Conversations with an Executioner

Conversations with an Executioner (Polish: Rozmowy z katem) 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 (1952–1956), 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 1972–1974, 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. He died on 27 September 1975 in Warsaw, weakened by the years of physical torture endured during his police interrogations.