Born in Warsaw in 1907, Kazimierz Moczarski was a Polish writer and journalist, and an officer of the Polish Home Army during the Second World War. He was in his early 30s when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and he joined the Polish resistance. He later fought in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 but was arrested in August 1945 and imprisoned in Warsaw’s notorious Mokotów Prison when the communist regime turned against the Home Army.
Then something extraordinary happened. In 1949 Moczarski was placed in a cell with two German Nazis, Gustav Schielke and Jürgen Stroop, a close confidant of Heinrich Himmler and an SS general, infamous for overseeing the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto from April 19 to May 16, 1943.
Conversations with an Executioner is Moczarski’s account of his conversations with Stroop over nearly nine months. Stroop had been sentenced to death by an American court after the war and was awaiting trial in Poland that led to his final execution in 1952. As for Moczarski, he was finally released after 11 years in prison, four years after Stroop was hanged. Conversations wasn’t published until 1977 and has just been translated into English by Sean Gasper Bye.
The opening chapters tell the story of the making of a Nazi. Born in 1895, Stroop grew up in a small garrison town. He was a provincial German Catholic, the son of a policeman, “strict, soldierly, chauvinistic”. His childhood reads like something out of the German TV series Heimat. Stroop received a basic education and volunteered to serve in the First World War where he had an undistinguished military career.
Stroop was late to signing up to Nazi organisations in 1932. He joined the SS in July and then the Nazi party in September. It was in the mid-1930s that he started rising through the SS elite and attracted the attention of Himmler, who became his patron and supporter, promoting Stroop through the ranks until by the closing stages of the war he was one of the Nazi grandees.
Then came his key promotion. On April 15, 1943 he was in Lviv when the phone rang. Himmler wanted Stroop to liquidate the Warsaw Ghetto. He was put in charge of the murder of more than 70,000 Polish Jews (including Moczarski’s brother). Stroop’s account is full of Nazi euphemisms. “When Stroop used terms like ‘resettle’ or ‘Sonderbehandlung’ (special treatment), ‘resolving the question’, ‘catching’ Jews, we knew exactly what he meant,” writes Moczarski.
The central 80 pages of the book describe the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. There are breathtaking moments in Stroop’s account of what he calls “the Great Operation”. He refers to “the “paratroopers”: “Jewish men, women and children jumping from the windows, balconies and attics of houses whose ground floor was [set] on fire. They’d hit the ground, on tarmac and cobblestone. Before that they’d throw down eiderdowns, blankets, and other bedclothes to land on. My SS men started calling them ‘paratroopers’. The fun [sic] went on all night...”
What is astonishing is not Stroop’s complete indifference to the suffering of the Jews but Moczarski’s restraint during the nine months of these conversations about Stroop’s terrible career. Occasionally, Moczarski, and even the other German cellmate, lose patience with Stroop. But what is so fascinating about Conversations with an Executioner, and what makes it one of the outstanding books of the year, is Moczarski’s determination to find out what made a Nazi and to find out what he could about the inside story of one of the most terrible events of the Holocaust.
Conversations with an Executioner, by Kazimierz Moczarski is translated by Sean Gasper Bye and published by Duckworth
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