I have previously written here about Janina’s relationship with Antoni Pański, her first life partner. As these things go, that version was just a snapshot of my knowledge at the time. Since then, I have accumulated more sources, which of course led to more questions than they answered.

At this point, my two main sources on the Pański family are the memoir of Antoni’s brother Wacław Solski, written in the 1960s, and the memoir of Antoni Marianowicz, first published in the 1990s. Marianowicz was a grandson of Antoni’s maternal aunt, with whom the Pański family shared their Warsaw apartment on Koszykowa, and often visited them as a boy (and shared a house with Mrs Pańska in the Warsaw ghetto). Still, Marianowicz is a tricky source. Yes, it was his close family, but, born in 1923, he not only writes about things that happened when he was a small boy (or even before he was born), but also writes about them well over fifty years later, with memory possibly distorted by time. Solski was also writing quite late in life, also having done a lot of research for the book, often admitting that he remembers something differently from the way preserved in history books.

Anyways, enough about the meta level. First of all, contrary to what I originally thought, Janina and Antoni did not meet at university. Rather, they had probably known each other their whole lives, even though they grew up in different cities, as they were actually related. Antoni’s and Janina’s maternal grandmothers were sisters: Emilia and Eleonora Feigenblatt, respectively (this paper gets it wrong, probably because of the confusion caused by the fact that Eleonora Feigenblatt married a man called Henryk Feigenblatt, which blurs the maiden and married names). Moreover, Antoni’s father was very close with Edward Flatau, the second husband of Janina’s mother. The Pański family would often come to stay with the Flataus in Warsaw. (However, the Hosiasson children do not seem to have been very close with their mother, if allowed contact at all, so it is not clear if they would really spend time in the Flatau household at all.)

Marianowicz recalls that, as a young man, Antoni fell in love with Janina. The feeling was reciprocated, but the family was not keen of the union, and Janina broke it off under pressure from “her outraged aunts and uncles.” Soon afterwards, Antoni got together with Elza Aftergut, his first wife. I am having a hard time, however, placing that information on some sort of a timeline. Solski recalls that he first met Antoni’s new fiancée, which he had just got engaged with that summer, in August 1914, as they were leaving Łódź at the breakout of the war (the Pańskis spent the First World War in Minsk). Elza joined them on the way to Minsk, and by the time she reappears in Solski’s story, it is late 1918 and she lives with the Pańskis in Warsaw, still as Antoni’s fiancée (at that point the Pański family consists of the mother and two sons; the father reportedly killed himself in 1918, when he heard a later unconfirmed rumour that his three sons had been killed; and the third son, Wacław, is by now a professional revolutionary on the run and this is the last time he visits his family, it seems).

So, we have three distinct periods during which the first round of the Janina-Antoni romance and the subsequent family uproar could have taken place. First, before the war. Antoni’s rather sudden engagement over the summer would fit the version where this is a reaction to the family’s dissent from his plans to marry Janina. But at that point, Janina is just under fifteen years old (and Antoni is nineteen), and it would not even have to be them being distant cousins that prompted the breakup of the union. Additionally, Antoni spend the academic year directly preceding WWI in Paris, as a first year student, which would move the whole thing even earlier in time, towards 1912, which is really pushing it in terms of the potential to be a serious relationship.

Second, during the war. Not very likely, as they lived under different occupations for most of that time: Antoni was in Minsk until the spring of 1918, and Janina has a well-documented school presence in Warsaw between 1910 and 1919.

Third, in 1918 or shortly after. Most likely, it seems. He arrives in Warsaw and finds his younger cousin having grown into a beautiful, bright woman. She is nineteen and not indifferent. But, he is either already married to Elza, or about to marry her after at least four years of wartime engagement—and this seems to me more of a reason why Janina would be pressured to step away, not necessarily the, rather distant, family connection. But, this is all just a guess.

In any case, they do split, but clearly cannot stay too far form each other. Once Antoni is done with his army service and back at university in 1921, they are constantly in seminars together, and Antoni’s eventual divorce from Elza in 1924 likely did not surprise anyone. After that, they most probably spend almost a decade together. Yet, never married, even after they had been living together for some years, and some of the family members who could object to the union were already gone. Again, so far there can be only guesses as to why.