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Hello All,
The following is an account of the escapades of Michal Woynicz at the Tenth
Pavilion prison in the Warsaw Citadel which led to his subsequent
arrest. There is an accompanying letter by Ethel Voynich which I will
submit to the list in a separate e-Mail.
"It soon became clear to everyone, to the arrested,
and to those outside the prison walls, that the threat of execution was now a
real possibility, first for those who took a direct part in the three
assassinations, and second for every leader of 'Proletariat' against whom it
could be proved that he had taken the fatal decisions, helped to organise the
assaults or had provided the assassins with their weapons. All the facts
were in the files of the gendarmes and the state prosecutor.
The Bohuszewicz leadership of the party made plans
to engineer the escape of the most endangered prisoners from the Citadel.
In July and August 1885 the organisation smuggled a
few small files into the prison to cut the iron bars of the cells. Nothing
came of this. More serious was the attempt undertaken by Michal Woynicz, a
member of 'Proletariat', who brought into the conspiracy the easy-going brother
of one of the arrested, Antoni Janowicz. He was a class-mate in the
officers' school of a Russian Second Lieutenant, Piotr Fursa, with whom, along
with other officers of the gendarmerie and high officials, he spent his time,
and money, playing cards. Fursa was the governor of the Tenth Pavilion,
the prison in the Citadel. Through Janowicz, Woynicz became one of the
card-playing group which often met inside the Citadel. He was thus able to
find out the exact location of the prison cells, corridors and exits. In a
letter dated 26 April 1947, written in New York where she then was living, the
widow of Michal Woynicz, the English novelist Ethel Lillian Boole-Woynicz,
recounted this episode in the life of her husband as follows: [letter to be
submitted in a separate e-Mail]
The traitor who informed the authorities about the
escape plan was Pinski, in whom Maria Bohuszewicz confided all the details of
the preparations for the escape, and who undertook to provide the escapees with
places to hide in before they could be smuggled out of the country. Michal
Woynicz, who, unknown to his wife, was an active member of 'Proletariat' (he
said as much to Byelanovsky after his arrest) was exiled without trial for five
years to eastern Siberia whence he later escaped to England."
"The Origins Of Polish Socialism, The History and Ideas of the First Polish
Socialist Party 1878-1886", by Lucjan Blit (Cambridge, At The University Press,
1971, pp.135-137).
Regards,
Dana Scott
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