Agent Zo: the Polish blonde with nerves of steel

In recent years, far from diminishing, the number of books on the Nazis, Occupied Europe and the Holocaust – events that now lie three quarters of a century in the past – seem only to grow. New archives are opened and attics are raided for forgotten diaries and letters. One historian who has mined them with great skill is Clare Mulley, the author of books on spies and Hitler’s pilots. She has now unearthed a story about a bold and resolute Polish agent, Elzbieta Zawacka, who went by the name of Zo.

Her adventures are extraordinary, and their background is no less fascinating. Agent Zo is as much a book about Poland’s unhappy history, overrun both by the Germans and the Soviets and later abandoned by the Allies, as an account of the terrifying life led by Zo and her friends, whose chances of survival were very slim indeed.

The seventh of eight children in a family living in what had been, until the first world war, German-occupied territory, Zo grew up bilingual in Polish and German. She was in her thirties, with a higher degree in mathematics, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in August 1939 agreed to the partition of Poland under the Soviet and German spheres of influence. By late September much of Poland was under occupation, whether by the Germans or the Red Army. Repression followed swiftly. Businesses were nationalised, political parties were banned and schools were closed down. In the German part, thousands of Polish citizens, either Jewish or people refusing to be turned into ethnic Germans, were deported to concentration camps. Those who planned to resist either fled to the Polish armed forces regrouping outside the country or joined the clandestine Home Army.