Henryk Cederbaum

Who was Henryk Cederbaum?

Henryk Cederbaum was a Polish lawyer and one of the noted members of Warsaw's bar in the early 20th century.

Already before World War I, when Congress Poland was under Imperial Russian control, he gained much fame as one of the "unhumble" lawyers: prosecuting and defending in trials where Polish people were victims and Russians were offenders. One of the best known was the trial of Aleksandr Barteniev, a Russian military officer who murdered his Polish lover, a noted dramatic actress Maria Wisnowska in 1890. The Varshavskiy Dnevnik, the official Russian-language newspaper published by the tsarist authorities, noted that - despite the official ban on usage of the Polish language in public - Cederbaum spoke very bad Russian and was apparently very proud of it. The case was later fictionalised by, among others, Ivan Bunin in his 1925 novella Case of Lieutenant Yelagin.

Another well-known and widely discussed case was the trial of Maria Gurko, the wife of Russian governor-general of Poland Iosif Gurko. She was well-known to Warsaw's shopkeepers for never paying for the clothes and jewellery she ordered. However, in 1892 one of the shopkeepers in a silk store called the police.