Halina Kłąb-Szwarc. The youngest female secret agent in the Home Army

“Be aware of your responsibility towards society. Do not let this historical opportunity for freedom pass you by, for which so many people of my generation have waited in vain.” This quote from Halina Kłąb-Szwarc has been inscribed on the memorial plaque next to the monument dedicated to her in the centre of Łódź. The place where the monument has stood since 2021 was carefully chosen. Right behind it is the former Gestapo prison where Kłąb-Szwarc, then age 21 waited for her death sentence to be carried out.[1]

Halina Szwarc (née Kłąb) was prepared to risk everything, including her life, for the sake of freedom and the opportunity to lead an independent life. Initially, however, there was nothing to suggest that her young life would soon turn into a kind of action thriller. Halina, an only child, was born in Łódź on 5 May 1923. There, she enjoyed an excellent education at the Helena Miklaszewska girls’ grammar school, a prestigious institution for the daughters of intellectuals and well-to-do factory owners. Music played a particularly important role in young Halina’s life. She dreamed of becoming a concert pianist and spent several hours a day practising the piano. However, her dream was brought to an abrupt halt one day, when she heard a 12-year-old boy playing the piano at her music school. “I knew that I would never be able to play better than him,” she recalled years later.[2] As a teenager, Halina joined the Girl Guides.

The outbreak of the Second World War turned everything the 16-year-old Halina had planned and held dear on its head. She tried to join the underground movement on her own initiative. She soon succeeded: in December 1939, she was accepted as a member of the Łódź division of the armed combat force (Związek Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ). Her first assignment was to learn German perfectly. She used newspapers and other materials to help her pick up the language. Several months later, she was told that she should attempt to have her name added to the Deutsche Volksliste (“German People’s List”) due to her grandmother’s German roots (née Vogel). She also joined the League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Mädel), the equivalent of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) for young girls.

In the autumn of 1940, Halina was included in the Deutsche Volksliste due to her “unambiguous German origins”, and changed her surname to Klomb. She had to pay a high price for doing so, however. Her friends, who knew nothing about her involvement in the resistance, left her in no doubt about what they thought of her “change of mind”: they spat in front of her feet.

Soon, the young Halina moved to Kalisz, where she attended a German school and passed her “Abitur” school-leaving exams with excellent marks. She then worked as a teacher in a school in the district of Piwonice, where she taught the children of the Germans who had settled there. During this time, she already began taking on secret service assignments. Her task was to monitor the mood among the German population and compile reports on the subject for the Kalisz II division of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK). Her direct superior was Wacław Kałużniak, code name “Jacek One” (Jacek Pierwszy). After he was discovered by the Germans and shot, Halina took over his position under the code name “Jacek Two” (Jacek Drugi).

In 1942, at the request of her superior, Halina moved to Vienna. To avoid attracting suspicion, she enrolled as a medical student there. However, this was only a cover, which she needed in order to begin “Campaign N” (Akcja N). She secretly sent out anti-National Socialist propaganda materials to German households. These included the death announcements of young soldiers who had been killed “in the service of the Führer”, as well as magazines designed to lower the morale of the German population by announcing the imminent defeat of Germany. “Campaign N” was a form of psychological warfare.

The young agent knew what awaited her if she were to be discovered. For this reason, she carried a small bottle of poison with her wherever she went. “I took the cyanide on every assignment. I was told to bite onto the bottle if I was interrogated and tortured,” she later reported in an interview for the “Wysokie Obcasy” magazine.[3]