It seems easy to make sure you only have one husband or one wife. Nevertheless, hundreds of people became bigamists before the war. Completely unintentionally!
One of the high-profile cases of this kind took place in Krakow in 1921. The weekly magazine "Nowości Illustrowane" announced on the front page: Revenge of the betrayed husband. Wojciech Kruk kills his faithless wife Julia with an accurate shot! In fact, it wasn't just a simple betrayal at all. The history of the marital dispute stretches back seven years, to the beginning of the First World War.
In August 1914 - right after the outbreak of the conflict between the partitioning powers - Wojciech Kruk, a peasant from Prądnik Czerwony near Kraków, went out into the field as usual. There he was captured by Russian soldiers and then forcibly drafted into the army. His wife did not know what was happening to him, and after a few years she completely lost hope of Wojtek's return. Eventually she decided to make a new life for herself.
The tragic end of many stories with bigamy in the background:the husband returns home after many years. The wife, allegedly unfaithful, dies at his hand.
And then, like a bolt from the blue, the return of Wojciech Kruk fell on her. In 1919, the missing husband knocked on her door. As reported by the newspaper, he is back:
just to find out that my wife found herself a comforter at the time in the person of a certain Stefan Cholewa. Blinded in his wife, Raven did not initially see what was happening around him, only when his attentive neighbors opened his eyes to check the matter, he pretended to be leaving for Calvary, but unexpectedly returned home late at night and found his wife in the arms of his lover. Since then, the house of the Ravenclaws has turned into a real hell.
There is no doubt whose side the newspaper took. For journalists, it was not a mutual tragedy at all, nor a stalemate, in which the war was guilty, not the people. Illustrated News saw one culprit:a perfidious wife.
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Can you have an affair if your husband dies in a war?
Wojciech Kruk uncompromisingly demanded that Julia break off the "romance". He could not understand that during the few years his spouse had separated, she had managed to love another man; that now he was a stranger. A spirit that, after a long silence, returned from beyond the grave. The man began to row, to wash his wife furiously. He even called the police to talk Julia out of her head about the new life.
It did nothing:the woman decided to move to her neighbors, and filed a beating report and a petition for divorce to the court. The hearing was about to take place any day and Krukowa was already starting to plan her wedding with her new partner, Stefan Cholewa.
Statistical yearbooks recorded from several to several dozen cases of bigamy each year. However, most have never been reported to the police or to the courts.
Her husband, however, was not going to let go. When the news reached him that Julia had made an appointment with Cholewa in the field, he followed her and blocked her way:
When she responded cynically to his requests, overwhelmed by despair and fury, with the revolver he had with him, he shot her, putting her dead in the place . After committing the act, he went to the local state police station, where, having informed about the murder of his adulterous wife, he turned himself into the hands of justice.
It is not known how this justice judged him, but one thing is certain. He could count on the sympathy of the press and society. It is worth adding that there were many similar cases immediately after the First World War. Even in my wife's family - Ola's well-known readers of "Historical Curiosities" - it happened that my husband returned from the war after many years, and his wife already had a new ring on her finger. Fortunately, no one was killed in that case.
Three husbands instead of one
The case of the "betrayed" Raven was not yet an extreme case. This is probably the story of Dina S. A story so traumatic that even the bloodthirsty pre-war press gave up this one time and did not publish the name of the main character.
There have been cases when the husbands of one wife got rid of "competition" themselves.
According to the 1933 article in "The Last News of Krakow", Dina was the beautiful daughter of a well-to-do merchant from a small town in Eastern Lesser Poland. She was also an only child and, luckily, she became an orphan right before the outbreak of World War I, while inheriting all her father's fortune. Of course, real queues of amateurs began to line up immediately. Finally, Dina chose one of them - a graduate of Jan Opatów Secondary School.
They got married very quickly and they would have lived happily ever after, had it not been for Piłsudski. A few months after the wedding, the war broke out, and Jan Opatow, imbued with patriotism - despite the crying and pleading of his wife - joined the Legions.
After only a month, Dina received a letter from the command of Polish troops: Opatow died in the field of glory . For many months she mourned her fallen husband, but finally - as journalists explained - youth won . Dina married again, to the clerk Bolesław Niłkowski. The idyll lasted for several months until suddenly in 1917 a call to the army came. Niłkowski went to the front and ... he too was killed.
This time, Dina was not so easily restored to her mental balance. It was only at the age of thirty that she stood on the wedding carpet for the third time - with a certain Kazimierz Zalewski. The war was long over and Zalewski would have been living peacefully and safely with the unfortunate ex-widow, had it not been for the fact that suddenly ... Bolesław, killed by Russian soldiers, rose from the grave!
Amnesia in Siberia
The man came home as if nothing had happened and began to explain that he had spent all this time in Russia with his head smashed. At the beginning of 1918, he was seriously injured at the front and lost consciousness, which prevented him from returning to his unit and was presumed dead. He only woke up in a Russian hospital. For months he struggled with amnesia, not knowing who he was or where he was from. Apparently only: When he fell from the steps of the wagon to the ground while traveling by train, his memory miraculously regained due to the shock .
In the midst of incredible hardships and dangers, he finally got out of Russia, only to return to his beloved woman.
"Wojciech Kruk kills his faithless wife Julia with an accurate shot!" "Illustrated News" drawing.
Hardly Ms Dina managed to recover from the impressions caused by Bolesław's resurrection, her first husband, Jan, appeared in her apartment! - continued "The Last Krakow News". He was also captured by the Russians and sent without ado to Siberia. Interestingly, he did not return to Poland alone. In exile, he married a Russian woman, changed his name and returned to Poland with his whole family.
This extremely confusing case was yet to be dealt with by the court. Unfortunately, the sentence did not come out. And what verdict would you make in the place of the interwar tribunal? Who was to blame for bigamy? Who deserved jail? And which spouse should be at Dina's side from now on?
Sources:
The article is based on source materials and literature collected during the work on the book "Upadłe damy II Rzeczpospolitej". You can buy the book with a discount at empik.com .
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