Agent Zo – Great Wall St. Journal Review

We want to congratulate author Clare Mulley on the great review published in today’s Wall St. Journal about her new book Agent Zo: The Untold Story of Fearless WW2 Resistance Fighter Elzbieta Zawacka, which was first published in the UK this past May and in the US in December. We blogged about its UK publication here.

This is the incredible story of Elżbieta Zawacka — the World War II female resistance fighter known as Agent Zo — told here for the very first time. Agent Zo was the only female emissary of the Polish Home Army command to reach London from Warsaw during the war. In Britain, she became the only woman to join the elite Polish Special Forces, the Cichociemni (aka the Unseen & Silent), affiliated with British Special Operations Executive (SOE).

She was secretly trained in the British countryside, and then became the only female member of the Cichociemni to be parachuted behind enemy lines to German-occupied Poland. There, whilst being hunted by the Gestapo who arrested her entire family, she took a leading role in the Warsaw Uprising and the liberation of Poland.

In his review, Andrew Nagorski writes:  “Zo was anything but ordinary, perhaps the most extraordinary individual among a multitude of larger-than-life figures who routinely took enormous risks to free their country from Hitler’s overlords….In ‘Agent Zo,’ the British historian Clare Mulley skillfully weaves together Zawacka’s personal story with the broad sweep of events.” 

This is a book well worth the read!!

Read the entire Wall St. Journal review online here, or in pdf.

By the way, we are happy that we were able to contribute a little to Clare’s research on Zo!