Jerzy N. Kosinski, novelist and essayist, was born on 14 June 1933 in Lodz, Poland, the son of Russian parents Mieczyslaw and Elzbieta. At the age of six, he was separated from his parents and wandered throughout Poland and Russia, continually suspected of being a lost Jewish or Gypsy child while being subjected to the ravishments of the Nazi holocaust and the traditional prejudice of an ignorant peasantry. Among other things, this experience caused Kosinski to lose his speech for a period of five years and produced a sense of survival-by-wits that recurs in virtually every aspect of his adult life. After six years of wandering from village to village in Eastern Europe and maturing far beyond his years, Kosinski was reunited with his parents. Of the Kosinski family, once numerous and distinguished, only two members survived the war. The situation for Kosinski at the end of World War II was problematical.
