Conversations with an Executioner

'For 255 days, Moczarski listened. The verb is too pallid for the feat. He probed, needled, circled back, and challenged Stroop’s self-account. The result is Conversations with an Executioner, a censored version published in Poland in 1977 and now expertly translated by Sean Gasper Bye in the first full English edition' Benjamin Balint, New Statesman

'Brilliantly translated by Sean Gasper Bye... It’s a book that won’t leave you alone, which will gnaw at you like a prison rat' The Times

'A chilling classic' Guardian

'One of the most extraordinary testimonies of the 20th century... As historical testimony, Conversations is unique. It is yet more precious, however, as a model of how to behave when we are confronted—literally and inescapably—with our enemies... Why we have had to wait 45 years for a complete translation is hard to imagine... I too shall remember Conversations with an Executioner, above all, for what [the translator Sean Gasper] Bye refers to as “the supreme integrity of Kazimierz Moczarski’s life, struggle and witness"' Robert Chandler, Prospect

'Conversations with an Executioner is an extraordinary and horrifying book... Sean Gasper Bye's translation from the Polish is fluent and unobtrusive... What makes Moczarski's book so fascinating is not just the extraordinary detail of events and people, but his portrait of the Nazi mind' Caroline Moorehead, Times Literary Supplement

'A Polish classic which evokes the past but also sheds light on the predicaments of the present' Anne Applebaum, author of Autocracy, Inc

‘This is a remarkable document. By turns shocking and chilling but always compelling, Moczarski's prison conversations with a senior, serial and shameless Nazi killer provide an invaluable insight into the heart of a hideous ideology' Jonathan Dimbleby, author of Endgame 1944

'An extraordinary book, almost impossible to categorise: simultaneously an act of witness and a work of the imagination, a brilliant portrait of a mediocre man’s rise within the Nazi hierarchy, unsparing and yet deeply human' Jane Rogoyska, author of Hotel Exile

‘Extraordinary, original, gripping, and painfully relevant to our times’ Philippe Sands, author of 38 Londres Street

'This is a fascinating and totally unexpected account of one of the darkest periods of the Second World War' Antony Beevor, author of Rasputin

'An intriguing document that portrays Stroop as the exemplary perpetrator: a mediocrity promoted above his abilities, but fanatical in his allegiance to Hitler, Himmler and Nazi ideology. Moczarski, working from memory, brings to light the workings of the Nazi mind with penetrating insight' Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History

'A remarkable feat of reportage and timely insight into the Nazi mind' Charlie English, author of The CIA Book Club

'Moczarski’s Conversations with an Executioner is quite simply one of the most remarkable books to emerge out of World War Two. Part unlikely memoir and part biography, it gives an insight into the Nazi mind that is as fascinating as it is chilling. Outstanding' Roger Moorhouse, author of Wolfpack: Inside Hitler’s U-Boat War 

'A richly textured three-dimensional portrait of a two-dimensional mass murderer who presided over the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, never revealing a hint of a conscience. Although Hannah Arendt did not coin the phrase "the banality of evil" until much later, Jürgen Stroop already embodied it' Andrew Nagorski, author of Saving Freud

'This fascinating revelation of how a good little middle-class boy turns into a Nazi mass-murderer is all the more chilling for the forensic, at times witty, style in which his horrified cellmate and near-victim records it. A page-turner and must-read for understanding the workings of the Holocaust' Adam Zamoyski, author of Poland: A History

'We have the recorded speech of Nazi monsters; some delivered from the dock of postwar trials, some in the distorted recollections of surviving memoirs. But this is unique. These "conversations" are the product of months of forced proximity, gleaned and shaped by a cellmate with the journalistic skills to produce one of the most arresting portraits of Nazi malevolence in free fall. The result is a searing picture of what it took to be one of Htiler's most gleeful executioners. Riveting and sickening in equal measure' Martin Davidson, author of The Perfect Nazi

'Essential reading for all those interested in the Nazi occupation of Poland, the mass murder of Polish Jews and the larger history of the Second World War' Antony Polonsky, Emeritus Professor of Holocaust Studies, Brandeis University and Chief Historian, Global Education Outreach Project, Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw

'A masterpiece of 20th-century literature' Daily Telegraph

‘This is a work of significant literary and historical significance’ All About History Magazine

'A masterpiece of unique perspective' The Week

'A bleak depiction of the personality of a war criminal—and the systems that made his appalling behaviour possible' Prospect

'What is so fascinating about Conversations with an Executioner, and what makes it one of the outstanding books of the year, is Moczarski’s determination to find out what made a Nazi and to find out what he could about the inside story of one of the most terrible events of the Holocaust' David Herman, Jewish Chronicle

'Only now is this remarkable book being published in the U.K. in a fluid new English translation by Sean Gasper Bye... What is fascinating and often chilling about Conversations is the complex drama of Moczarski’s three actors' Jonathan Levi, European Literature Network