This country is at war with Germany.

We shall go on to the end.

I remember the sheets of flame which came up and almost blinded us from our guns.

In this episode of the World War II podcast, I'm joined by Claire Mully to uncover the extraordinary story of El Sabeta Zavatska, known by her codename, Zoh.

A woman who defied the odds as a resistance fighter, courier and special operations agent during the Second World War.

Zoh was the only woman to make the perilous journey from Warsaw to London as an emissary of the Polish Home Army.

After completing training in Britain, she became the only female agent to parachute

into Nazi-occupied Poland. There, with the Gestapo hunting her and a family arrested, she played a

crucial role in the resistance fighting in the Warsaw uprising and working toward Poland's liberation.

After the war, despite being one of Poland's most decorated female soldiers,

the Soviet-backed communist regime imprisoned Zoh and her story was buried for decades now.

Thanks to new archival research and exclusive interviews,

Claire brings Zoh's remarkable life back into the spotlight

in her excellent book, Agent Zoh.

Claire, thanks for joining me.

So we're going to be talking about Elizabeth Zavatka,

who will become Agent Zoh.

Shall we start with a background?

She's Polish, but her first language was German.

So what was a background?

So she is born in 2009 in a historic Polish town called Torun in northwest Poland. But in 1999, when she was born,

that part of Poland had actually been annexed into the Prussian Empire, which is an earlier

...