Steerforth, an imprint of Pushkin Press, published on Tuesday the first uncensored English translation of 'Conversations with an Executioner,' a book by Polish journalist and resistance fighter Kazimierz Moczarski documenting his conversations with Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi commander who led the suppression of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the killing of more than 50,000 Jews.
First uncensored English translation of 'Conversations with an Executioner' published after decades of delays
Steerforth, an imprint of Pushkin Press, published on Tuesday the first uncensored English translation of 'Conversations with an Executioner,' a book by Polish journalist and resistance fighter Kazimierz Moczarski documenting his conversations with Jürgen Stroop, the Nazi commander who led the suppression of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the killing of more than 50,000 Jews.
Moczarski shared a cell with Stroop at Mokotów Prison in Warsaw for 255 days in 1949, after Poland's postwar Communist regime imprisoned him on the basis that his resistance group, the Home Army, was a quasi-fascist organization that had collaborated with the Nazis — a characterization the source describes as baseless. Moczarski spent 11 years in prison, where he later recounted enduring 49 methods of torture.
During World War II, Moczarski worked for the Home Army's Office of Information and Propaganda, participated in the assassination of Stroop's predecessor Franz Kutschera, made an unsuccessful attempt to kill Stroop, and later fought in the citywide Warsaw Uprising. The Nazis crushed that revolt, resulting in the deaths of more than 160,000 Poles, including approximately 17,000 Polish Jews.
Stroop, described by Moczarski as a middle-class German with limited education and a drive to advance through military ranks, gave Moczarski a day-by-day account of his orders to crush the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, during which his forces burned the ghetto block by block over nearly a month. Stroop referred to the operations using terms such as 'neutralizing' Jews and 'cleansing' the ghetto of 'subhumans.'
A serialized version of the book appeared in the Polish magazine Odra from 1972 to 1974. Moczarski died the following year at age 68, before a censored edition appeared in 1977 — which removed references to the reasons for his imprisonment — and before an uncensored Polish edition was published in 1992 following the fall of Communism, when it became a bestseller. The book has since been translated into more than 15 languages, adapted for stage and screen, and included on required school reading lists in Poland.
The new English translation was produced by Sean Casper Bye and championed by Clare Bullock, the book's UK editor, who has Polish Jewish heritage and spent years pushing for an English edition at multiple publishing houses, according to Bye. Bye said that Cold War-era censorship, disrupted communication, and closed archives in Eastern Europe had long limited the presence of Eastern European sources in Holocaust scholarship across English-speaking countries.
- The source does not state the retail price or print run of the new Steerforth/Pushkin Press edition.
- The source does not identify which specific passages or references were removed in the 1977 censored Polish edition beyond references to the reasons for Moczarski's incarceration.
- The source does not detail the specific findings or contents of Stroop's reports obtained from the Polish Commission for Researching Nazi War Crimes or the US Pentagon archives that Moczarski used to verify facts.
- The source does not state whether any independent historians have formally assessed or verified the accuracy of the new uncensored English translation.
- The source does not explain what specific challenges to the book's authenticity as a document have been raised, beyond noting that Moczarski had no materials to take notes in the cell.
- The source does not name the previous English translation or translations of the book, if any existed prior to this uncensored edition.
Read the original at The Jerusalem Post