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.
Zo, a blonde, blue-eyed woman who looked younger than her age, had been involved with the Polish Women’s Military Training programme, the PWK, since the late 1920s. When war broke out she became an instructor for the Home Army, an organiser and a courier, moving from place to place, avoiding arrest, setting up safe houses, and delivering messages and weapons. In December 1942 she was appointed the only woman emissary from the Home Army Command to the General Staff of the Polish Army in London, carrying with her 500 pages of microfilmed material hidden in a cigarette lighter.
The journey was perilous, involving several changes of identity and disguises, and repeated attempts to cross the Pyrenees. Zo seems to have had nerves of steel. Having delivered her messages, she stayed on to overhaul the unsatisfactory communications between Poland and London with great thoroughness but not much tact. Her relentless, obsessive dedication made her a somewhat humourless task master, admired but not always liked. She also pushed through, against considerable odds, an agreement that the women of the Home Army would finally be given full status as soldiers. Trained by the SOE, Zo was then dropped back into Poland to continue the fight. She found her brothers and sisters scattered, some of them dead, and many of her friends in captivity.
Zo was in Warsaw in time to take part in the uprising in July 1944, where she described the first few days as ‘the most wonderful time of my life’. But the Germans were merciless, the bombing unceasing and when, after 63 days, the Poles capitulated, Zo was lucky to escape, leaving thousands of her companions to be deported to concentration camps.
Making her way to Krakow she began to reorganise resistance. Nor did her war end with Germany’s defeat. As the German troops pulled out, their places were taken by the Soviets, and it soon became clear that what was left of the 400,000-strong Home Army would have no future in the new Soviet-dominated Poland.
Mulley is particularly good on the tragedy of post-war Poland, as the Allies withdrew their support from a country that had fought for them so bravely, tellingly giving the codeword Operation Unthinkable to a briefly considered action of rescue. On 6 July 1945 the British formally recognised the Soviet-backed Provisional Polish government and withdrew support from the Polish army in London. Approximately 300,000 Polish resisters would eventually be arrested, many to disappear into the Soviet gulags; 6,000 were executed. The Home Army had been the largest resistance army in Occupied Europe.
Though many of her friends and colleagues were dead, Zo herself had a long life after the war. Having resisted the communist takeover she was eventually arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for espionage. In time she emerged to become a teacher in adult education, and tried to set up a Polish equivalent of the Open University. After the first independent trade union, Solidarity, won the elections in 1989 and Lech Walesa became president, she was given better jobs and was able to promote a scheme dear to her heart – research into the real history of Poland’s war. Well into her eighties, when asked why she continued to work so tirelessly, she would say that she had no time to waste and that there was still much to do. She died in 2009, shortly before her 100th birthday, and was buried as a brigadier general with a band, full military honours and aircraft flying past.
Agent Zo is meticulously sourced and its novel-like narrative makes for a most enjoyable book.
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