The Hosiassons had four children: Henryk, Stefan, Janina, and Ludwik. At least, those are the children we know of, or ones that lived long enough to finish school.

The university entrance photos of the boys, lined up by age, tell a story on their own. Each young man on his portrait is just a little less serious and more relaxed than the previous one. Henryk, the eldest, must have been the golden child of the family. When he enters the university, his stellar silver medal high school diploma is already over a year old, as he had the bad luck of graduating just a few months before the Great War broke out. He looks beyond the camera with earnest seriousness. It is the same face as Janina’s: round, strong-browed, with a full, wide mouth that does not smile, but rather tightens with resolve. The middle brother sits back a little and smiles shyly. It is somehow unsurprising that he will be the one to ditch his medical career and escape to Paris. The youngest, Ludwik, is the odd one out. A smaller face and frame, he is dressed with more panache than his brothers, and looks a little like he does not want to be there. Which is exactly what will happen, when he eventually drops out of university.

Their father, Józef Hosiasson, was a merchant who gained some prominence in the Warsaw Jewish community over the years. He would be a member of various committees, lead a charity that helped poor mothers, and sign political petitions. But there seem to be no documents left that would tell us anything about the private life of the family.

What is available, however, are newspaper archives. All the facts above about Józef can be read off newspaper clippings from the time. But the reports, ads, and open letters are only tiny traces of a person. Then there is the – uncertain, tentative – interpretative work of trying to read the values and beliefs that manifested through the actions that were reported in public.

On November 12th, 1905 we find the following list of charitable donations made by the readers of the Kurjer Warszawski newspaper:

(Full scan of the newspaper can be found here.)

In the list of names of people who gave money we find: “Henio, Stefanek i Janeczka Hosiasson ze swojej skarbonki 60 kop.” That is, little Henryk, Stefan and Janina Hosiasson gave 60 kopeks (which is 0.6 of a ruble) for baking bread for the poor, which was organized by the newspaper. The year 1905 was not an easy one in Warsaw, with the Russian revolution rolling through the city earlier in the year. There probably were enough of the poor to use more than one charity bakery. And apparently quite a few children were donating some of their own savings to the cause – the Hosiassons are not the only children to be listed here.

In the public, larger-scale charity work of their father, and in this snippet showing how the children were taught to contribute to those parts of their community that were not as affluent as themselves, there is a common theme. This focus on the community will continue through Janina’s life. Although eventually she will admit to be skeptical about Soviet-style communism, before 1939 she was firmly a part of the young socialist intelligentsia at the university and beyond. In mid-1930s, together with many of those friends, she moved from the high-end city center neighborhood to a new, progressive social housing project (which, sadly, turned out mostly too expensive for actual working classes to rent there), where every May 1st was widely celebrated. And finally, during the war, as a refugee herself, she worked in a Red Cross refugee help center in Vilnius.