Polish resistance fighter's chilling prison talks with Nazi killer finally reach English readers

A Polish war hero spent 255 days locked in a cell with one of Nazi Germany's most brutal killers. Nearly five decades later, the world can finally read what they talked about.

Kazimierz Moczarski was a resistance fighter doing time in Warsaw's Mokotów prison in 1949 when guards threw him in with two German Nazis. One was Jürgen Stroop, an SS general who'd orchestrated the Warsaw ghetto's destruction and murdered or captured over 56,000 Jews. The two men shared those four walls for more than eight months straight.

Moczarski, fluent in German, saw an opportunity. Instead of just surviving, he started asking questions. Real ones. He wanted to understand how ordinary Germans became mass murderers, how they justified imposing their brutal "Ordnung" — order — across Europe. He documented everything in a book called Conversations with an Executioner.

The thing is, Moczarski himself was considered dangerous back home. Poland's communist government had arrested him after the war, accused him of collaboration alongside other resistance members. Being a celebrated figure in the underground didn't protect him. So he sat there in that cell, talking to a man responsible for unimaginable atrocities, and wrote down the conversations.

When the book dropped in 1977, it became an instant bestseller in Poland. A year later, legendary director Andrzej Wajda turned it into a stage production. But English-speaking readers never got their hands on it — at least not officially. The translations that existed were censored, edited down, stripped of pieces the authorities didn't want circulating.

This month changes that. Sean Gasper Bye's new English translation is uncensored, the first complete version available to British and American readers. It's 50 years late, but it's finally here.

The book sits somewhere between true crime and psychological investigation — a rare window into how someone becomes capable of that kind of evil. Moczarski wasn't there to judge or moralize. He was trying to understand the machinery of genocide from the inside, from the mouth of someone who'd run part of it. That makes it uncomfortable to read, probably. But also necessary.