History's Secret Heroes: Series 3: Agent Zo's Leap of Faith

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Agent Zoe struggled to hear what the other parachutists were saying.

Air roared through the open cargo hatch in the British Halifax bomber as it approached the drop zone above central Poland.

Zoe was nudged forwards.

The other two parachutists with her said, ladies first.

Zo's legs dangled over the hole in the floor of the fuselage.

On this moonless September night in 1943, all Zo could see below was darkness.

She put her hands on the metal on the edge of the fuselage and that cold chill from the metal would have run up her arms.

Zo tightened her jumpsuit.

Her belt was packed with currency, Reichsmarks and United States dollars.

All of the clothes had been checked, checked the pockets in case there was anything British that might have given her away, a cigarette stub from the wrong manufacturer, a bus ticket or anything.

And in the pockets she had a torch, a spade in case she had to dig a hole to hide her parachute.

She had two revolvers, of which she was very proud, and a small tin with a cyanide capsule in it in case she was caught and needed to take her own life before being probably very brutally interrogated.

Underneath the jumpsuit, she wore an old overcoat, and underneath the overcoat was a blue silk dress.

Which sounds romantic but it's not because as soon as possible when she is on the ground she needs to disappear into the general civilian population and women weren't wearing trousers in 1943 occupied Polish territory.

Zo's real name was Elspieta Savatzka.

She was parachuting down to join her compatriots fighting in the Polish resistance.

She was a born soldier, full of courage, determination, patriotism to serve her country, and she was a feminist.

She's a freedom fighter in its widest sense.

The Halifax bomber reached its destination.

It was time for Zoe to jump.

She was terrified of heights and the thought of leaving relative safety and plunging into the abyss terrified her.

She looked down into the darkness, summoning up her courage.

If she succeeded in her mission, she could save the lives of thousands of women.

She smelt something of the Polish land below, of wet grass, the end of the harvest, and of cut potatoes.

And the dispatching light turned from red to green.

The dispatcher shouted, Go!

And she straightened her legs and just dropped into the night.

I'm Helena Bonham Carter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes.

True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

Agent Zoe's leap of faith.

Zo was awoken by an explosion.

It was five o'clock in the morning on the 1st of September, 1939.

At first Zo thought the Polish Air Force must be undertaking exercises nearby at Katowice airport.

But it quickly became clear there was a series of further detonations that she could feel through the walls of her dormer and through the metal frame of her bed.

Claire Mulley is the author of Agent Zo.

Zo put on her uniform and went out to see what was happening at the barracks at the Polish Women's Military Auxiliary.

Later that morning, a radio broadcast confirmed that Poland was being invaded by Nazi Germany.

And they ended the radio broadcast saying, as of now, we are all soldiers.

Zoe's smile was wry.

She was 30 years old and the commander of her unit, but as a woman, she did not have the military status of a soldier.

Women auxiliary volunteers were considered civilians.

They weren't recognised as soldiers.

They enjoyed no extra rations.

They weren't even paid.

But she wanted to fight.

Eugenia Maresch worked with Zo later in life.

She was in Attach University when she started thinking seriously

about organizing women just in case the war broke out.

Poland is stuck between Russia and Hitler.

That was the problem, you see.

We're sort of stuck in between.

two enemies.

At university, Zo studied mathematics.

Her parents had taken the progressive position that their daughters, as well as their sons, should have access to higher education.

She was determined and very, very upright and very, very straight.

And she decides and she sticks to that.

She was a woman for herself.

She wasn't thinking about getting married or something.

She was actually saying, I want Poland to be better, to be independent.

When Zo was a baby, her mother would soothe her by singing traditional Polish nursery rhymes.

In the town of Torun, where she grew up, this was an act of rebellion.

That part of Poland was actually annexed into the Prussian Empire, so it was German territory.

So, ironically, legally, when she was born, she was a German citizen.

But her mother was determined the children would not lose their Polish identity.

Zo once said that she sucked in patriotism with her mother's milk.

Her mother drilled it into her that they were really Polish.

Zo was the seventh of eight children.

She was preceded by a parade of her older brothers and sisters and followed by a younger sister, Clara.

They weren't a wealthy family.

They had a small house on the outskirts of town with a garden.

They took in lodgers.

Her mother sold her jewelry to try and pay for the education of her children.

Zo's father worked as a minor official in local government.

That meant state authorities could inspect the family home.

And they went in there to check that they were truly German and not doing any seditious Polish heritage in there.

So they would check the language of the prayer book and the chatter of the children.

Her family coached Zo to hide her Polish heritage during these inspections.

So in a sense, this was her first legend, her first alias.

In 1920, when Zo was 10, the Treaty of Versailles recognised Poland as an independent state.

One misty morning that January, Zo's family joined the crowds to watch military processions at Turun's ceremonial gate.

It was a long day for small children.

Zo was absorbed in her book, but a blast of music made her look up.

She glanced at her father.

This stoic man, a former army officer himself, with tears running down his cheeks as he heard for the first time the Polish national anthem being played in public in Turun, their hometown.

At that moment, Zo made a decision that would change the course of her whole life.

She swore that under her watch, Poland was not going to lose its freedom again.

Zo's vow would be tested in 1939.

Following the Nazi invasion in the West, the Soviet Union invaded in the East on the 17th of September.

The Polish government was already in retreat and realised it could not fight a war on two fronts.

It left the country and ordered the emergency evacuation of as many of its troops as possible to regroup overseas.

Around 35,000 Polish armed forces and politicians left Poland.

The politicians set up a government in exile, first in Paris and then in London.

So

could have followed these troops.

Leaving Poland was the safest option as it was carved up between Nazi and Soviet forces.

But she decided the most active part she could play would be now in the resistance in her own country, so she decided to remain.

A few weeks later, on the 2nd of November, Zo was standing by a tiled stove in a stranger's Warsaw apartment.

The stove was unlit, the apartment freezing cold.

Zo pledged her allegiance to the service for Poland's victory.

It was one of many resistance organizations, but would become the largest, drawing together eventually 350,000 men and 40,000 women under the name of the Home Army.

This was when Elspieta Zavatska, as she had been, renamed herself Zo.

Zo was told to recruit more members for the resistance, especially women.

Most able-bodied men of conscription age were already overseas with the Polish Armed Forces overseas, so able-bodied men moving around Poland were immediately very conspicuous.

Women were moving around everywhere.

They were keeping businesses going.

Yet Zoe knew it would be hard to recruit women unless they received the same recognition as men.

Even in the Home Army, women didn't have legal military status and were not paid.

They are a country with huge rationing, with great poverty.

They can't commit their time and resources to the Home Army unless they're getting recompense for it.

Despite all this, within a month, month, Zoe recruited 50 women to the resistance.

Some of them were former members of the PWK, like herself.

Some of them were just old friends, teachers that she'd worked alongside that she trusted, even her younger sister, Clara, who she was very close to.

And she recruited women who worked as secretaries or translators in the offices of the German occupying authorities.

She recruited even women who worked in bakeries and in laundrettes who could see the changing garrison bread orders or look at the different tabs on the uniforms that were coming through to be washed and cleaned so that they could build a picture of troop movements.

Every week, Zo collected reports about German activities from her extraordinary intelligence network.

She memorised everything she could and wrote down notes of the few things she couldn't.

Then she made the dangerous journey to Warsaw to pass her findings onto the resistance.

Her friends describe her as crossing borders like a whirlwind.

Over the next two years, Zo became known as a skilled courier.

She said after she had crossed wartime borders a hundred times she stopped counting because she thought it might be bad luck.

Zoe had blonde hair and blue eyes.

It was easy for her to blend into groups of civilians.

Sometimes she slipped into train carriages.

They would hide beneath the coal on passenger ships that go up north.

She hid documents in clever places.

The back of her clothesbrush slips off and she could keep a thin slip of paper in there with her aid memoir of the statistics she was taking to the resistance headquarters.

Zoe travelled with false identity papers and deliberately fudged her fingerprint records.

She put her finger onto the ink pad, put it on the paper and smudged it.

And the Germans just couldn't be bothered to check it again.

Her work constantly put her in danger.

In May 1940, she was stopped by the Gestapo.

They locked her into a hut at a checkpoint, but she managed to break her way out through the window and run through the forest, not looking back, always expecting the train dogs to be on her heels.

But she ran and managed to get away again.

One cold evening in May 1942, Zoe was on a courier mission from Berlin to Warsaw.

She was carrying a battered old suitcase filled with American $10 bills for the Resistance, which she had meticulously pasted beneath its marbled paper lining.

It was after curfew.

The Gestapo kept a close watch on Warsaw station, so she changed trains and went to Sosnovitz.

There she hoped to stay with her sister Clara for the night.

Zoe threw a pebble up to her sister's second-floor window.

There was no response.

She threw another.

Clara was expecting her, yet no light came on.

Something was wrong.

So she called at a neighbour, and they didn't let her in.

They just hissed at her.

Go!

The Gestapo are here, they've arrested Clara, and they're waiting for you in her rooms.

And Zoe had this awful moment.

I was just thinking, is there any way she could help her sister?

But she knew it was not going to help her by getting arrested herself.

Shocked and desperately worried about her sister, Zo went to her friend's home.

First, she stowed the suitcase full of money.

She didn't want it to fall into Gestapo hands.

The next morning, she needed to tell her comrades and the resistance that the Gestapo had captured Clara.

She went back to the train station and looked for women she knew.

Aware the Gestapo would be looking for her, she didn't go up to the friend she saw on a platform.

She made a sign indicating that she should not be approached, then whispered details quickly as she passed her.

Then she boarded a tram for Katowice, then a train to Krakow, then the late night service to Warsaw.

And when she went into her carriage, she was followed by obviously a plain-clothes Gestapo officer who sat down opposite her.

Zo knew she had been followed all day.

She was terrified of being shot.

She was terrified above all of perhaps giving away some of her resistance contacts.

Just past three in the morning, Zoe had taken her coat off and was appearing to sleep.

But then she sat up and walked down the corridor towards the toilets.

As she did so, she looked past the windows and she could see these telegraph poles whizzing past.

They weren't approaching a station.

The train wasn't slowing down.

She looked behind her and she saw the pale face of the officer.

She knew she was nearly out of options.

As she passed the passenger door, she took the plunge.

She pulled open the door and threw herself out.

She was pretty battered on her landing.

Blood streaked down her clothes from her injuries, but she picked herself up and she managed to get away yet again.

Zo was now a marked woman.

The Gestapo put her on their wanted list.

The Home Army helped her adopt another new identity and dye her hair auburn.

Still, she continued to move around Poland.

Then, to her astonishment, she was offered an extraordinary new role by the commander of the Home Army, General Stefan Lewetsky.

She was the first and only woman appointed to be his personal emissary.

She would cross the whole of Europe, carrying vital microfilm evidence to London.

This included information on Nazi plans for mass murder of the Jewish population, as well as plans for the V-1 missile and V-2 rocket.

While she was in London, General Rowcki had two more jobs for her.

The first was to mend broken land communications between Britain and Poland.

The second was to present his demands for the full integration of women into the Polish Home Army.

General Rowcki is not a feminist.

He's not an equal opportunities employer.

He is doing this because he realises that women have got much more experience than a number of the men serving in the same roles.

Some of them had escaped from prisoner of war camps, some were downed pilots, but they didn't have the experience in occupied territory.

But the women couldn't discipline them.

They couldn't give orders.

They could only issue polite requests.

If you're trying to run an army, you need military discipline.

To prepare for her journey to London, once again, Zoe changed her appearance.

She's done her hair in a different way, wearing glasses, not wearing glasses.

She hid in the water tanker of the French Prime Minister's train.

She's nearly drowned when when they stop to take on more water during their journey.

She was smuggled to the Pyrenees at a hotel on the French side of the mountains when two German officers arrived.

She passed herself off as a waitress.

Climbs the stairs into the upper floors of the hotel where she is actually thrown out of the window into a bank of snow.

So had been shoved out of the window by her communist Catalan guide, and by doing so, he had saved her.

It took several attempts for her to cross the perilous mountain passes into Spain, evading German watchtowers, guard dogs, and gunshots.

Finally, though, she made it into Spain and to the British Embassy in Madrid.

From there, staff drove her south to Gibraltar, where they gave her a full body shirt to her complete horror and chagrin.

Then she took a troop ship to Liverpool.

They're actually hunted by U-boats on that journey.

At last, after a dangerous journey of nearly three months, the British intelligence services collected her off the ship and took her to London.

There she was handed over to Polish general staff.

She had made it and delivered that vital information.

On a warm spring day at the end of May 1943, Zoe walked through the bluebells in a London park.

She was accompanied by Kazimierz Bilski, known as Agent Rum.

Rum served in the Silent Unseen, an elite special operations paratrooper force set up in London by the Polish Army in exile.

Rum was a hero, clever and handsome.

He's used to a lot of admiration from his colleagues and a lot of adoration from the young women who see him in his Polish uniform.

But Zo wasn't full of adoration for him.

In fact, she was frustrated by the sloppy work coming from his office.

Yet Rum's mind was on romance.

So he pulls from his pocket a pair of silk stockings, like an amorous magician, and starts flirting with her.

Zo couldn't believe it.

Her mind is full of the hardship and the peril in Poland.

Her sister, Clara, who had been arrested by the Gestapo, has been sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Her brother, Egon, has been sent to Auschwitz.

She knows what the realities are and this man is flirting with silk stockings.

She scowled at him.

Rum made things worse by trying to explain that, in his opinion, women wearing their legs bare as Zo did was not elegant.

Zo was outraged and told him in no uncertain terms that his mind should be on Poland's future role in a free Europe.

Abashed, Rum took his stockings back.

But Zo realised that the exiled Polish command knew little of what was happening at home.

Persuading them to treat women as soldiers with equal status to men would be even harder than she first thought.

Zo struggled to convince the Polish commanders that women should have full military status.

She had a terrible experience.

And then, on top of that, those captains and majors, the Polish one who sat in London, the comfortable chairs, and they're talking to that woman who's crossed the borders

herself

and asking if the women could actually take part

in fighting.

After three months in London, Zo was despondent.

She said it was the worst moment of her war when she feared that she wasn't going to be able to change the system, she wasn't going to secure the legal representation for women in the home army.

Zo travelled around Britain to see how the army in exile was organised.

General Rowetsky had drafted a decree on women's military status in Poland and she had commented on it, but all this work would be meaningless unless she could get it signed off.

In Scotland, she helped the silent unseen train to use weapons, munitions and parachutes.

She also explained to them how to pass as a civilian in occupied Poland.

So they wouldn't be immediately picked up for asking for a coffee with cream if there was no cream.

The silent unseen were impressed with her work.

They were preparing for a large paratrooper drop over Poland.

Agent Zo was asked whether she would like to spend the rest of the war in Scotland training the troops.

And she said, Well, no, I need to go back and serve my nation.

They said, Well, I'm afraid you can't because you'd have to parachute.

And obviously, you can't parachute because you're a lady.

The following year, Zo would become the only woman to parachute back into Poland.

This was the moment when, on that moonless night in September 1943, she jumped out of the Halifax bomber with her blue silk dress under her jumpsuit.

Zo landed on Polish soil with a thud.

She failed in her mission to achieve military status for women in the Home Army, but there was no time to mourn that.

She had to prepare for her next mission.

a strike by the Polish Home Army against Nazi occupation.

On the 1st of August 1944, Zo was serving as a quartermaster at the Women's Military Service headquarters.

Her job was to provide food, medicine, and supplies to field hospitals.

Five o'clock that evening was designated W hour, named for the Polish word Wibuch,

meaning explosion.

This was the moment when the Polish Home Army planned to attack.

So she goes upstairs to look out the window, to look down on the streets for the last hour of occupation, and she sees a troop of young men.

They were from the Home Army, but they were running from something.

And as they round the corner, the Germans see them, and obviously they're armed.

So she said they just mowed them down.

Zoe hurried downstairs to where the stretchers were kept.

Four women, two nuns, two civilians were taking the stretchers out to help the wounded.

And she runs back upstairs to look, and as she looks down on the street, there was another round of bullets, and all the women are killed as well.

This was her introduction to one of the most brutal conflicts of the war, the Warsaw Uprising.

On that day, 50,000 Home Army troops attacked the German garrison.

Within three days, the Poles regained control over most of the city.

People came out and were celebrating.

There were parties in the streets.

There were young couples going off into the night, singing songs together.

But this early victory didn't last.

The Nazis fought back.

There followed 63 days of deadly conflict.

As many as 15,000 Polish insurgents and 250,000 civilians were killed.

And eventually, Bor Komorowski, the commander-in-chief of the Home Army, realises that they'll have to capitulate.

He has two main priorities at this point.

One is that the fighting forces should be treated as prisoners of war.

And he's managed to secure the Home Army is now seen, recognised by Britain and America as an official Allied army.

This gave Home Army troops protection under the Geneva Convention.

If they were captured, they should not be killed, but instead sent to prisoner of war camps.

Of course, since the women of the Home Army didn't have military status, these rules didn't apply to them.

They're considered to be bandits, to be commandos, and under Hitler's commando order, they can just be shot.

They don't have any protections under the Geneva Convention.

Then, the Commander-in-Chief, Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, revealed his second priority.

He finally signs the draft decree that Zoe had produced in London, meaning that women were officially soldiers with legal recognition and rank.

This would afford them the protections of the Geneva Convention.

And so, for the first time in the Second World War, the only time in history, Nazi Germany set up prisoner of war camps for the women as well.

And instead of being shot or worked to death in labor camps, they are sent to these prisoner of war camps.

At last, Zoe had won full military status for women.

This saves thousands of lives.

At the end of the Second World War, Soviet troops, now fighting for the Allies, pushed the Nazis back out of Poland.

Though Poland technically regained its independence after the war, in practice it became a satellite state of the Soviet Union.

For Zo's family, there was joy and tragedy.

Her brother Egon had been murdered in Auschwitz, yet her sister Clara, who'd been arrested by the Gestapo, deported to Ravensbrück and tortured with medical experiments, miraculously survived the war and the camp.

She and Zo were reunited in 1949.

Though they were together again, the sisters faced new hardships.

Communist Poland authorities did not trust many resistance fighters.

In the 1950s, Zo was arrested and tortured.

She spent years in prison.

After her release, Zo became an academic, working on teaching methods.

But her real passion was to preserve the history of the Polish resistance.

Owing to the opposition of the authorities, she had to gather material in secret.

Years after the fall of communism, in the 1990s, Eugenia Mares was working in the National Archives in London.

She was invited to a conference in Torun, Poland.

Its organizer was Elspieta Savacka, Agent Zo.

Zo asks for Eugenia's help collecting stories from Poles in London.

Eugenia remembers her words.

I hasten to save from oblivion the name and deed

and death of thousands of murdered people who died for their homeland.

Zo lived to the age of 99.

She spent her final days living with her sister, Clara.

The resistance stories and archival materials Zo collected are now in a museum in Turun.

During their time together, Eugenia asked Zo why she had never written her own life story.

She said,

because I don't consider my life important.

I simply served Poland as best I could.

I survived a hundred times because I was lucky enough.

Others didn't.

I'm Natalia Melman-Petrazella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger.

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If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain.

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Listen first on BBC Sounds.

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The APY on cash deposits as of December 27, 2024 is representative, subject to change and requires no minimum.

Funds in the cash account are swept to partner banks where they earn the variable APY.

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