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]
In the spring of 1943, Halina Kłąb was sent on a two-week training course on marine warfare. There, she learned to identify different types of ships, as well as their weapons systems and water displacement levels. Soon afterwards, she went to Hamburg. There were already a large number of agents in the city with orders to gather information about the German armaments industry and to crack the codes for the air defence systems. Halina posed as a tourist in the city: a young girl with a camera and travel guide was unlikely to attract suspicion. She met a young man who worked as a ferry operator for workers in the dockyards. He invited her to join him on a tour of the port. This enabled her to discover and photograph a number of facilities, including several used for military purposes.
This information, which she passed on to the Allies would later play a key role. At the end of July and the beginning of August 1943, the British RAF and American USAAF conducted a series of carpet-bombing raids on Hamburg known as “Operation Gomorrah”. After the air attacks, during which 1.7 million high explosive bombs and firebombs were dropped onto the city, most of its buildings were left in ruins. 1.2 million people fled Hamburg from one day to the next.[4] The Allies succeeded in destroying all the submarine docks as well as a diesel engine plant. This was a major blow to the German armaments capacities and brought the country’s second-largest city to a complete standstill for a short time. The Polish government in exile in London awarded Halina Kłąb the Bronze Cross of Merit with Swords – a medal for bravery for non-combat activities – for revealing the location of the military facilities.
Halina’s next assignment was in Berlin. She volunteered to work in the Central Archive for Military Medicine (Zentralarchiv für Wehrmedizin). There, she gained access to sensitive data on the state of the German Army. Her task was to supply information about soldiers wounded at the front. She also had access to names and locations of military units, as well as the number of wounded. This information was passed on to Poland and from there, to the Allies.
In May 1944, Halina travelled to Łódź to visit her mother. She was also told by her superior to take time to rest. However, shortly after her arrival, she and her mother were arrested by the Gestapo in her parents’ flat. Halina was accused of underground activities. It later emerged that she had been betrayed by a spy. The two women were taken to the Gestapo prison at 13 Danzigerstrasse (today: ul. Gdańska) in Łódź. Halina was brutally interrogated multiple times. The most commonly used method of torture were blows to the back and heels. Gas masks were used to quieten the prisoners if they screamed too loudly. However, despite being tortured and humiliated, Halina did not give any names away. Finally, she was sentenced to death without a trial. Her mother was deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
Halina Kłąb spent eight months in prison. For about 12 days, she was forced to sit in the “dark cell” – a completely dark space that was so low it was not possible to stand upright. In mid-January 1945, as Soviet troops approached the city, the Germans decided to “evacuate” the prison, transporting the prisoners westwards in order to “liquidate” them there.
Barbara Cygańska-Wiland, a fellow prisoner, described the situation in Łódź that night: “Towards midnight, we were also led out of the prison in groups of eight. We walked through the city down the pitch black, empty streets towards Chojny, along Pabianicka Avenue towards Pabianice. It was a clear, ice-cold, starry night. Civilians were fleeing with everything they owned along all the streets that led out of the city. There were carts everywhere carrying children and the elderly. They were all Germans who had been settled in the farms that had once belonged to the Polish farmers who had been driven out.”[5] Both women managed to escape under the cover of darkness. Soon afterwards, others followed their example. The female German prison guards, who were clearly nervous, were coming under increasing time pressure as they fled from the Soviets, and didn’t have the will to search for them.
As Halina Kłąb-Szwarc admitted many years later in an interview for “Wysokie Obcasy”: “When the war came to an end, I was in my early twenties, but I felt like a 60-year-old.”[6] However, the end of the war did not result in the return to normality for which Halina longed. During the first months after the war, she went underground in order to avoid being arrested by the Polish Security Service (Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, UB). It was not until 1946 that she underwent a legal rehabilitation process before a court in Łódź. Her superiors in the Home Army confirmed that she had only asked for her name to be added to the Deutsche Volksliste at the request of the Army leadership.
Halina then moved to Poznań, where she continued the medical studies that she had begun in Vienna and married Andrzej Szwarc. However, the future for former members of the Home Army was anything but bright. They were harassed by the security services in the communist People’s Republic of Poland. Halina underwent multiple interrogations lasting for several hours, even when she was heavily pregnant. In 1951, she was forced to give up her job as a researcher at the Medical University (Akademia Medyczna) in Poznań due to her past activities. Halina Kłąb-Szwarc had two children: a son, Andrzej (b. 1951) and a daughter, Anna (b. 1958). In the years that followed, she changed jobs several times and conducted research, mainly in the field of thyroid diseases among patients from Greater Poland. She was also one of the first doctors to initiate comprehensive medical examinations of concentration camp survivors.
However, it was not until 1964, when Halina Kłąb-Szwarc moved to Warsaw, that her scientific career took off. She became vice-dean and later vice-rector of the Warsaw sports academy (Akademia Wychowania Fizycznego). At 52, she turned to an entirely new area of research: gerontology, or the study of ageing processes. She became a highly regarded expert in the field. One of her most important achievements in this area was the establishment of a university for senior citizens (Uniwersytet Trzeciego Wieku, UTW) in Warsaw in 1975. A similar institution in Toulouse in France served as an inspiration for the project. Later, the university was named after Halina Szwarc. Together with France and Belgium, Poland was initially only the third country in the world offering this form of support and education for retired people.[7] Currently there are more than 500 universities for senior citizens (including branch offices) throughout the country, with around 90,000 students.[8]
Prof. Halina Kłąb-Szwarc received numerous awards for her services during the Second World War, including the Bronze and Silver Cross of Merit with Swords (for her assignments in Hamburg and Berlin) and the highest military order of merit in Poland, the Virtuti Militari. She was also presented with the Order of Polonia Restituta Second Class Commander’s Cross with Star.
For years, neither her relatives nor her colleagues knew anything about her activities during the Second World War. It was not until 1999, when her book, “Wspomnienia z pracy w wywiadzie ZWZ-AK” (“Memories of My Work in the ZWZ and AK Secret Service) was published, that the world found out about the extraordinary story of the young secret agent. The book was used as the basis for the filmed theatre performance “Doktor Halina” (2008, director: Marcin Wrona) and the documentary film “Najmłodsza agentka” (2023, director: Magdalena Majewska).
Halina Kłąb-Szwarc died in 2002 aged 79. She was buried in the family grave in the Powązki cemetery in Warsaw.
Monika Stefanek, October 2024
My thanks to Prof. Andrzej Szwarc, son of Prof. Halina Kłąb-Szwarc, for providing the material that helped me write this article.
