There’s a graveyard in Europe

There’s a graveyard in Europe for one hundred and five men and the Lone woman.

That’s her name, not situation.

Anna Louise Christine Mogensen was called Lone, a short for Danish Abelone or Polish Apolonia. She was a Dane and Pole at the same time, having been born in Poland, killed in Denmark, and married to a Pole. In love with all three, she lost her life twenty-three years into that life, and her marriage three days into that marriage.

Lone, born in 1921, spends her first fifteen happy, blissful years in Jaroszowiec north of Cracow, where her father runs a cement plant. In mid-1930s, the business gets killed by the Great Depression aftershocks, the family returns home, and the girl is homesick there. Poland is her number one, Denmark next in line.

In Denmark, Lone feels like a transplant at first. She goes to a boarding school to polish her Danish, joins the Girl Scouts and takes up photography. She is almost eighteen in 1939, when Poland, alone and enveloped by Germany and the Soviets, gets invaded. The country comes under occupation, and it’s a hard one, in all kinds of ways.

Poland is number one and Denmark next in line also on Hitler’s target list – which is a long list, by the way. Some six months into the war, the Wehrmacht goes up the Jutland Peninsula and grabs the country, which comes under occupation. However, compared to Poland, it’s more like a protectorate, at least until August 1943.

It IS occupation to Lone. She gets very occupied after Germany invades both her countries, and goes to work for a tough resistance group Holger Danske to collect intelligence, take snapshots of German military installations, and carry reports and orders. In the autumn of 1943, she even helps evacuate Danish Jews to Sweden.

At the same time, the Polish Intelligence is busy in Denmark. It’s not so much pre-war spooks from Department II of the CINC Staff as the Continental Action, organized and run by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and called by the SOE the Civilian Polish Underground Service. Its Danish branch goes by "Felicja," or "Inflexion."

Most of its activities overlap with what the local resistance does, and Lone helps, especially after she meets 2nd Lt. Lucjan Masłocha, who’s just broken out of a POW camp near Lübeck. Instant two-way crush. Following a short-training by Polish spooks based in Sweden, Lucjan takes over "Felicja", and they begin to work together.

They infiltrate the German police apparatus, report to the Allies all enemy activity after the protectorate got upgraded to occupation, map out airfields, radar sites and critical infrastructure, work out courier routes, collect weapons, all the while cooperating with the Danish underground. Somewhere along the way, he pops the question.

And she says yes, of course. He’s bound to report to the London HQ, so they don’t wait with the wedding and get married late on 31 December 1944. 2 January, Lucjan leaves, but soon returns: he failed to board the ship, too many Germans. Lone’s over the moon, but it’s the third day of her marriage, and twenty-third year of her life.

That night, heavily armed and trigger-happy Gestapo and Hipo, local auxiliary police, storm into their Copenhagen flat. They open up with everything they have and Lone, hit several times, is killed on the spot. Lucjan will take eight more days to die in a Wehrmacht hospital. Four months later, the Germans are gone and the country’s free.

Denmark has a special place for people who died to make it free. It’s the Ryvangen execution site, turned into a memorial park and graveyard for one hundred and five heroes and lone heroine, Anna Mogensen. For one hundred and five Danes and lone Pole, Lucjan Masłocha. Still, neither Lone nor Lucjan is really alone there.

Lone has her man among all these men, and Lucjan his half-Polish wife among all these Danes.