page_title: Conversations with an Executioner
section_title: Conversations
hierarchical_section_title: Conversations with an Executioner / Conversations
caption_attribution_description: English: Kazimierz Moczarski, officer of Polish Home Army, writer , d.1975
context_page_description: Conversations with an Executioner is a book by Kazimierz Moczarski, a Polish writer and journalist, officer of the Polish Home Army who was active in the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. On 11 August 1945, he was captured and imprisoned in a maximum-security prison by the notorious UB secret police under Stalinism. For a time, he shared the same cell with the Nazi war criminal Jürgen Stroop, who was soon to be executed. They engaged in a series of conversations. The book is a retelling of those interviews.
  Moczarski spent four years on death row, incarcerated as an alleged enemy of the state. He was tried three times while in prison as an anticommunist, and pardoned eleven years later, during the anti-Stalinist Polish October. His manuscript about Stroop, written in secrecy from 1956, was published in monthly installments by the magazine Odra in 1972–74, followed by a shortened book version released in 1977. The full text without communist censorship was published in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, by the Polish Scientific Publishers PWN. Moczarski did not witness the publication of his book.
context_section_description: The uncut Polish edition of the book by Moczarski is preceded by a Foreword written by Andrzej Szczypiorski and followed by his Biography and Glossary of German names and terms by Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert. The book is composed of 26 chapters each with a separate title, and structured like a traditional biography beginning with the description of their first meeting in prison, and then continuing in a chronological order from the subject's birth until his execution, with additional themes weaved into the central story. Moczarski and Stroop were not alone in the cell. The third inmate was SS-Untersturmführer Gustav Schieike from the Waffen-SS originally from Hanover. All three slept on narrow mattresses placed on the floor for the night. There was a retractable wall bed in the cell, which none of them used out of respect for the others.
  Stroop derived considerable pleasure from talking, due to Moczarski's genuine interest in every detail of his story, a new focus and a reason to live. Stroop described the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto after the Ghetto uprising in minute detail, eager to mention the foreign Hilfswilliger ("willing helpers") in the death of over 50,000 Polish Jews: "They did not understand Polish," he said, "and therefore, were unable to communicate with the people of Warsaw. This was exactly what we wanted. We called them Trawniki men." Moczarski translated his interior monologues in the first person, and did not dramatize any of the admittedly irrational parts.
  The book, written in Polish and published as Rozmowy z katem in 1978 by Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, was translated to English and published in 1981 by Prentice-Hall as Conversations with an Executioner. Prominent translations include German, as Gespräche mit dem Henker, published by Droste, Düsseldorf, in 1978; French, as Entretiens avec le bourreau by Gallimard, Paris, in 1979; Hebrew, as Śiḥot ʻim talyan by Loḥame ha-Geṭaʼot, Tel Aviv, in 1979–80; Czech, as Rozhovory s katem by Jota, Brno, in 2007; and Ukrainian, as Besìdi z katom by Černìvcì in 2009, among several others.
caption: Kazimierz Moczarski, c. 1956
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