Marking grandad's service: Navy officer to lead naval contingent on Remembrance Sunday
Brandishing a shining sword, forged especially for the occasion, Lieutenant Commander Anna Sanocki marches alongside Royal Navy and Royal Marines personnel at HMS Excellent in Portsmouth, where they've been rehearsing their drill.
The officer, from RNAS Culdrose, will lead the naval contingent at the Cenotaph Remembrance Sunday service in London.
And when she does, her own family's remarkable history will be at the forefront of her mind.
Lieutenant Commander Sanocki's grandfather, Tadeusz "Ted" Sanocki, was 22 years old at the outbreak of the Second World War.
He lived in south-east Poland on a family farm near the city of Przemysl, which is today near the border with Ukraine.
Lt Cdr Sanocki said: "When I was younger, I thought I was the only one with any link to the military, until I discovered there was this rich family history.
"Grandad didn't talk about what happened in the war, and that family knowledge was lost. He passed away when I was two.
"Some years ago, I started getting into family history and pieced together his story. His family were farmers. The German invasion intended to take the best land for themselves.
"My grandfather was taken with his brothers and sisters to a work camp elsewhere in Poland. We know that he was sent to a prison in Germany and then to a work farm in Austria."
He added: "He escaped to Yugoslavia and fought in support of Tito, but he was shot in the leg. He then escaped to Italy in 1945 and joined the Polish contingent of the British Eighth Army."
Lt Cdr Sanocki has photographs of her grandfather with fellow Polish soldiers while serving in the 5th Kresowa Infantry Division. One picture shows her grandfather holding a small girl, although the context is not known and the photograph is not captioned.
"After the war, he came to the UK with the Polish Resettlement Corps," she added. "Initially, my grandfather wanted to go back to Poland. His family wrote to him and said: 'Don't come back. It's not safe. You've got a better life in the UK. Stay there'."
Lt Cdr Sanocki said Ted then met her grandmother, Ruby, who was aged 22 at the end of the war. She had been a corporal in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force, tending to barrage balloons in Yorkshire. The couple married and moved to Plympton, near Plymouth, and in 1957, Ted became a British citizen.
"There are certain details that make me now think 'that's really cool'," Lt Cdr Sanocki added. "I joined the Royal Navy at the age of 26. When I think back about my grandmother, she was serving on the frontline when I would have been in my second year at uni. It puts a whole new spin on things."
The 43-year-old from Plymouth is the senior meteorology and oceanography officer at RNAS Culdrose. She runs the team which provides weather forecasts for flying operations at the Fleet Air Arm station, and ocean tactical data used by naval helicopters to hunt submarines.
Next year, she is due to join the aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth in a role she describes as "my dream job."
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