The Counterfeit Countess, by Elizabeth B White and Joanna Sliwa (2024)
In the early 1930, Josephine Janina Mehlberg was a Jewish mathematician from Lwów, Poland. She had earned her doctorate in mathematics and was teaching in her profession. In 1933, she married Henry Mehlberg and the couple lived a quiet life in Lwów until the Nazi invasion of the city. In 1939, they fled to Lublin.
Mehlberg was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and her family had connections with aristocrats. Once in Lublin, she assumed the papers and persona of a Christian Polish aristocrat and transformed into Countess Janina Suchodolska. As a countess, she joined the Polish resistance and talked her way into providing food and medicines to the Polish prisoners at the Majdanek Concentration camp. She also smuggled messages and weapons to imprisoned resistance fighters. It is believed that she was persuaded the Nazis to release about 10,000 prisoners.
She and her husband survived the war and ultimately moved to the United States. She never talked about her life during the war, but settled in to teaching mathematics at a mid-western university. Late in her life, she wrote down her memories of her experience during the War. The authors, one of whom is an expert own the Holocaust in Poland, received a copy of Mehlberg's manuscript, research the matter and wrote this book. It reads like a novel and provides information about the Holocaust in Poland that is not universally known.
4 Stars
Read: August 2026
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