Bronisława Wieniawa-Długoszowska

Bronisława Wieniawa-Długoszowska

Portrait of Bronisława by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, known as Witkacy, Moscow 1918.
Born Bronisława Kliatchkin
1886
Died August 1953 (aged 66–67)
Paris, France
Cause of death Complications of a gall bladder operation
Resting place Laurent family tomb,
Montparnasse Cemetery, France
Other names Jeanne-Liliane Lalande
Spouse(s) Leon Berenson
Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski
Children Zuzanna Vernon née Wieniawa-Długoszowska
Parent(s) Salomon Kliatchkin
Helena Bajenov

Bronisława Wieniawa-Długoszowska (1886 – August 26, 1953 Paris) was of Russian Jewish origin. Her father Salomon Kliatchkin (1858–1916) was the owner of the first credit bureau (credit reference agency) in Tsarist Russia. Her mother was Helena Kliatchkin (née Bajenov; 1886–1953). She had nine siblings; one died in childhood, three in Joseph Stalin's purges, one survived in Russia, four in exile in France. The family's suffering under Stalin are recorded in a film shown on Russian television in 2008; История семьи как эпоха (The history of a family which was a witness to its epoch).

She studied medicine in Paris before 1914. At this time she was married to her first husband, Leon Berenson, a lawyer. Berenson was the defender in the Tsarist courts of Felix Dzerzhinsky, who was to be the founder of the Cheka, the first Soviet secret police agency. At the outbreak of the First World War she volunteered to work as a nurse at the Hotel Continental in Paris, now the Westin Paris - Vendôme. She nursed Pierre Laurent, a young French officer, the son of Charles Laurent, a French senior civil servant.

Pierre was sent to join the military mission of General Lavergne in Saint Petersburg, then called Petrograd. Lavergne had succeeded General Henri Niessel as head of the French military mission. There Pierre was responsible for obtaining information about the Russian army. Bronisława, back in Petrograd, helped him. After Vladimir Lenin arrived in his sealed train their priority was to prevent him leading Russia into an armistice with Germany. They were able to obtain telegrams to Lenin purporting to show that he was supported by German funds. They presented this information to the Provisional government headed by Prince Georgy Lvov, but no action was taken. After the October Revolution, Bronisława escaped on a false French passport under the name of "Jeanne-Liliane Lalande". While in Petrograd she had met Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski, a Polish officer. At considerable personal risk to herself she was able to persuade the Cheka to release him from Taganka Prison in Moscow to house arrest at her house. They both escaped to Poland, and he later became her second husband. They had one daughter, Zuzanna, later Vernon (11 August 1920 – 3 August 2011). She was the goddaughter of Józef Piłsudski, the main leader of Poland between the wars, who was a friend of her father. In the summer the family lived in the manor house of Bobowa. They famously had good, if distant, relations with the Hasidic Jews of Bobowa (Bobov) and the Bobov Rebbe Ben Zion Halberstam. The rest of the year they lived in their official residence; a hunting lodge in Łazienki Park in the center of Warsaw.

When in 1938 General Bolesław Wieniawa-Długoszowski was sent to Rome as Polish ambassador to the government of Benito Mussolini, Bronisława accompanied him. When Italy joined the war with the other Axis powers in 1940 they fled together to New York. In 1942 he committed suicide. She and her daughter were looked after for some weeks by Arthur Szyk, the famous cartoonist and anti-Nazi activist. Tatiana Yacovleff du Plessix Liberman was another friend who, with her husband, Alexander Liberman, helped Zuzanna find work at Vogue magazine and, later, at the United Nations, where she became one of the first simultaneous interpreters.(see link below)

Bronisława returned to Europe after the war and died in Paris in August 1953 of the complications of a gall bladder operation. She is buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery under her assumed name; "Jeanne-Liliane Lalande" in the Laurent family tomb. As explained in the Russian film mentioned above, after half a century without contact, twenty years after Bronisława's death, the Russian and French descendants of Salomon Kliatchkin were re-united.

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