Moczarski, Kazimierz
MOCZARSKI, Kazimierz
Nationality: Polish. Born: 1907. Education: University of Paris, degree in law 1932. Military Service: Armia Krajowa (Polish underground) during World War II. Career: Worked as a journalist and for the Polish State administration before World War II; head, investigative division, District Board of the Underground Struggle of Warsaw, c. 1944; head, Home Army Information and Propaganda Bureau; imprisoned, 1945-56; journalist, beginning in 1956. Involved with Polish Journalistic Association and Democratic Party, beginning in 1956. Editor, Problemy Alkoholizmu (Warsaw). Died: 1975.
Publication
Memoirs
Rozmowy z katem. 1977; as The Conversations with an Executioner, edited by Mariana Fitzpatrick, 1981.
Zapiski, with Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert. 1990.
Other
Alkohol w kulturze i obyczaju, with Jana Górskiego. 1972. Po powstaniu. 1980.
* * *Kazimierz Moczarski is the author of a book entitled The Conversations with an Executioner. It is a record of his conversations with Jurgen Stroop, an SS general, the liquidator of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 and the person responsible for sending the Jews of Greece to Auschwitz. Moczarski was sentenced by a Stalinist court to death, and in 1949, while awaiting his execution, he spent 225 days in a cell of the Mokotov prison with a German war criminal whose execution Moczarski had been preparing during the war pursuant to the death sentence passed by the Polish underground movement.
Moczarski was born in 1907 in Warsaw. He graduated from the law department in 1932. He also studied journalism and international relations at the Institute des Etudes Internationales at the Law Department of the University of Paris. Before the war he worked for the Polish State administration and as a journalist. The analytical mind of a lawyer and the cognitive passion of a journalist were later reflected in his famous book.
From the earliest months of the German occupation Moczarski was connected with the Polish Home Army, subject to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. He worked for the Home Army Information and Propaganda Bureau. From January 1944 he was the head of the investigative division in the District Board of the Underground Struggle of Warsaw. Therefore, he was in charge of the investigations conducted against the traitors of the Polish nation, and he passed death sentences. During the 63 days of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he was the head of the Home Army Information and Propaganda Bureau. After the coming of the Red Army, he was active in the underground movement until the day of its formal dissolution by the government in London.
Moczarski was arrested and imprisoned on 11 August 1945. In January 1946 the Communists sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Amnesty brought him mitigation to five years, and he was conditionally set free. The Supreme Court, however, declared the mitigation void, and he was imprisoned for five years. In November 1948 a new investigation was instituted against him, and 49 torture methods were used on him. From 2 March to 11 November 1949 he was imprisoned in one cell with Stroop. On 18 November 1952 a Communist court sentenced Moczarski to death pursuant to a decree on punishing the traitors of the Polish nation and the Nazi criminals. In October 1953 the Supreme Court changed the penalty to life imprisonment. In April 1956 he was released from prison, and on 11 December he was completely rehabilitated. After beginning a normal life Moczarski resumed journalism and was involved in the activity of the Polish Journalistic Association as well as in political activity as a member of the Democratic Party. In both those organizations he was, among others, a vice president of the members' arbitration organ.
The work of his life—The Conversations with an Executioner— is one of the most important nonfiction books in Polish literature. As a prisoner who shared the cell with Stroop, Moczarski decided to write a book in order to answer the question concerning the historical, psychological, and sociological mechanism that made some Germans form a group of slaughterers who governed the Reich and attempted to introduce their Ordnung in Europe and in the world. Another unrevealed intention of the author was to reach the Polish audience, in spite of the censorship, and accuse the totalitarian Communist system of its crimes committed on the Polish patriots from the Home Army.
A well-known part of the book deals with the murder of 70,000 Polish Jews during the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. That genocide brought Stroop Nazi distinctions and a promotion. Moczarski encouraged Stroop to enunciation in order to hear his story and to understand his mentality.
The basic issue in this report is the question of Stroop's sincerity. The author insists that spending many months together in one prison cell makes people sincere. Moczarski thinks that to a considerable extent Stroop showed his real face. Before writing the book he additionally confronted the information obtained from him with other sources.
Moczarski was a witness of the extermination of the Warsaw Jews. As a soldier and a member of the Home Army Information and Propaganda Bureau he met many people who analyzed the situation of the Polish Jews and were involved in helping them. In his book, written in the 1970s, Moczarski remains nobly faithful to his conspiratorial function and—what has not been stressed by the critics—he slightly idealizes the Polish-Jewish relationships during the war. But the latter are not the crucial issue of the book, which is a significant testimony of the times of the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism.
—Kazimierz Adamczyk
See the essay on The Conversations with an Executioner.