Asked whether he himself was a Jew, Kosinski said no. Yet, he was both Jew and Holocaust survivor.
James Park Sloan, whose 1996 biography disproved several of Kosinski's claims about his life, explains the paradox of this denial: "Of the things stolen from him by the war, the most precious of all may have been a comfortable acceptance of his basic identity." Kosinski was born Jerzy (Jurek) Nikodem Lewinkopf in Lodz, Poland, on 14 June 1933. His father, Moses Lewinkopf, was born in Zamosc in 1891, and his mother, Elzbieta Liniecka Lewinkopf, was born Elzbieta Wanda Weinreich in Lodz in 1899. In 1939 Moses Lewinkopf, sensing that Germany would invade Poland, officially changed his name to Mieczyslaw Kosinski and moved his family to the small town of Sandomierz in eastern Poland, where they began to live disguised as Gentiles. They moved again to the village of Dabrowa, where a Catholic priest, Father Okan, aided the Kosinski family in finding a small apartment and maintaining a conspiracy of silence with the villagers.
Jurek Kosinski spent the war years in this village, restrained from making friends and taught to hide his identity. He received religious instruction from Father Sebastianski at the local church, became an altar boy, and received his first communion in 1943.
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