Kazimierz Moczarski, the author of this “astonishing” book, was a Polish Resistance officer in the Second World War captured by Stalin’s secret police in 1945, and declared an enemy of the state and incarcerated for 11 years in Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison, said Frances Wilson in The Telegraph.
While there, he “endured 49 different types of torture”, one of which was to share a cell for 255 days in 1949 with the former SS Commander Jürgen Stroop, an “architect of the Holocaust and liquidator of the Warsaw ghetto, now awaiting execution”.
Moczarski, who had once tried to assassinate Stroop, discovered that his cellmate was entirely unrepentant, and willing to discuss his crimes freely. Lacking notebooks, he memorised what he was told and later used those memories to produce “Conversations with an Executioner” – a book first published in a censored edition in Poland in 1977, and only now fully translated into English. Composed largely of dialogue, it offers a unique perspective on the “narcissism of Nazism” – and deserves to be considered a “masterpiece”.
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Moczarski, a trained journalist and former law student, “grasped that he had been handed the opportunity of a professional lifetime” when he was forced to bunk up with Stroop, said Roger Boyes in The Times. Guided by Moczarski’s promptings, Stroop told him everything: about his rise through the Nazi ranks; about his time setting up Jewish labour camps in southern Poland; and finally, about how he oversaw the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, which he still regarded as a “career high”.
With relish, Stroop recalled “tucking into steak and pommes frites” after spending the day watching flame-throwers being “blasted at Jews in hiding”. Asked if he ever pitied his victims, Stroop replied: “Praise be what hardens.” Superbly translated by Sean Gasper Bye, this book will “gnaw at you like a prison rat”.
Because Moczarski was forced to rely on memory, questions have been raised about the reliability of his account, said Jo Glanville in The Guardian. He argued that imprisonment had so intensified his recollections “that he could replay his conversations with Stroop as if they were a tape recording”. While writing the book after his release in 1956, he “fact-checked Stroop’s version of events” – and found that everything the SS general had told him seemed true. Moczarski died in 1975, two years before his book was finally published. It offers a “remarkable insight into the genesis and mindset of a Nazi war criminal”.
