21/12/2023
Aldo Steccanella
Władzia Kostakówna came out of the shadows to become a beauty queen, and then stepped into the shadows to work as intelligence operative.
➡ Before that Warsaw girl decided to run for Miss Poland, there’d been other kinds of running in her life. WWI made her family run from the city in 1914, then the Bolshevik revolution ran them out of Crimea, and only in 1920 could the girl and her mother, having buried the father of the family and run out of all resources, return to free Poland.
➡ In 1920s, Władzia lived in a French convent for a few years, learned typing and stenography in Warsaw, and in 1929, when the first official beauty pageant was held in Poland, she was working for the capital city savings bank. The humble clerk ran for the sash and won, leaving behind highborn ladies, stepping into the spotlight and turning into a celebrity overnight.
➡ 20-year-old Władzia went on to represent Poland in the Miss Europe contest in Paris, coming second, and then, she could have competed for the Miss Universe tiara or taken any movie role she wanted but didn’t. Instead, she married a Warsaw lawyer named Śliwiński, became the stepmother of his teenage son Leon and got involved in charity.
➡ Nearly a decade later, the Third Reich drove her family out of Warsaw, and the Sliwińskis moved to Aix-en-Provence and then Nice, where the stepson joined the Polish Intelligence and recruited his stepmother. She started out as a wireless operator, but quickly graduated to field operative, eager to scratch that itch and get even with the Germans.
➡ To intelligence work she brought unequalled courage and perfect sangfroid, proving that her beauty was hardly skin-deep. Several times she dodged German Abwehr or Italian OVRA and once saved her network by eating a whole address book while under custody. She got promoted to 2nd lieutenant and always refused to be compensated for her service.
➡ It went on until late 1944; when the Third Reich's efforts were beginning to look like flopping of a fish on a deck, the spy ring was terminated, and Władzia and Leon moved to Morocco. After WW2, she reunited with her husband, who’d served in the Navy Command in London, but the family couldn’t return to Poland, taken over by the communists.
➡ They settled down in Casablanca, where in 1951 the former spy received the King’s Medal for Courage in the Cause of Freedom aboard a British cruiser; she would also get Polish Cross of Merit with Swords and French Legion d’honneur, one of the first awarded to a Polish woman. Until her death in France in 2001, she cherished them more than her 1929 sash.
➡ And that, surely you’ll agree, was the beauty of it. Of her.
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If you feel like reading about another beautiful intelligence asset, see this post: https://www.facebook.com/ipngovplEng/posts/751123383718486