Agent Zo: The Untold Story of a Fearless World War II Resistance Fighter

(For college professors and students, parents, teachers, and adults). This well-researched work by British author and historian Clare Mulley presents the amazing story of Elzbieta Zawacka, a Polish World War II resistance fighter whose exploits are truly exceptional and helped restore Polish women to their rightful place in the historical record.

Born in 1909, her home town of Torun was annexed by the German Empire and her first language was German, which she spoke with no trace of a Polish accent. She was 20 when Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939, which was followed by the Soviet Union’s attack on Poland on 17 September.

Blonde and blue-eyed, young-looking for her age, Zawacka had a kind of open, honest face. She was a senior instructor with the Polish Women’s Training Organization (PWK), an organization of young women cadets, and began organizing her PWK colleagues into a resistance network, called “Coal”, after the Silesian mines.

In 1940, after Germany invaded Holland, Belgium, and France, Winston Churchill approved the creation of a secret organization, known as the Special Operations Executive (SOE), to arm, train, and help coordinate the resistance in the occupied countries. At the same time, General Sikorski, prime minister of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London, and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces, ordered the formation of a Polish special forces parachute unit from the cream of the veterans now in England. Known as the Cichociemni, Silent Unseen in English, this elite unit would be funded and trained in England. Elzbieta would soon become the only Polish woman to qualify as a Cichociemni and was the first and only Polish woman to parachute into occupied Poland behind enemy lines.

Elzbieta took the nom de guerre Zo, and was appointed head of Farmstead, the Polish underground’s communications unit responsible for couriering all “mail” to the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. Her mail included encrypted radio messages, maps, film footage, original documents, and microfilmed intelligence reports.

Her first assignment was to Berlin, in which she traveled as Elizabeth von Braunneg, an oil company secretary. After delivering mail to clandestine Polish contacts, she also gathered intelligence specific to Berlin, which was eagerly awaited not only by her own government but also by the British. The British War Office in London even added their own intelligence requests. Zo was awarded the Cross of Valor in recognition of her many journeys into Berlin and for helping build vital new courier routes from Vienna and across Germany to the Swiss border, and through Flensburg to Denmark.

In the autumn of 1942, after having evaded the Gestapo for months in Warsaw, she discovered that her name was on the Gestapo wanted list, the Fahndungsbuch, as number 237. Posters were printed with her real name, Elzbieta Zawacka, even giving her correct date of birth and Torun address. She was then given new orders that enabled her to escape.

Zo had become a true legend of the Home Army by crossing wartime borders over one hundred times. She was awarded the Virtuti Militari, Poland’s equivalent of the U.S. Medal of Honor, and was now the personal emissary of General Rowecki, Commander of the Polish Resistance’s Home Army. Her mission was to cross the whole of Europe and reach the Polish General Staff in London with carefully hidden microfilm. Rowecki gave her two directives for the General Staff in London that were very important. The first gave Zo full powers to organize the communications land routes between Poland and London. The second was more controversial. The Home Army still operated on the pre-war basis that female auxiliaries had duties but no right to rank, pay, or promotion. Rowecki drafted a decree on “women’s military service” that would provide them the same rights as their male counterparts.

On one of her courier missions to London, Zo received French papers identifying her a Madame Elise Riviere from Alsace. She had to perfect her high-school French to become Elise and took intensive English lessons. In Paris, she worked with Polish intelligence agents, and took with her a brass cigarette lighter that had hidden microfilm in it as well as 500 pages of microfilm in a hollowed-out key. She now had to make her way to the Polish honorary consulate in Barcelona, which involved a physically grueling and dangerous climb over the Pyrenees through snow storms, while also dodging the bullets of frontier guards. Finally arriving at Barcelona, she was issued new false papers as British citizen Elizabeth Watson, which enabled her to travel to England and meet with the Polish General Staff in London. The microfilm she provided contained information on German U-boats, troop movements across Europe, the German munitions industry, and Home Army sabotage operations that were planned and conducted.

In meeting with the men in London responsible for land communications, she was greatly disappointed in their tardiness in decrypting messages and their disregard for instructions, which increased the risks faced by couriers, coders, and wireless operators every day. The longer she stayed in London, the more she irritated she became by what she saw as emigré politics. The London Poles seemed to be concerned more with rival political factions than the dangers faced by the Home Army and the underground resistance.

Author Clare Mulley points out that in late 1943, the Polish Armed Forces had been a crucial Allied resource. There were 30,000 troops of the Polish First Corps in Scotland who took part in the cross-channel invasion of Europe. In Palestine, General Anders led 60,000 soldiers of the Polish Second Corps who fought the Germans in Italy.  The Polish Air Force had over 11,000 men, who distinguished them selves in the Battle of Britain, and 5,00 Poles served with the Allies in the Polish Navy and Merchant Navy. There was also the 400,000-strong Home Army, which a British military staff report stated was “the strongest, best organized, and most determined” resistance force in occupied Europe. Above all, Polish intelligence consistently proved vital to Allied strategy and operations. The British also reported that Poland provided nearly half of the intelligence it received from the occupied countries. In addition to the breaking of the German Enigma machines by Polish mathematicians, the Polish resistance provided reports on German preparations for Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, the locations of German submarine bases, and the locations of Germany’s V-weapons program.

In the summer of 1944, the Soviets advanced west after the retreating Germans, and the Home Army was ready to launch the Warsaw Uprising against the occupying German forces. Zo took part in the Warsaw Uprising and, although capitulation was inevitable, General Komorowski, nom de guerre Bor and Commander of the Home Army, ensured that captured Home Army soldiers would be treated as POWs under the Geneva Convention rather than being shot on surrender or sent to concentration camps.

For four long years, Zo had organized and run an intelligence network, crossed wartime borders countless times as a courier, and, as an emissary of General Rowecki, she challenged and changed military policy and practice at the highest level. In tacit recognition of Zo’s London work, he signed the order that women in the Home Army were regular combatants and were to be awarded military rank. As a result, they would become the only female units in the war to be interned as POWs. Zo’s work had provided an unprecedented level of legal protection to several thousand women and Bor awarded her a second Virtuti Militari.

After the end of the war, the country was under Soviet-backed communist rule and Zo took up teaching jobs. In 1951, the communist government administered an exam to assess the politics of the country’s teaching staff. Outraged at being asked about the laws of Marxism, Zo failed decisively. She was then arrested by the secret police (UB for Urząd Bezpieczeństwa; English: Security Office) and sent to the infamous Mokotow prison, known for its detention, torture, and execution of the Polish underground fighters and anti-communists. She was sentenced to five years in prison, which was later increased to ten years, and was then sent to Fordon, Poland’s toughest prison for women. Zo was allowed to teach mathematics to the prisoners, and later to the guards. She was released after nine years in prison.

While teaching, Zo wrote her doctoral dissertation on distance learning and in 1965, was awarded her PhD. She continued with post-doctoral studies and was promoted to Associate Professor at Gdansk University. In 1978, Zo received the Yad Vashem Righteous award for saving Jewish women in her apartment. She also witnessed Poland’s partially free elections in 1989 and then saw Lech Walesa elected president in 1990. Like many, Zo was shocked to see the destruction of the Twin Towers in New York City on television on 11 September 2001. She was recognized again when she was awarded the title “Custodian of National Remembrance” by Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance. She had spent a number of years in secret developing an archive of testimonies by female veterans while also securing for them the clandestine decoration of Home Army Crosses. At the age of 97, Zo was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General (retired). At the time of her death in 2009, she was 99 years and 10 months old.

Zo was also a good friend of Sue Ryder, a British volunteer with the SOE and a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, who was assigned to the Polish section of the SOE. In 1943, Ryder was posted with the Polish Unit to Tunisia, Algeria, and later with the Poles in Italy. In 1945 she returned to the UK and was attached to the Polish Forces in Scotland. After the war, Ryder established charitable organizations to care for concentration camp survivors and honor others who suffered during the war. This included the Polish women at Ravensbruck, whom the Germans called “Rabbits” because of the pseudo-scientific experiments they were subjected to. Ryder was made a life peer in the House of Lords and took the title Baroness Ryder of Warsaw.