Civility in Uncivil Times

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The Publication is funded by Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the
Republic of Poland as a part of the National Programme for the Development of
the Humanities. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the
Ministry cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information
contained therein.

The cover Illustration courtesy of Eugeniusz Lokajski.

©Anna Machcewicz

ISSN 2191-3293 ∙ ISBN 978-3-631-82808-3 (Print)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-83401-5 (E-PDF) ∙ E-ISBN 978-3-631-83402-2 (EPUB)

E-ISBN 978-3-631-83403-9 (MOBI) ∙ DOI 10.3726/b17517

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About the author

The Author
Anna Machcewicz is an assistant professor in the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. She was a research fellow at Yale University and Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena. Her main research fields are the social history of Communism and democratic opposition in Poland.

About the book

Anna Machcewicz

Civility in Uncivil Times

Kazimierz Moczarski (1907–1975) was a journalist, soldier, and political prisoner. His life exemplifies a Central European biography under Nazism and Comunism. The addictive and moving Civility in Uncivil Times reveals the story of a man who defended law and democracy all his life. Moczarski fought for it in the authoritarian Poland of the 1930s. During the Second World War, he partook in the resistance movement. After the war, he spent eleven years in a Stalinist prison, including nine months in one cell with the Nazi Jürgen Stroop, who commanded the brutal pacification of the Warsaw Ghetto. The communists imprisoned Moczarski’s wife. After release, he rebuilt the broken marriage, rejoined social life, and wrote a work about meeting Stroop. Translated into many languages, Conversations with the Executioner is a thorough study of totalitarianism.

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Introduction

Chapter One: A Dream of Poland

Chapter Two: The German Occupation

Chapter Three: The Warsaw Uprising

Chapter Four: The End of the Underground State

Chapter Five: The First Trial

Chapter Six: The Investigation from Hell

Chapter Seven: Zofia, Zosia, Zofijka

Chapter Eight: A Difficult Freedom

Chapter Nine: Life’s Many Currents

Chapter Ten: Conversations with an Executioner

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

On 2 March 1949, Kazimierz Moczarski, one of the thousands of Poland’s political prisoners, was moved into a new cell in a prison in Warsaw’s Mokotów district. He found himself face to face with SS General Jürgen Stroop. During the war Moczarski had served in the anti-German underground, the Home Army.

Stroop had been responsible for the bloody liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto in April–May 1943. For Moczarski, facing a criminal and an enemy with whose system he had engaged in a life-or-death struggle for six years, this was a situation straight out of Shakespeare. They would spend nine months together, and every day Moczarski listened to Stroop talk. The fact that each man had reasons to believe that he would not come out of prison alive made Stroop extremely candid.

However, things turned out differently. Or, rather, justice was served.

Stroop was hanged in Warsaw in 1951. The Polish media did not cover his trial or his execution very extensively. Moczarski was sentenced to death, pardoned and released after Poland emerged from Stalinism in 1956, and later rehabilitated.

Moczarski would never forget his time with Stroop. He understood that the prison discussions taught him something important. Stroop’s was not only a crime story but, more importantly, an account of the evolution of a criminal. Moczarski told it dispassionately, with detachment and, despite the ostensibly casual form of reportage he chose, he gave us a profound vivisection of a killer. His book Conversations with an Executioner appeared more than twenty years after he was released.

The whole world watched Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961. Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem appeared in 1963. Unlike Moczarski, Arendt did not meet the executioner she wrote about, but only observed his trial. Still, this eminent philosopher gave us an astute portrait of the dutiful Nazi. Her reflections on “ordinary” men’s readiness to commit crimes, the law’s shortcomings and the limited opportunities to settle scores for crimes have entered the canons of learning and of literature.

Poland was cut off from the world by the Iron Curtain, and so Moczarski did not have an opportunity to read Arendt’s book. It is all the more astounding to juxtapose the books, as the two portraits intertwine to confirm her thesis about the “banality of evil.”

He was born in a teachers’ home, which was driven by a tradition of engagement in pro-independence activity, and he became active in public life already as a university student. He joined the Youth Legion, which adhered closely to Józef Piłsudski, for many Poles a legendary leader who was instrumental in Poland’s rebirth in 1918. However, Piłsudski’s people gradually turned to authoritarian ways. Moczarski left the Youth Legion in mid-1934 and travelled in France, where he came close to the left and observed the growing Fascist and National Socialist threats. Searching for his own ideology after returning to Poland, he ←8 | 9→finally opted for the Democratic Club movement of the liberal-democratic and secular intelligentsia, which attracted a range of people, from the anti-Fascist left all the way to Communist sympathisers. However, as a promoter of compromise and discussions in which ideas clashed, Moczarski fundamentally opposed all radicalism. While he was sensitive to social injustice, he was also wholly resistant to the era’s revolutionary enthusiasts who wanted to change the world. He respected the law and the social contract. He viewed the world critically and fought for principles rooted not in utopian ideals but in Positivist work that would change public ethics. His ideological choices were rooted in the late-nineteenth-century ethical tradition of radical intelligentsia. This thinking, very characteristic of a large part of the pre-war Polish intelligentsia, lay in the best traditions of civic engagement.