Con­ver­sa­tions with an Exe­cu­tion­er, orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten in Pol­ish and now ful­ly trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish for the first time by Sean Gasper Bye, is one of the most dis­turb­ing mem­oirs to emerge from the Holo­caust. Its premise is almost unbe­liev­able: in 1949, Kaz­imierz Moczars­ki, a non-Jew­ish Pol­ish resis­tance fight­er impris­oned by Poland’s post­war com­mu­nist regime, was placed in a cell with Jür­gen Stroop, the SS com­man­der who over­saw the destruc­tion of the War­saw Ghet­to. For 255 days, the anti-Nazi resis­tance fight­er con­versed with the man respon­si­ble for one of the defin­ing crimes in the destruc­tion of Euro­pean Jewry.

The book’s pow­er lies in Moczarski’s refusal to por­tray Stroop as demon­ic or excep­tion­al. Instead, Stroop emerges as a recog­ni­tion-hun­gry bureau­crat turned mass mur­der­er, defined by absolute obe­di­ence to author­i­ty. In this depic­tion, Moczars­ki forces the read­er to con­front a cen­tral ques­tion of Holo­caust his­to­ry: how does an unex­cep­tion­al man, moti­vat­ed by careerism, loy­al­ty, con­for­mi­ty, and pride, become an instru­ment of extra­or­di­nary destruction?

Moczars­ki is more than a neu­tral observ­er. He press­es Stroop on his eva­sions, chal­lenges his self-jus­ti­fy­ing fan­tasies, and pre­serves the ten­sion between what Stroop says and what his words expose. The book also records a post­war tragedy as Moczars­ki was impris­oned and bru­tal­ized by com­mu­nist author­i­ties who had also opposed the Nazis. There is bleak irony in the fact that the Pol­ish gov­ern­ment would place an anti-Nazi Pole and a Nazi in the same predicament. 

Chap­ter 18, titled ​“Aber ein guter Mann!” (“But a Good Man!”), is one of the book’s most dis­turb­ing. Stroop recounts the destruc­tion of Warsaw’s Great Syn­a­gogue with sat­is­fac­tion and then cal­cu­lates the num­ber of Jews killed or cap­tured dur­ing the oper­a­tion. He also describes the theft of Jew­ish homes and imag­ines Nazi vil­las ris­ing on the ghetto’s ruins. At the same time, the Nazi acknowl­edges that the insur­gents repeat­ed­ly sur­prised Ger­man forces, built hun­dreds of bunkers, and turned a planned short oper­a­tion into weeks of cost­ly urban com­bat. Moczars­ki answers Stroop’s mil­i­tary boast­ing with per­cep­tion. The Ger­man commander’s essen­tial fail­ure was not the length of the upris­ing, but that he fought a bat­tle whose pur­pose was geno­cide. The Nazis may have won the bat­tle, but the vic­to­ry goes to Moczarski.

This chap­ter rep­re­sents the book’s great­est achieve­ment. Stroop’s lan­guage, includ­ing his euphemisms, cal­cu­la­tions, racial pseu­do­science, pro­fes­sion­al van­i­ty, and moments of boast­ful can­dor, shows how geno­cide becomes pos­si­ble with­in a sys­tem that has first stripped its vic­tims of human­i­ty. The hor­ror is not only in what Stroop did, but also in the non­cha­lance with which he relates it. Moczars­ki pro­tects the his­tor­i­cal and moral truth that Stroop tries to con­trol. The Jew­ish fight­ers’ courage exposed the bank­rupt­cy of Nazi anti­semitism: a regime that defined Jews as cow­ard­ly and sub­hu­man encoun­tered resis­tance root­ed in sol­i­dar­i­ty, dig­ni­ty, and deter­mi­na­tion. 

Con­ver­sa­tions with an Exe­cu­tion­er is painful to read. Yet when read not only as Moczarski’s study of a Nazi per­pe­tra­tor but also as a work of moral clar­i­ty, it becomes a vivid reminder of our oblig­a­tion to ques­tion author­i­ty, val­ue human­i­ty, and resist evil wher­ev­er it appears.