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who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat—drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir.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Drawing on the manuscript of Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa, professional historians and Holocaust experts, have uncovered the full story of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.
Grace
2025-02-23
An excellent book about how one person’s bravery and brain can help save an incredible amount of other people lives from being destroyed, of course I reckon this wouldn’t have been possible without the help of other brave, selfless people who in a world of chaos managed to make the seemingly impossible become possible! Reading this book in the first quarter of the year 2025, when our world once again finds itself in an existential state of crisis, where the feeling that our world is a large loony bin and where all sorts of cognitive dissonance is creating new problems of an increasingly dangerous pace! My thoughts about our current world: ”We are repeating what we have not yet forgotten, and this time around we can be certain it will be concreted and cemented by a few elected into power whom have shown they are all fully demented and This Too Shall Not Ever Pass again, because when the last nuclear is finished all there is left is to see the world evaporate into nothingness, no one left to blame! “ Kindly, Grace
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