Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elżbieta Zawacka FIRST EDITION

Mulley, Claire.

Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 2024.

First edition, exemplary condition. 

Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Nonfiction 2025, & recipient of Military History Matters magazine’s Book of the Year 2025, Silver Award, tells the remarkable story of courageous resistance fighter Elżbieta Zawacka, aka ‘Zo’, the only woman to parachute from Britain to Nazi-German occupied Poland during the Second World War. There, while being hunted by the Gestapo, who arrested her entire family, she established a military intelligence network, couriered microfilm across wartime borders and, as the only female member of the Polish elite special forces, the ‘Silent Unseen’, played a key role in the largest organised act of defiance against Nazi German occupation – the Warsaw Uprising.

After the war, Zo was demobbed as one of the most highly decorated Polish women in history. Yet the Soviet-backed communist regime not only imprisoned her, but also ensured that her remarkable story remained hidden. Now, through new archival research and exclusive interviews with people who knew and fought alongside Zo, Clare Mulley brings this forgotten heroine back to life, transforming the was we see the history of women’s agency in the Second World War.