Majesty
The Nazi dignitary sometimes was also surprisingly sincere:
The Jews surprised me and my officers […] with their determination in battle. And believe me, as veterans of World War I and SS members, we knew what determination in battle was all about. The tenacity of your Warsaw Jews took us completely by surprise. That's the real reason the Grossaktion lasted as long as it did.'
On 30th June, 1943, the General had the opportunity to face a real Polish army man – divisional General Stefan ‘Grot’ Rowecki, the commanding officer of the Home Army, who had just been arrested.
I could see him clearly through the open door. I must admit, Herr Moczarski, that he impressed me enormously. Although he was dressed in civilian clothes, it was obvious that he was a soldier of great distinction, who could fight effectively under guerrilla conditions without the help of uniforms and other military trappings. I'd heard about his courage and military expertise but was unprepared for his noble bearing. In spite of his exhaustion, his face was calm and serene. Although we were delighted in principal [sic] to be holding a captive of such importance, none of us really enjoyed seeing him under arrest. A most remarkable man! […] It was an unforgettable moment. Although 'Grot' was our deadly enemy, I was reminded of Feldmarschall August von Mackensen in 1918.'
In the first five Polish book editions, published between 1977 and 1985, two sentences, in which Stroop talks about the General's qualities and the subsequent statements, were censored out without any annotation, even though they had been previously included in the serial reportage published in Odra (no. 5, 1973).
The excerpt in which Stroop describes his eight-year-old son Olaf, whom he gifted chamois boots and an SS uniform sends shivers up and down one's spine. The child, armed with a dagger and a real, loaded Italian rifle, ‘supervised’ prisoners working for his father on his Wiesbaden property.
The price of heroism
The seventeenth Polish edition of Conversations with an Executioner (Kraków: Znak, 2009), includes an introduction by Norman Davies, who exposed the flawed the conviction that Second World War was a ‘straightforward, bipolar conflict between Good and Evil; between the democratic countries and their fascist enemy.’
After the victory of 1945, Stalin openly condemned Western democracy, treating its representatives with as much contempt as the defeated fascists. Thus, according to the communist logic, the decision to put Moczarski, the Polish resistance soldier in the same cell as with SS General Jürgen Stroop, who was co-responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, was completely natural. Even though Moczarski and his fellow Home Army soldiers fought the Nazis with determination and sacrifice, the communists did not hesitate to sentence him to death, as a collaborator. In Polish reality, Moczarski's fate plainly illustrates the determination of the Polish regime under Soviet control. Moczarski belonged to an educated, politically conscious social class, which in normal circumstances would take over the power after the war, however instead it was cut off from it.
Norman Davies, Introduction to Kazimierz Moczarski, Rozmowy z katem (Conversations with an Executioner), Kraków (2009)
The same edition of the book, carefully prepared by Andrzej Krzysztof Kunert, is also exceptional thank to its annex, which contains, among others, a description of 49 kinds of ‘maltreatments and tortures’ which Moczarski was subjected to during interrogations, cited from his letter, which he sent from the Sztum prison to the Chief Military Prosecutor Office in Warsaw in February 1955. The book also contains texts by several prominent writers – significant voices which enrich the knowledge about Kazimierz Moczarski and his opus vitae, such as the following description by Tadeusz Konwicki, who spoke to Moczarski soon after his liberation.
Sitting across from me, he was waxy yellow, yellow with that deathbed yellowness which I knew from elsewhere, knew well. Bones large and small, jutted against his gray-yellow skin; from time to time a tendon would tremble, cylindrical, not as pointed and sharp-edged as those terrible bones of his. When he spoke the blackened stumps of his teeth were revealed, terrible gaps where teeth had been knocked out. His eyes, yes, his eyes, were beautiful. Alive, young, not tortured by prison. Yes, all right, I will praise his eyes because I wanted to praise something about that remnant of a man, that human scrap from which no one could ever reconstruct the marvelous daredevil he'd been in the good old days of the German occupation.
'Excuse me for asking, but how much did you weigh before you went to prison?' I asked.
‘A little under two hundred,’ replied that shriveled chicken of a man.
The sight of him pained my heart, some terrible choking fear seized my throat, my skull rang in horrendous dismay, and I felt like running out of there, but there was no running out. Yes, in some way I was responsible for his fate, I felt guilty that the regime in People's Poland had held him in prison, on death row, for all those months, that Security men had knocked out his teeth and broken his fingers with their heels, that he, a Home Army officer, had waited for death on death row with a Nazi SS general, who had helped slaughter the Warsaw ghetto.
I was sitting across from one of the leaders of the Home Army, one of those people on whom I had turned my childish wrath in '45, the wrath of a generation that had lost the game, a rebellious generation that cursed its own fathers and leaders. Later on, I was to feather my own nest while he was being plucked clean. Still later, I would struggle to lose weight while he struggled with approaching death. Then I … then he … No, no, he was victorious in the end no question of that, even though he had lost, even though he had lost a large piece of his life.
‘But how could you stand up to prison, torture, death?’
I knew that he knew what I meant. Because both of us already knew the value of heroism and cowardice, the greatness and the poverty of being human. I had already read fragments of his book. He was a fellow Polish writer. With more character than I, a life more worthy of respect.
‘You see, they made a certain mistake,’ he said, speaking hurriedly. ‘They wanted to break my spirit and so they told me that my wife and daughter were both dead. Meanwhile, I realized that now I was all alone, no longer responsible for anyone else, I couldn't jeopardize or burden anyone, I was utterly alone and therefore I was a free man. From that moment on, they didn't stand a chance with me. I took it all the best I could. I was able to stand up to everything, but in other psychological circumstances I might not have been able to.’
I was grateful to him for that human, wise, and beautiful element in his interpretation of his own vile and inhuman fate. And in his words I could also detect a certain forgiveness for my transgressions, my betrayals, my mortal sins.
Tadeusz Konwicki, Moonrise, Moonset, New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1987
Kazimierz Moczarski
Conversations with an Executioner
edited by Mariana Fitzpatrick
published: Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice-Hall, 1981
dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 in
hardcover, 282 pages
ISBN: 978-01-317-1918-7 Author: Janusz R. Kowalczyk, transl. AM, May 2016