The story of Agent Zo: the fearless female resistance fighter of WW2
Smuggling papers, microfilms and cash across Nazi-occupied Europe, dodging the Gestapo, training with the SOE, parachuting back into Poland… nothing was too dangerous for this fearless female figurehead of the Polish resistance. Clare Mulley tells her story
Leaving her coat on her seat, Elżbieta Zawacka – AKA Zo – shuffled out of her train compartment and along the dark corridor. Despite the blackout, glancing over her shoulder she saw a man’s pale face lean out to watch her. She had boarded the train knowing that the Gestapo had been following her. Now it was clear they were still on her tail. “Shit,” she thought, pressing on.
It was May 1942. Two days earlier, Zo had been smuggling military intelligence from Nazi-occupied Warsaw to her resistance contacts in Berlin, the capital of the Third Reich. From there the material would be sent west with a friend’s diplomatic post. It was a high-risk operation, but the fastest way to get secret reports to London.
While in Berlin, Zo had also collected a large block of cash to bring back to the resistance ‘Home Army’ in Warsaw. She had spent that night at a safe house, feverishly pasting dollar bills inside her old suitcase before carefully replacing the lining. Then she had caught the early train back to Poland. Breaking her journey back to Warsaw, she was climbing the steps up to her sister’s door in the industrial town of Sosnowiec when a terrified neighbour warned her a Gestapo officer was waiting inside.
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Zo’s network had been betrayed in her absence, and her sister was already in a Gestapo cell. Braving out her shock and grief, Zo managed to stash her now precious suitcase safely and issue a few warnings before she risked heading on to Warsaw. She was at the station when the Gestapo caught up with her. Rather than making an immediate arrest, she realised they were following her, so she diverted to Kraków in the hope of losing them. Now, exhausted on the late train to Warsaw, she decided she would rather kill herself than risk betraying her friends. But she was not quite ready to die.
Zo set out with the microfilms hidden inside the shaft of a door key and a brass cigarette lighter
An elderly Polish railwayman stood in the corridor, waiting to open the passenger door at the next station stop, still some miles away. Zo had no way of knowing whether he was a trustworthy patriot or sympathetic to the Nazi cause. “I am from the Home Army,” she told him steadily. “Get the door, I’m going to jump.” Wordlessly dropping his hand to the lock, the guard lent in and pushed the door wide. As though partners in a dance, in the same fluid movement Zo swung herself out and into the rushing night air. Zo was an experienced intelligence officer and courier, and had illegally crossed wartime borders more than 100 times. By then the Home Army was one of the largest organised resistance forces in occupied Europe, providing crucial military intelligence to the Polish government-in-exile in London and the Allies. But despite successfully evading the Gestapo by throwing herself from the moving train, once Zo’s name appeared on German wanted lists it was clear she could not continue to serve on the same routes.
London calling
Zo had no false modesty about her abilities, but she was astounded when her new orders arrived. Her assignment was to cross the whole of Nazi-occupied Europe, almost 1,000 miles, taking urgent microfilm to London. Once there, she was to undertake two missions as the personal representative of the Home Army commander. It was the first time a woman had been given such authority.
Zo set out with the microfilms hidden inside the shaft of a door key and a brass cigarette lighter. Her dramatic journey would see her almost arrested in Nazi-occupied Paris, where her forged papers were confiscated, and then half-drowned while hiding in the water tanker of top Vichy official Pierre Laval’s private train as she illicitly crossed the demarcation line between occupied northern France and so-called ‘Free France’ in the south.
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Clare Mulley shares the nail-biting story of Polish intelligence agent Elżbieta Zawacka, aka "Agent Zo"
She would be thrown out of a hotel window when a German border force started questioning her resistance companions, and dodge bullets in the freezing mountain passes of the Pyrenees as she hiked over to Spain. Of the four couriers sent out at roughly the same time, Zo was the only one not to lose her microfilm and successfully reach London. At first unsure whether to salute her or kiss her hand, the Polish officers who met Zo in the British capital struggled to accept her authority. The irony was that while they were wearing military uniform behind their office desks, it was this “captain in a skirt,” as they dismissively referred to her, who had spent the last few years on active service. In fact, Zo had been in uniform herself when Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland had first plunged the world back into war.
Who was Elżbieta Zawacka?
Born in 1909, Zo had been raised in the part of Poland that had been annexed into the Prussian empire until her country regained its independence after the First World War. Although her first language was German, she had always known that she was really Polish, and she had joined her reborn nation’s Women’s Military Auxiliary while at university, ready to serve should Poland’s freedom be threatened again. It was as a commander of this female force that Zo had taken part in the defence of Lwów in September 1939. Building barricades, making petrol bombs and supporting the anti-aircraft batteries, she had been part of the team that enabled the Polish government, treasury and a significant percentage of her country’s armed forces to flee south through the city.
Having regrouped in France, and served in its defence, the Polish troops who reached Britain were dispatched to defend the east coast of Scotland. Some 2,400 candidates from among their ranks were whittled down to 800 recruits for secret specialist training under the auspices of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) at various historic country houses. Of these, 579 would complete the rigorous courses designed to turn them into partisan leaders, wireless and forgery experts, demolitions instructors and battalion leaders back behind enemy lines. But, due to a lack of aircraft and the long moonlit nights needed for navigation, only 316 were sworn into the Polish special paramilitary force, the Cichociemni or Silent Unseen.
Several of the officers who met Zo in London were Silent Unseen trainees, desperate to be back in action. These men were used to praise from their bosses, admiration from their colleagues and appreciation from women. They found Zo’s lack of deference perplexing and laughed at her attempts to issue orders.
In 1943, Zo became the only woman ever to parachute from Britain into Nazi-occupied Poland
When one of the men tried to charm her with a pair of silk stockings, Zo was appalled and shocked that he was starting “some trivial conversation, with flirting… I still had the tragedy of occupied Poland in my mind”. As the male London staff jokingly organised “defensive action against her”, Zo set about securing legal military status for the women of the Home Army.
Three months later, Zo became the only female member of the Silent Unseen, making her, in Polish, the only Cichociemna. Ever since her leap from the moving train, she had been terrified of heights, but she had scraped through parachute training in the Scottish Highlands and at an airfield outside Manchester. It was a crisp September evening in 1943 when she swung her legs, still bandaged from hard landings, over the edge of the ‘Joe hole’ in a four-engined Halifax bomber. Moments later she became the only woman ever to parachute from Britain into Nazi-occupied Poland.
Zo would go on to play a vital role in the largest organised act of defiance against Nazi Germany: the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Her work to secure legal military status for female soldiers meant that, two months later, instead of shooting the captured women as ununiformed commandos, for the first time in the war the Nazi military detained female platoons as official POWs. Thousands of lives were saved as a result.
Zo was never a POW herself. Slipping away among the civilian survivors leaving her destroyed capital, she kept up her battle until Poland regained its freedom, in 1989, from the communist regime imposed by the Soviet Union after the war. It was a struggle that would see her arrested more than once, and given a 10-year jail term in the 1950s. When she died in 2009, once again in a free Poland, she was one of the most highly decorated women in her country’s history and held the rank – which meant far more to her – of brigadier-general.
This article was first published in the August 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
