Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka – Mulleyová Clare (2024)

This is the remarkable story of Elzbieta Zawacka, the Second World War resistance fighter known as Agent Zo. She was the only woman to travel from Warsaw to London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army command, and in Britain she became the only woman to join the Polish elite Special Forces known as the Silent Unseen. Secretly trained in the British countryside, she was the only female member of these Special Operations Executive-affiliated forces to be parachuted behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied Poland. Hunted by the Gestapo, which arrested her entire family, she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland. After the war, she was demobilized as one of the most highly decorated women in Polish history, yet the Soviet-backed Communist regime imprisoned her and kept her remarkable story hidden for more than forty years. Drawing on new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zawacka, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life and transforms our understanding of women’s agency during the Second World War.