They must have met at university. There were not that many philosophy students after all and not that many women in the hallways yet. And surely not that many beautiful women with an intense, striking gaze. In the summer 1921 they both sat at Kotarbiński’s Leibniz seminar. By the time they finished their PhD theses, he had divorced his first wife, and she, it seems, was still single.

His name was Antoni Pański. Born in 1895, he was the eldest of three sons of a psychiatrist from Łódź. While in high school, he was involved in some secret student organization for Polish independence and ended up being punished for that with being denied access to better schools. He ended up in Paris and Russia, where he finally received the diploma that allowed him to enter the Warsaw University. In the meantime, a world war happened, and his family moved to Warsaw and found an apartment on Koszykowa street – in the same building in which Tarski grew up.

Antoni and Janina’s relationship does not show up anywhere until well after that first seminar in 1921. Telephone books, city hall indexes, and the letters they wrote to coworkers tell us nothing about what their relationship was like. Just the bare facts: who lives where and with whom. While Janina was spending the 1929/30 academic year in Cambridge, Antoni took a half-year break from his city hall job and went to study economics in London. Coincidence? Probably not. Shortly after she came back from Cambridge, Janina had a new address. She now lived on Koszykowa, together with Antoni and his mother. This was her first move out of her father’s house.

It’s hard to tell how unusual it was for couples of their social status to live together unmarried. Irena Krzywicka, their contemporary, a well-known writer and feminist of the time who was most known for her work promoting contraception and abortion among low income women, as well as her very open extramartial affair with another popular writer of the time – she wrote in her memoir that having affairs at the time was one thing (every educated woman had them, it seemed), but living together without marriage was another: it was just not done. Krzywicka writes about this as one of the main reasons why she married her own partner at the time. Maybe the nearly ten years between Krzywicka’s own marriage of propriety and Janina’s house move were a long enough time to change people’s perspectives on these things. Maybe it was never as big of a deal as Krzywicka made it sound. Or maybe Janina just did not care.

Antoni could not hold onto a job, it seems. He got a PhD in philosophy and even published some papers in philosophy of science, but that route ended quickly. The academic career was clearly not for him; he was more of the active type. His involvement in politics and the funding and self-publishing of the biweekly “Socialist Review” cost him two jobs at the Department of Statistics in Warsaw’s City Hall. The final sacking happened in 1934. After that, he struggled to find further employment and turned to freelance translations.

Could this unsteadiness of his position in life (he also had a history of arrests, both as a teenager and in the 1920s) be the reason why Janina wouldn’t commit? Or was it just a difference in focus? She had one passion and one only: philosophy. Her goal in life, even more pronounced as she was getting older, was to find a paid position that would allow her to focus solely on research. Maybe she did not want a husband to provide for on top of that. On the other hand, the company that her father left to her and her brothers seems to have doing well, so maybe money was not that much of a problem.

So maybe it was religion? She was a Jew and never changed that. Antoni, somewhere between his teenage years in Łódź and the beginning of his university studies in Warsaw became a Christian. It is difficult to tell how official the change was, as his diplomas and other school documents persistently classify him as a Jew, while he continues to report himself as a protestant. In pre-war Poland inter-religious marriages did not exist, so one of them would have to commit to a change if they wanted to marry at all.

The Pański entry in the biography dictionary lists Janina as Antoni’s second, “unmarried” (nieślubną) wife.

In June 1935 Janina was still on Koszykowa and their situation does not appear to have changed much. Yet, just over two months later, she would write her correspondence from the Złota street and sign her letters with a new surname. It was not Janina Pańska. It was Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum. Somewhere in August 1935, a marriage did take place.

Złota street was where Adolf Lindendaum’s family was based. Adolf – Dolek for friends – was one of those bright young Warsaw logicians. Born in 1904, he was five years younger than Janina. He came from a well-off family and liked to party possibly even more than he liked mathematics. The stories about his party character had been told in the Warsaw logic circles for decades after the war.

It was the summer of 1935. Lindenbaum had a fresh habilitation (an academic title beyond a doctorate, which was the first step towards future professorships) and a serious job at the university awarded just weeks earlier. That same year, Janina was assigned an apartment in a social housing project which was becoming increasingly popular among the left-leaning intelligentsia. He had a stable income, she had her own place – perfect time to tie the knot. A few months later they moved to her new apartment.

Janina and Antoni’s split was clearly amicable. He would visit the Lindenbaums in their new home, especially once he himself moved to the same neighborhood. And they would try to get married eventually, but that’s a story of a different place and a much darker time.