Counterfeit Countess, The
The Holocaust has given rise to many accounts of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess is unique. It tells the remarkable, untold story of 'Countess Janina Suchodolska', a Jewish woman named Janina Mehlberg who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by their country's Nazi occupiers.
Janina Mehlberg operated in Lublin, 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, clothing and medicine for thousands more of the camp's prisoners. At the same time, she personally smuggled supplies and messages to resistance fighters imprisoned at Majdanek, where 63,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers and shooting pits. Incredibly, she eluded detection, survived the war and eventually emigrated to the USA.
Drawing on the manuscript of Mehlberg's own unpublished memoir, supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa, professional historians and Holocaust experts, have uncovered the full story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 extraordinary woman. They interweave Mehlberg's sometimes harrowing personal testimony with broader historical narrative. Unsparing yet inspiring, The Counterfeit Countess is an unforgettable account of selfless courage in the face of unspeakable cruelty, and a major addition to the history of the Holocaust.
Elizabeth White (Author)
Dr Elizabeth 'Barry' White recently retired
from the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, where she served as historian and as
Research Director for the museum's Center for
the Prevention of Genocide. Prior to working
for the USHMM, Barry spent a career at the US
Department of Justice working on investigations
and prosecutions of Nazi criminals and other
human-rights violators. She served as deputy
director and chief historian of the Office of
Special Investigations and as deputy chief and
chief historian of the Human Rights and Special
Prosecutions Section. She lives in Falls Church,
Virginia.
Joanna Sliwa (Author)
Dr Joanna Sliwa is an historian at the Conference
on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany
(Claims Conference) in New York, where she
also administers academic programmes. She
previously worked at the American Jewish Joint
Distribution Committee, and at the Museum
of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to
the Holocaust. She has taught Holocaust
and Jewish history at Kean University and at
Rutgers University and has served as a historical
consultant and researcher, including for the PBS
film In the Name of Their Mothers: The Story of
Irena Sendler. Her first book, Jewish Childhood
in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust
won the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded
by the Wiener Holocaust Library. She lives in
Linden, New Jersey.