REVIEW BY ANDREW MULHOLLAND
This latest book from biographer Clare Mulley goes way beyond the astonishing life story of Elżbieta Zawacka. For it also provides an important overview of 20th-century Poland, as well as a reminder of the horrors of tyranny and the price paid by individuals for realpolitik. As Zawacka herself would havewished, it gives due prominence to the role of women in the political and military struggles of Poland and elsewhere. Without being polemical, the book sets that record straight with the skill and sympathy of a diligent historian. All of this done in an accessible, page-turning style.
Zawacka herself was a prominent member of the Polish Home Army during World War II, a political campaigner, writer, archivist, historian, teacher, and academic. The cliché ‘a long and full’ life doesn’t quite cover it. For those wondering to what extent is this actually military history, the answer is that the heart of the book deals with Zawacka’s wartime experience.
She participated in the ten-day siege of Lwów in 1939 and also in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Apart from that, she worked primarily as a senior commander in the ‘Farmstead’ overseas communication section of the Home Army. This involved extensive travel across occupied Europe, with enough close calls to fill a dozen spy novels. She trained with the SOE in Audley End and parachuted back into Poland from an RAF Halifax.
