The Silent Sacrifice of Irena Iłłakowicz: Poland’s Forgotten Spy Heroine

dthholland
Jun 3
6 min read

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In the great sweep of twentieth-century history, World War II produced its share of spies, saboteurs, and secret agents, figures who operated in the shadows to resist tyranny. Among them was Irena Iłłakowicz, a polyglot aristocrat turned intelligence officer, whose courage in the Polish underground would ultimately cost her life. Her story, intertwined with exile, espionage, and betrayal, remains one of the war’s more quietly extraordinary episodes.

From Berlin to Persia: A Cosmopolitan Beginning

Irena Morzycka-Iłłakowicz was born on 26 July 1906 in Berlin, then part of the German Empire. Her Polish parents, Bolesław Morzycki and Władysława Zakrzewska, had left their occupied homeland in search of opportunity, a path similar to that taken by other Polish émigrés of the time, such as the Curies.

When the First World War upended Europe, the Morzyckis fled to Finland, then a Grand Duchy under Russian rule but moving rapidly toward independence. After Poland re-emerged as a sovereign nation in 1918, the family returned home.

Educated in Poland and later in France, Irena studied humanities at Grenoble University before moving to Paris. There, she met her first husband, Azis Zangenah, the son of a Persian prince. They married and relocated to Iran, where she spent two years in his family’s palace. Although living in splendour, Irena grew deeply homesick. Cut off from her family and Polish community, she quietly arranged a departure with the help of Polish diplomats in Tehran and was able to return to Warsaw.

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Life Before the Storm

Back in Paris in the early 1930s, Irena met her second husband, Jerzy Olgierd Iłłakowicz, with whom she returned to Poland. The couple married in Warsaw in 1934, and their daughter Ligia was born two years later. They enjoyed a short-lived period of peace. But with reports emerging from Nazi Germany, they prepared for war with grim determination.

That war came in September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland from the west and, days later, the Soviet Union attacked from the east. By October, both Irena and Jerzy had joined the Polish resistance. To avoid detection by the Gestapo, Irena adopted the alias Barbara Zawisza, and she and Jerzy lived apart, taking care never to meet publicly.

A Perfect Spy

When Poland fell under Nazi and Soviet occupation in 1939, many in the resistance were called upon to perform extraordinary tasks, but few were as uniquely suited to espionage as Irena Iłłakowicz. Drawing on her elite education, cosmopolitan upbringing, and fluency in seven languages, Polish, French, English, German, Russian, Finnish, and Persian, she quickly distinguished herself as an invaluable asset to the underground intelligence network.

She was assigned to Zachód ("West"), a section of the intelligence department within the Organizacja Wojskowa Związek Jaszczurczy (OW ZJ), one of several clandestine military organisations aligned with the larger Polish resistance structure. The unit, operating in tandem with the Związek Walki Zbrojnej (ZWZ) and later the Armia Krajowa (Home Army), had a specific remit: gather information on the German war machine through military, political, and economic reconnaissance, especially concerning the Western Front.

Irena’s ability to assimilate, adapt and convincingly assume new identities made her ideal for the high-stakes environment of counterintelligence. Her flawless German allowed her to integrate seamlessly into Berlin, a city at the very heart of the Third Reich. There, she joined a covert cell embedded within the German capital, collecting sensitive information on troop movements, industrial production, and administrative decisions that were later relayed back to the Polish underground.

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Operating in Berlin was a level of danger few agents experienced. Irena’s mere presence there was an act of defiance. Travel in and out of the Reich, even under false papers, carried the constant threat of exposure. Her work demanded not only linguistic dexterity and nerves of steel, but also the ability to decode subtle behavioural cues, conceal her emotions, and sustain double lives in the most literal sense.

Yet as the network expanded, so too did the danger. By 1941, German counterintelligence had begun to unravel her cell. Arrests mounted over the next year. Surveillance tightened. Despite her precautions, Irena was arrested by the Gestapo on 7 October 1942 and taken to Pawiak prison in Warsaw—a place synonymous with terror.

Torture, Bravery, and Escape

Pawiak was not merely a prison; it was a crucible of suffering, a site where Nazi interrogators honed their techniques against political prisoners, Jews, and resistance fighters. Incarcerated in its damp, overcrowded cells, Irena was subjected to relentless questioning, psychological torment, and physical torture. Yet she revealed nothing. Her silence preserved the integrity of her cell and bought time for others to flee or regroup.

Aware of her high value to the resistance and the unbearable conditions she faced, her comrades found a way to smuggle a small vial of cyanide into the prison. It was an unspoken rite among intelligence officers—the final insurance against betrayal under torture. Irena, however, rejected the offer. She believed that to continue living was a form of resistance in itself.

Her husband, Jerzy Iłłakowicz, now deeply embedded in the National Armed Forces (NSZ), leveraged contacts and bribes to orchestrate her removal from Pawiak. A sympathetic guard was persuaded to include Irena among a group of female prisoners bound for Majdanek. This may seem counterintuitive—Majdanek was a concentration and extermination camp, but the move offered a slim window of opportunity. Unlike Pawiak, where high-value prisoners were closely monitored, Majdanek’s processing system offered less scrutiny, particularly for political prisoners masked as common criminals.

The rescue that followed was audacious. A group of NSZ operatives, impersonating Gestapo officers, arrived at Majdanek bearing forged orders for Irena’s transfer. Dressed in crisp uniforms and wielding false authority, they demanded she be released for “interrogation” back in Warsaw. Remarkably, the ruse worked. Irena was led from the camp under guard (her own comrades in disguise) and spirited away before the deception could be uncovered.

It was a plan worthy of fiction, but documented in wartime reports of the Delegatura Rządu na Kraj, the Polish Government-in-Exile’s administrative branch in occupied Poland.

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Back to Work

Following her escape, Irena spent a brief period recuperating in the Lublin district before returning once more to Warsaw. Now living under even deeper cover, she stayed with Dr. Miłodroska on Filtrowa Street and resumed active duties. But the intelligence landscape had shifted. While the Germans remained the visible enemy, the growing shadow of Soviet influence loomed over Poland’s future.

With the Red Army approaching from the east, Soviet intelligence operations in occupied Poland increased in intensity. Under the guise of anti-Nazi cooperation, Soviet operatives were laying the groundwork for a postwar communist regime. Parachutists from the NKVD and aligned factions like the Polska Partia Robotnicza (PPR) were being inserted behind enemy lines. Their mission was not only to aid in the fight against the Nazis, but to neutralise non-communist resistance groups.

Irena now turned her attention to this emerging threat. She monitored Soviet radio communications, tracked the movement of infiltrators, and compiled intelligence on the PPR’s activities. It was a new, more convoluted theatre of espionage, one in which yesterday’s allies could become tomorrow’s executioners.

At the same time, Jerzy was preparing for his departure to London, where he was to represent the National Armed Forces before the Polish Government-in-Exile. He pleaded with Irena to accompany him, but the command overruled the request. Her work was deemed too vital to abandon.

On the night of 4 October 1943, just nine days before she was to join a clandestine mission to the West, Irena received a message summoning her to an urgent meeting. She was wary—it bore the hallmarks of a trap—but felt the content of the message too important to ignore. Before leaving, she warned her host to notify her contacts should she not return.

She never did.

Death in the Shadows

Irena's lifeless body was discovered at Pole Mokotowskie, a large park in central Warsaw. Her death was violent and deliberately brutal. Though the precise method remains classified in wartime reports, the brutality was consistent with political executions designed to send a message.

The perpetrators were never formally identified. Given her recent activities, suspicion centred on the Soviet-aligned Polish Workers’ Party (PPR) or the NKVD, who were known to eliminate resistance figures deemed obstacles to the postwar political settlement. At the time of her death, Irena had been involved in gathering intelligence on a Soviet radio contact hub in Otwock—evidence suggests this may have directly led to her murder.

Her funeral had to be conducted in secret. Still officially known as “Barbara Zawisza,” she was interred in Powązki Cemetery, Warsaw’s most revered burial ground. To avoid Nazi surveillance—who frequently infiltrated funerals of resistance members—Jerzy disguised himself as a cemetery labourer, while her mother posed as a grave attendant. It was not until 1948 that a memorial plaque bearing her true name was affixed to her grave.

Recognition and Legacy

On 20 May 1944, Irena Iłłakowicz was posthumously promoted to Second Lieutenant by order of the commander of the National Armed Forces. Much later, in 1995, she received the Krzyż Narodowego Czynu Zbrojnego (Cross of National Armed Deed) in recognition of her sacrifices.

Her story, like many of the women of the Polish resistance, remains relatively unknown outside historical circles. Yet her bravery, multilingualism, and refusal to yield under torture speak to a legacy of unflinching commitment. She was a woman whose wartime contributions were shaped not by violence, but by courage, intelligence, and integrity.

In a war that often painted espionage in glamorous hues, Irena Iłłakowicz’s life reminds us of the quiet price paid by those in the resistance—the price of secrecy, separation, and, ultimately, silence.