A Polish resistance hero spent 255 days in a cell with the SS general who razed the Warsaw ghetto

In 1949, Polish resistance leader Kazimierz Moczarski was in his fourth year of incarceration when he was moved into a cell with two Nazis at Warsaw's Mokotów prison, The Guardian reported. One of them was SS General Jürgen Stroop, the war criminal who led the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and was responsible for the murder or capture of more than 56,000 Jews. The two men ended up sharing the same cell for 255 consecutive days, an encounter that later became a celebrated work in Poland. The Guardian reported: "They shared the same four walls for 255 consecutive days." That closeness gave Moczarski an unusually direct view of a man whose wartime brutality made him one of the most infamous figures of the Nazi occupation. "a chilling psychological portrait of a Nazi mass murderer through the lens of this extraordinary prison encounter" The Guardian's website used that phrase to describe the account, which is now appearing in English for the first time in an uncensored version, nearly 50 years after its original publication. The framing points to why the book has endured: it reads less as a dry war-crimes record and more as an unsettling study of how ideology took human form. Moczarski, described by The Guardian as a celebrated figure in modern-day Poland, produced a text that generations of Polish readers already knew. The new English edition, stripped of earlier censorship, finally lets readers outside Poland encounter the full record of those 255 days in full.

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