Conversations with an Executioner: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto

A remarkable firsthand account of the rise and fall of the Nazis told from the inside of a prison cell.

The first complete English translation of the international classic work of World War II literature and investigative journalism.

Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum-security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the death of over 50,000 people: Jürgen Stroop.

For 255 days, Stroop talks to Moczarski of his life, entirely unrepentant of the crimes for which he would soon be executed himself. Conversations with an Executioner is Moczarski’s firsthand account of these extraordinary exchanges, giving disturbing insight into the mind of one of history’s most brutal war criminals.

Through his conversations with Stroop, Moczarski details the opportunities that the rise of the Nazi party in Germany presented for marginalized, mediocre characters like Stroop to gain prestige and power under the new regime—and the consequences that came for them after its fall. Unflinchingly examining some of humanity’s darkest moments, his work is a towering literary achievement, steeped in keen journalistic enterprise and psychological insight.

Widely translated and adapted for stage and screen in over 15 languages, this lost classic of World War II literature is now available in its first ever complete English translation.

Kazimierz Moczarski was born in Warsaw in 1907, and studied law at Warsaw University and the Sorbonne. During the Nazi Germany occupation of Poland, he fought as an officer in the Polish Resistance. In 1945, he was arrested by the new Communist regime as an enemy of the state, and was sentenced to ten years in prison. It was during this time that he was locked up with the Nazi war criminal, Jürgen Stroop. After his release, Moczarski worked as a journalist, and began writing his masterpiece, Conversations with an Executioner. Moczarski died in 1975, weakened by years of torture during his time in prison.

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator from Polish. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize; and been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University. He is a Senior Consultant for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), having previously served as Interim Executive Director. He lives in Philadelphia.