The Counterfeit Countess
The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust
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4.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The “remarkable…inspiring” (The Wall Street Journal) true story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg—a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat—drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir.
World War II and the Holocaust have given rise to many stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess is unique. It tells the astonishing unknown story of “Countess Janina Suchodolska,” a Jewish woman who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by Poland’s Nazi occupiers, becoming “a heroine for the ages” (Larry Loftis, author of The Watchmaker’s Daughter).
Mehlberg operated in Lublin, Poland, headquarters of Aktion Reinhard, the SS operation that murdered 1.7 million Jews in occupied Poland. Using the identity papers of a Polish aristocrat, she worked as a welfare official while also serving in the Polish resistance. With guile, cajolery, and steely persistence, the “Countess” persuaded SS officials to release thousands of Poles from the Majdanek concentration camp. She won permission to deliver food and medicine—even decorated Christmas trees—for thousands more of the camp’s prisoners. At the same time, she personally smuggled supplies and messages to resistance fighters imprisoned in Majdanek, where 63,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers and shooting pits. Incredibly, she eluded detection, and ultimately survived the war and emigrated to the US.
Drawing on the manuscript of Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa, professional historians and Holocaust experts, have uncovered the full story of this remarkable woman. They interweave Mehlberg’s sometimes harrowing personal testimony with broader historical narrative. Like The Light of Days, Schindler’s List, and Irena’s Children, The Counterfeit Countess is a “riveting…stunning” (Debbie Cenziper, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author of Citizen 865) account of inspiring courage in the face of unspeakable cruelty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historians White and Sliwa (Jewish Childhood in Kraków) deliver a powerful biography of Jewish mathematician Janina Spinner Mehlberg (1905–1969), who posed as a Catholic aristocrat during WWII and joined the Polish resistance. Born to a "life of rare privilege for a Polish Jewish girl," Mehlberg earned a doctorate in 1928, married a fellow student, and settled in Lwow (later Lvov). By 1941 the couple "experienced the full force of Nazi persecution." After narrowly evading several deadly round-ups, they arrived in Lublin, where a family friend, Count Andrzej Skrzynski, provided them with new identities as Count and Countess Suchodolska. When the German SS took charge of the city, Skrzynski recruited "the Countess" to provide welfare services to prisoners at the Majdanek concentration camp, where she connected with the resistance, aided during a typhus epidemic, and engaged in fraught negotiations with the camp commandant that led in 1943 to the release of more than 3,000 Catholic Poles imprisoned there after their expulsion from territory annexed by Germany in 1939. Drawing from Mehlberg's private memoir, the authors recreate vivid scenes of horror at Majdanek, describing on one occasion "the smell of burnt hair and roasting flesh." The result is a heart-wrenching profile of resilience, ingenuity, and heroism.
