AGENT ZO

Celebration of a hero of the Polish resistance during World War II—whose work, because she was a woman, was long obscured.

Elzbieta Zawacka, writes historian and BBC commentator Mulley, was the only woman ever to be enlisted in the elite special forces of the Polish army in exile, who was parachuted into her Nazi-occupied homeland to help organize resistance fighters. As Mulley notes, some 40,000 women became members of the Polish Home Army, but none had an official rank and usually fulfilled jobs thought suitable for women—typing, cooking, nursing, and the like. “Zo,” her code name, championed women’s rights as well as antifascism. Before the war, she had trained in mathematics, and, “unmarried at thirty and choosing to live alone, she was already raising eyebrows.” Yet, of more or less ordinary appearance, she was able to blend into the crowd, which helped as she crossed the borders between Poland, Germany, and other nations more than 100 times, carrying messages as a courier. “Serious, stern, tough and very matter of fact,” as a comrade described her, Zo helped organize the Warsaw uprising and, against all the odds, survived years of being hunted by the Gestapo. When the Soviets arrived, however, the Polish resistance was suppressed and its leaders arrested. Zo was arrested too, “each investigation leading to further interrogations,” and finally sentenced to seven years of imprisonment, during which time she taught math to inmates and guards alike. Freed, she mounted a campaign of noncompliance, saying, “There is nothing they can do to me.” Among her other accomplishments was public commemoration of the Home Army, part of “a chain of defiance leading inexorably to Poland’s return to independence”—after which, in belated acknowledgment, she was honored with the rank of brigadier general.

A well-told story from a little-known corner of World War II history.