CONVERSATIONS WITH AN EXECUTIONER: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto

CONVERSATIONS WITH AN EXECUTIONER: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto
KAZIMIERZ MOCZARSKI (tr. Sean Gasper Bye)
Steerforth Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and the death of over 50,000 people: Jürgen Stroop.

For 255 days Stroop talks to Moczarski of his life, entirely unrepentant of the crimes for which he would soon be executed himself. Conversations with an Executioner is Moczarski's first-hand account of these extraordinary exchanges, an insight into the mind of one of history's most brutal war criminals, and one that unflinchingly examines some of humanity's darkest moments.

Never before published in the United Kingdom, Conversations with an Executioner is a book of enormous historical importance, written in masterful prose by a writer who tragically wouldn't survive to see his work published.

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My Review: Chilling, sobering, appalling, revolting.

If you're wondering who the January 6th/ICE criminals are when they're alone with their thoughts, this is the book to tell you the nauseating truth. A person of no curiosity, no accomplishments of mind, no apparent capacity for self-reflection or empathy. A creature of appetites without moral guardrails that he shared with his cellmate as he waited out his time before execution. A simple mind that craved the validation of his own importance received from patently manufactured myths of Honor and Valor in committing vile acts of cruelty, allowing him to believe his basest urges were noble...ennobling his acts. It really startles me that this guff works in the twenty-first century.

The author was only alive because the Stalinist government post-WWII wanted to physically (in the usual ways) and psychologically (by having him share a cell with Stroop) coerce him into admitting he told lies about their Stalinism's resemblance to Nazism. To resist them in his mind, he thoroughly interviewed Stroop, working the details into his memory, using the horrifying scum's self-confessed deeds to shore up his own rightness and righteousness.

It's here I have to confess that I wobble a little. Moczarski was in the cell with Stroop until his 1949 execution. Moczarski was not freed from the threat of execution and the actuality of torture until 1956, the post-Stalin awakening. He did not write stuff down in that cell. It's true that psychological abuse creates hypervigilance...I suffer from it...and a truly demonically exhaustive memory, but seven years of gap allows things to get muddled, some to get lost, most to fade.

Fact-checking what's fact-checkable doesn't turn up glaring obvious fabrications. But so very much of the stories' content is, at best, only checkable in broad strokes. I don't think Moczarski set out to exaggerate or to create more awful deeds than Moczarski spoke of. I think he told the truth about what he was told. It's still hard for me to say I think his account is inerrant; and the accusations Stroop leveled against himself in his own words are appalling enough to require me to leave room for Stroop to speak with misguided self-aggrandizement.

It makes the modern Gaza genocide more starkly evil.

ADA, latest fascinating idea made into a story by the eminent funny intellectual Mark Haber

ADA
MARK HABER
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 5 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: From “one of the most rigorous and serious—and anachronistic—novelists working today” (The Washington Post) comes a raucous new tale plumbing the depths of ego and ardor.

In a remote country in Europe, Gerard Desacroux IX, petty tyrant and French nationalist, wants nothing more than to be reunited with Ada, the object of his desire ever since their brief fling in Paris years before. Though Ada is on her way to visit, there are the unfortunate matters of civil unrest, assassination attempts, and Ada’s affluent (and highly inconvenient) husband to contend with before bliss is attained. Despite it all, Desacroux IX is determined that nothing—neither war, nor ominous weather, nor the rising swell of indignant peasants—shall stand between him and Ada.

Told with Mark Haber’s trademark exuberant absurdity, Ada is a comedy about the mania of power, unrequited love, and the solitude of authority.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Berchtesgaden. Are you even serious right now. Berchtesgaden! And Desacroux being shoved out of Paris because of THE Revolution, being scion of a lineage of disgusting fascist scum! Readerly nose, meet authorial fist.

And it *barely* takes him a hundred pages to whomp up this recipe for tart-tongued satire of entitlement. It's a fast-moving read, it doesn't have digressions or discursions to slow Desacroux's millrace of thoughts as he settles into Berchtesgaden (seriously, follow the link above...it makes this read exquisitely funny!) with the intent to claim what is not his for purposes malign and bland at the same time. It goes...not well, really for anyone but most definitely hastens Desacroux's comeuppance.

At every turn, he's hemmed in, he lives in a tine, muddy place of no significance after being thrown off the world stage for utter incompetence and uselessness. Desacroux paces in circles around his "Great" Room, abusing and being abused by Hans the sole servant; when the people rise against him, he retreats into the Sword Closet, an even smaller space than the "Great" Room, one with the trappings of power all around him...and he never grasps a single one, relying on isolation to "protect" him from consequences from his real-world abuses of power. Trapped with the trappings of power, weapons he does not have the skill or the wit to wield, fearful and waspish with it, utterly determined to possess *some*thing so he chooses a woman.

Reliably a safe choice for controlling men throughout history. It's here I got to thinking about Ada, or Ardor, Nabokov's longest work of fiction with its alternative world that so deftly, so lovingly, dissects the loss of the illusion of power by dwelling on its exterior trappings; both puissance, and intimate power are lost, misused, made into glue-traps of self-delusion and narcissism. The title, obviously, is a source of my mental leap from a short satire to a long and complicated exploration of similar themes. The sound of the word "Ada" is important in both works, but I don't think it's ever obvious they're related. Maybe they aren't, in Author Haber's purposeful use of brevity, more than coincidentally resonant and then only in my fevered head. Though I'll counsel anyone who starts this read and feels like abandoning it to read it aloud to youself for a page or two: This is performative language, meant to be performed, to be inhabited like its not-quite-our reality. Make the sounds, speak the vision into your world. It will change your experience for the better. (I do this with Nabokov's prose, too.)

It did make my propulsive experience of this single paragraph of a read more piquant, so I hope it was really in Author Haber's mind nit solely mine. The fate of each Ada, and her illicit suitor, is oddly enough not the real point of the story. It ends not with a bang but a whimper, like most people's lives do without regard to their egocentric self-aggrandizement. It's here that I dock my tenth of a star from a perfect five. Desacroux clearly believes he is fated for the ending of a Great Man, and nothing short of that is an ending. *I* think he deserves to be beaten almost to death, then thrown into a muddy ditch to drown while dying of thirst: "...the importance of literature and books, not the books themselves, I’ve said, quite frankly books bore me, but the presence of books is vital, because the absence of books is quite disastrous, the proximity of books, the symbolic importance of owning books, cannot be overstated, and having books around, read or not, speaks to the intellectual vigor and peerless ambitions of their owner," and "...my grandfather stupidly, ridiculously, decided not only to purchase books and collect books and surround himself with books, which, as I’ve already said, is fine and good, but also to read them, the fool!"

Off with his authorial head, I say in my Red Queen voice, for even crafting these sentences! For sinful wicked shame on you, Haber!

A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children
HALEY COHEN GILLILAND
Avid Reader Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

FINALIST FOR THE 2026 PULITZER PRIZE FOR GENERAL NONFICTION!!

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2025!

One of BookPage's 10 Best Books of 2025!

A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For readers of Say Nothing and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the epic, true story of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, grandmothers who fought to find their stolen grandchildren during Argentina’s brutal dictatorship.

In the early hours of March 24th, 1976, the streets of Buenos Aires rumbled with tanks as soldiers seized the presidential palace, overthrowing Argentina’s leader. To many, it seemed like just another coup in a continent troubled by them, amid political violence and Cold War tensions. But there was something darker about this new regime. Quietly supported by the United States and much of Argentina itself, which was sick of constant bombings and gunfights, the junta quickly launched the “National Reorganization Process” or El Proceso—a bland name masking their ruthless campaign to crush the political left and instill the country with “Western, Christian” values. The dictatorship, which continued until 1983, decimated a generation.

One of the military’s most diabolical acts was the disappearance of hundreds of pregnant women. Patricia Roisinblit was among them, a mother and leftist revolutionary labeled “subversive” and abducted while eight months pregnant with her second child. Patricia gave birth in captivity, making one last call to her mother, Rosa, before vanishing. Her newborn son was also taken, one of hundreds given to police, military families, and dictatorship supporters, while their biological parents were secretly executed and their bodies disposed of. For Rosa and the other mothers in her same situation, the loss was unimaginable; their only solace was the hope that their grandchildren were still alive. United by this faith, a group of fierce grandmothers formed the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, dedicated to finding the stolen children and seeking justice from a nation that betrayed them.

A Flower Traveled in My Blood is Rosa and the Abuelas’ extraordinary story, told by a journalist with unique access. With authority and compassion, Haley Cohen Gilliland brings this tale to life, tracing the lives of Patricia, Rosa, and her stolen grandson, Guillermo. As the Abuelas transform into detectives, they confront military officers, sift through government documents, assume aliases to see suspected grandchildren, and even pioneer a groundbreaking genetics test with an American scientist.

A compelling mystery and deeply researched account of a pivotal era in world history, A Flower Traveled in My Blood takes readers on a journey of love, resilience, and redemption, revealing new truths about memory, identity, and family.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: It took me almost three months to read this book. Yes, it's over five hundred pages; I can do that much reading in a day; the reason it's taken me so long is purely emotional.

This horror is another example of why the Global Right is really the international fascist front. There is no hiding from the fact the US government is riddled with people who supported the perpetrators of the heinous, nauseating crimes Author Cohen Gilliland details. And no, the argument that they did not know what was happening is not true...I refer you to the astonishingly and damningly complete endnotes. Not one thing in this book is unsourced. The perpetrators' voices are unheard, though not for lack of trying on her part. Had I done any of these things, I don't know I'd've been willing to talk on the record about them.

Anyone who heard about "Alligator Alcatraz" and did not instantly go into resistance mode needs to read this book. This is what happens when fascist scum grab power. If you can read this and NOT think "I've got to do something, anything, to oppose this publicly", I'm ashamed for and of you. Not reading it is cowardly.

If that sounds like I'm judging you, you're right. I am.

It's long past time to coddle yourself. I assure you, if you think you and yours are safe, they are not. No one's "guilt" matters to people like this.

I was clear about why Author Cohen Gilliland chose to refer to the Madres and the Abuelas by first names, both her stated one of not having confusingly common last names on the page and her unstated one of creating greater intimate connection with them, but it felt more confusing for me. A reporter for The Economist is not going to be so inexperienced as to not think of that; it actually works to increase my readerly investment because it hammers into my brain the Everywoman who went on the Plaza to hold up signs, photographs, and stand there utterly exposed to the unpredictable actions of the gun-wielders was each of these enraged grieving mothers and grandmothers.

Read this story, then resist actively the actions of ICEstapo.