Resistance fighter who smuggled out secrets

AUTHOR and historian Clare Mulley is on a mission to uncover the hidden tales of women fighters during the Second World War.

Clare will be talking about her latest book Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka, at Henley Literary Festival next Friday.

During the Second World War, Elzbieta Zawacka, or Agent Zo — who was known as Elizabeth Watson in Britain — was the only woman to reach London from Poland, bringing vital microfilm, as well as the only woman to parachute from Britain into Nazi-occupied Poland. She also played a key role in the Warsaw Uprising.

Clare, who lives in Essex with sculptor Ian Wolter and their dog, says: “There’s so much to it, but part of what makes her amazing is that she is the only person to parachute from Britain, from a small airfield in Bedfordshire, to occupied Poland during the Second World War, wearing a dress.

“It didn’t really faze her, I mean, she was terrified of heights so parachuting was absolutely terrible for her, but she did it. She wasn’t fazed by the idea of going into Nazi-occupied territory because she’d already spent three years serving in the Resistance inside Poland, so she knew what was going on.

“She had been commissioned by the commander of the Polish Home Army. When we think of Resistance in the Second World War we always think of France, but actually Poland had one of the largest Resistance forces, they were the first country invaded.” Elzbieta was a key figure in that and she was selected by the commander-in-chief of that Resistance Home Army to take very important microfilm and some orders, she had some missions to undertake in Britain.

“She had to cross nearly 1,000 miles of Nazi-occupied Europe, during which she gets thrown out of a high hotel window, she nearly gets arrested in occupied Paris, she nearly gets drowned hiding in the water tender of a steam train, she gets shot at in the mountains of the Pyrenees.

“I mean, it’s just perilous. She has a bit of fun with a fella on the way and then eventually she makes it to Britain and they can’t believe that this woman has got there. It’s absolutely shocking, because they’d sent three men at the same time and none of them have made it with their microfilm.

“But the men were so bloody sexist. We’ve got this fantastic stuff in the archive and they called her a ‘military female dictator’, things like that, because she’s like ‘No, I don’t want to sit down and have a cup of tea, I’ve got these orders to complete, I’ve got to sort out these missions, you’re not doing a very good job’, and she sorts it all out. She’s absolutely brilliant. Then they say, ‘Oh, thank you, where would you like to spend the rest of the war, a nice little house in Scotland or an apartment in London?’ and she’s like, ‘What are you talking about? I’ve got to go back and fight’.

“They said, ‘Well, you can’t, because there’s only one way back and that’s parachuting and obviously you’re not a man’. So you can imagine how she responds to that.

“She becomes the only woman to be parachuted from Britain back to Poland and then she plays a key role in the largest organised act of defiance against Nazi Germany in the entire war, which is the Warsaw Uprising, which happened 80 years ago and it went on for two months.

“She should be legendary. She survived the war but Poland, of course, ended the war with a Soviet-imposed Communist government and they didn’t like the story she was telling about all these fierce independent women fighting for freedom. The story the Soviets wanted told is that Poland did nothing and that the Red Army saved them, and so they tried to hide her story and they actually arrested her.

“She was sentenced to 10 years [in prison] and she was tortured but she never gave up and one of the most amazing interviews I did was with her cellmate and she described her as still being completely defiant and amazing in prison.”

Clare, who was awarded the Bene Merito cultural honour of the Republic of Poland in 2013, interviewed former president of Poland Lech Walesa in Gdansk earlier this year.

She says: “Zo survived the war and Lech gave her Poland’s highest award for valour, because he remembered her as this great woman. She is recognised in Poland but not as much as she should be, the story was literally hidden away in the archives and no one was allowed to get it out for more than 40 years.

“One of the amazing things about her is that she spoke German, it was actually her first language, because the part of Poland that she lived in had been occupied by the Germans before the First World War when she was a little girl.

“She was a very proud Polish patriot but it became really useful in the Second World War because she could pass as a German, because she was blonde and blue-eyed and she spoke perfect German. So, she was the courier that used to go in and out of Berlin which is the most dangerous route for taking microfilm.

“She would take it to a friendly embassy and they’d send it over in the diplomatic post to Britain, so she was doing really dangerous work.

“To get to London she had to go first into Berlin but by then her cover had already been broken, they knew her name and her face so that was really dangerous. And then she had to get across the border into France and then she had to register herself in France so she’s travelling as a German oil company secretary, that’s what she’s pretending to be.

“She has to go and report in France for her work and she’s quite late when she gets to the office and she hands over her faked papers, which Polish forgers have made for her, and they say, ‘There’s something about these papers, I want to take a closer look’ but it’s really late and they can’t be bothered to do it at night.

“So they send her to a hotel but they take her papers, so she can’t go anywhere, she can’t travel or anything and they say, ‘Come back in the morning’.

“So she had this terrible night in this Paris hotel room, hiding the microfilm, which she’s got in a key and in a little brass cigarette lighter so she hides those and then she has to just brave it out.

“So, she walks back to get her papers and says hello and they say, ‘Oh yeah, these are really interesting papers’ and they pull them out and they say, ‘They’re such good quality we wanted to compare them against a suspected forgery over here’ and she’s fine.

“She can’t show any relief or anything so she just picks up her papers, ‘Thank you very much’ and walks out and carries on.

“Then, in Paris, she hides on the personal train of Pierre Laval, the collaborationist prime minister of France so he’s working with the Nazis and she reckons his train will have fewer checks on it.

“So, she hides in the water tender, that’s the water tank that a steam train needs, but when they fill up the water tank halfway through the journey she’s nearly drowned.

“She survives that and then she goes to southern France but while she’s there, the border guards do a check of the hotel and they arrest a load of people.

“She runs upstairs and a bloke helping her pushes her out of a window and luckily she lands in a bank of snow and she manages to hide there and get away. She hikes through the mountains with a very handsome young man but they get shot at by German border patrols up in the mountains.

“She makes it all the way to Britain with this very important microfilm which has got lots of military intelligence but also a load of quite early information on the Holocaust. So it’s really important and that’s just one chapter of the book.

“I couldn’t believe it that it was a true story and the hairs were going up on my arms when I was finding this stuff in the archives and interviewing people. I just think it speaks to all of us, and there is still this rich seam of untold women’s stories.”

• Henley Literary Festival presents Clare Mulley at Henley town hall on Friday, October 4 at 12.30pm. For more information, call (01491) 575948 or visit www.
henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk