memories of my maternal grandmother were surfacing – how she concealed her Jewish identity when she came to the United States, how she helped raise me as a Catholic on the outside with a hidden Jewish self. Not the same as living in Nazi-controlled Europe, but I understood something about hiding. Already the secret keeper for my grandmother, I felt compelled to keep Kosinski’s secret too. He may not have used words to answer my question about hiding childhood experiences in female characters, but his outsized reaction at the table felt like a confirmation.

Survival involved a combination of luck, planning, and the ability to live behind a wall of psychological silence

While Kosinski was alive, I didn’t fully grasp how our dinner encounter connected to the broader story of hidden Jewish children during the Holocaust. Kosinski was one of perhaps 5,000 Jewish children in Poland (out of almost a million) who made it through the war by hiding. The dinner had felt like a game of hide-and-seek with him, but his life taught him only the rules for hide-or-die.

At the time, the only other hidden child I knew about was Anne Frank. She and her family lived in a set of secret rooms in Amsterdam before being turned over to the Gestapo by unknown informants. Inside the Secret Annex, she wrote in her diary with the freedom of someone able to consider her Jewish identity and write truthfully about her family’s situation. Circumstances were markedly different for children in open hiding who attempted to live unnoticed among the non-Jewish population. Once the decision was made for them to go into open hiding, they had to forget the past overnight, masking themselves as faux Christians, and never – by a glance, an accent or a social mistake – reveal their original ethnic identity. Survival in this manner involved a combination of luck, planning, and the ability to live behind a wall of psychological silence.

By 1991, Kosinski had died and I’d left Wall Street for graduate school. I began researching the Holocaust’s hidden child survivors. That’s when I discovered AMCHA, the Israeli Center for Mental Health and Social Support of Holocaust Survivors and the Second Generation. Yvonne Tauber, who treated many formerly hidden children at the Center, coined the term ‘compound personality’ to describe how these people presented in therapy: a single individual with an external, age-appropriate self, concealing a suppressed, traumatised-child self from wartime.

The more I learned about the psychological dynamics that followed such children into their adult lives, the more I came to wonder how the suppressed child would express themselves in the grown-up texts they produced. Would their books involve dual perspectives, a split viewpoint that incorporated the child’s experience in hiding, with the adult reflecting on it? Memory for this group came in traumatic fragments, so would I find that too? Would the inner, suppressed self ever act up and perform a secret action? Yes, to all.

It was not........

© Aeon