An excerpt from Edmund Płoski’s memoirs:
I remember the first day when I met him, and his great joy when he heard the first Polish words on Sakhalin. I took him to my apartment. There, like a child, he cried and told with the honesty the story of his exile in all details. He had fell victim to a tragic judicial error, so common in the Russian justice system.
In St. Petersburg, he had numerous Russian friends from his gymnasium days and maintained contacts with them without knowing or being interested in what they were doing. He dreamed of science and his future career in this field. Among his close colleagues, he considered Kancher as one of his dearest friends. What brought Bronisław close to this young man were both the positions of their families and their similar level of culture. Therefore, the two were close friends in St. Petersburg. As a friend, at Kancher’s request, he allowed him to use his room. This was because it had a separate entrance and was isolated from the neighborhood. Kancher justified his request by the need of organizing meetings with friends, lectures, or something similar. Of course, Bronisław was aware that friends’ meetings, lectures, or reading books together were not legal, but he never supposed – and such a thought never entered his head – that terrorist plots or bombs were being prepared there. Yet this was exactly what Kancher’s friends were doing with his personal participation. When the conspiracy was discovered, the participants with bombs in their hands were arrested. Kancher, suffering from depression in prison so common among inexperienced young men, not only betrayed Piłsudski, but what was worse, apparently wanting to save himself, testified what he was suggested, that Piłsudski consciously made his apartment available for this revolutionary work in St. Petersburg and Vilnius. Piłsudski’s denial of these accusations confirmed policemen in the belief that Piłsudski was among the organizers of the coup, and was almost its mastermind. In court, Kancher retracted his testimony, but it did not help anymore. Therefore, while these young men, caught with bombs under their arms on the Nevsky Prospect where the tsar was supposed to be passing by, were each sentenced to 10 years of penal labor, Piłsudski was sentenced to 15 years. On the way to Siberia, they were together in one compartment of the ship. Kancher apologized to Piłsudski for his crime against him and begged for forgiveness, which he received from the tender-hearted Bronisław. He promised Kancher both to forgive him and forget his guilt, and not to complain to his comrades.
He told me about it, but obliged me with a word of honor to keep it a secret. The secrecy, however, did not hold, despite our intention. In our apartment, which was very poor and primitive with bare timber walls, and the floor full of cracks, yet decorated somewhat with the efforts of women, Bronisław cheered up. It seemed to him that freedom was returning; that he was back in the countryside, in the outhouse at his father’s estate, and with his family. In the prison, he seemed much older than his age would indicate, perhaps as a result of the fatigue that was reflected on his face. Here, on the contrary, I saw a young boy, light blond, with fine gentle blue eyes, animated and cheerful. The expression of dull despair I saw on his face in the barracks disappeared almost completely. In a conversation about the future ahead of him, he described images of serenity and hope.