Books Set in Europe, Poland

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

Books Set in North America, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty, by Bonny Reichert (2025)

Read:  June 16, 2026

5 Stars

Books Set in Europe and Asia; Poland and Israel

Once We Were Home, by Jennifer Rosner (2023)

Read: July 15, 2024

4 Stars

Books Set in Europe: France and Germany

The Art of Resistance, by Justus Rosenberg (2020)

 

The author, Justus Rosenberg, was well into his 90s when his memoir was published.  He was born in 1921 in the Free City of Danzig, a semi-autonomous city-state that existed for about 20 years between 1920 and 1940.  He was immersed in both Polish and German culture.  His grandparents lived in Poland, but his parents had moved to Danzig.  They believed that the Jewish residents of Danzig would be insulated from the rise of Hitler.

 

At age 16, Rosenberg was sent to Paris to further his education.  The rest of his family remained in Danzig.  When the Germans invaded France, Rosenberg’s studies came to an end.  The blond-haired, blue-eyed Rosenburg didn’t “look Jewish” and soon found himself joining the underground resistance movement.  The fact that he was also fluent in Polish, German and English was a major asset to the underground.

 

Rosenberg recounts his imprisonments and escapes in vivid detail.  The book reads like a suspense story.  We know from the beginning, of course, that the author survives, but that doesn’t distract from the tensions of the narrative.

 

After the War, Rosenberg settled in the United States where he became a literature professor at Bard College.  He died in October 2021 at age 100.

 

4 Stars

 

Read: January 2022

 

 

Books Set in Europe and Asia: Hungary, Poland and Israel

In Our Hearts We Were Giants: The Remarkable Story of the Lilliput Troupe ~ A Dwarf Family’s Survival of the Holocaust, by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev (2004)

 

This book is about the Ovitz family, a Jewish family from Transylvania.  In 1868, the patriarch of the family, Shimshon Eizik Ovitz.  He was born to normal-sized parents; however, he acquired a mutant gene, which made him a dwarf.  He married and his wife, who was of normal height, gave birth to two daughters, both of whom were also dwarfs.  Shortly after his wife died, Shimshon remarried a young woman, only a few years older than his oldest daughter.  Soon, their family grew.  Of Shimshon’s 10 children, seven were dwarfs.  The oldest child, Rozika, was born in 1886; the youngest, Perla, in 1921.

 

The family stuck together, with the normal-sized sibling caring for the other seven.  They built their own vaudeville troupe, known as the Lilliput Troupe, and entertained neighboring villages and cities with music, skits, jokes and other entertainment.  This made them well known and afforded them a means to survive.

 

Then the Holocaust came to their part of Transylvania.  All Jews of the area were transported to concentration camps.  The Ovitz family (minus one brother) were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.  The novelty of having seven little people in one family caught the eye of Joseph Mengele, and they were spared, along with their 3 normal-sized sibling.  They also convinced Mengele that several other townspeople were also family members.

 

This gave Mengele an opportunity to “experiment” on the entire extended family.  In exchange, the family was afforded certain “luxuries” not afforded the other prisoners.  They all lived in fear, however, never knowing what atrocities would be committed to their bodies.  Amazingly, despite the torture inflicted upon them, all of the members of the extended “family” survived the Holocaust.  They ultimately were able to immigrate to Israel, where they spent their remaining lives.

 

This is an important story and provides insight into the human experimentation conducted in the camps.  The book, however, jumps around too much, which interrupts the flow of the story.

 

Read:  January 21, 2021

 

3.5 Stars

 

 

 

 

 

Books Set in Europe: Poland

We Were the Lucky Ones, by Georgia Hunter (2017)

Only after her grandfather died did author Georgia Hunter learn that he was originally from Poland and had survived the Holocaust.  He never talked about his experiences, nor did anyone else in the family.  Later, when the author and her cousins would gather, she slowly learned how her family managed to survive the horror.  This book is based on their stories.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc were affluent Jews from Radom, Poland.  By the time the war broke out, their five children were young adults, some with families of their own.  The book begins in March 1939.  The middle son, Addie, is living in Parish hopes to return to Poland for Passover.  Letters from his mother, however, convince him to remain in Paris.  Soon all communications with his family back in Poland ceases.  For the duration of the War, neither Addy nor his family know each other’s fate.  He manages to leave Europe on one of the last passenger ships and ends up in Brazil.

The other children in the family are not so lucky.  Much of the family was set upon remaining in their home in Poland.  During the War, the family members become separated and are exposed to numerous horrors.  They are forced to leave their home and sent to live in a ghetto.  Two of the sons are sent off to fight in the War.

After the Russians entered Poland, the oldest son, Genek, was arrested by the Soviet secret police.  He and his wife, Halina, wound up in Siberia.  Other family members join the Polish resistance and are forced into hiding.  Mila survives with her young daughter, teaching her to hide and be quiet whenever the Nazi’s burst into their home.

From the title, the reader knows that the family survives the war.  They are not immune to the death and horror that surrounds them, however.  Each member suffers through the fear, the hiding from the Nazi’s or Poles who would be quick to turn them in.  Some of the narrow escapes described seem to defy logic.  Still, I enjoyed this book.

Read:  April 2, 2018

5 Stars

Books set in Europe: Poland

Irena’s Children by Tilar J. Mazzeo  (2016)

Irene Sendler (1910 ~ 2008) is sometimes referred to as the female Schindler.  Through her organization of a secret network in the Warsaw ghetto, she helped save more than 2500 Jewish children from the Nazis during World War II.

Irena’s Children tells of her courage during this period of history.  When asked about her efforts years after the war, Irena downplayed her role and insisted that she was assisted by many others and fretted that she couldn’t save more children.

Irena followed her beloved father’s example.  Although her doctor father died when she was only 6 or 7 years old, she remembered his tending to patients during the typhoid epidemic.  He gave her a strong moral compass to come to the aid and assistance of others.

Irena married shortly after university, but fell in love with the married Adam Celnikier, who was Jewish.  With her husband off to war, Irena and Adam made a life together, working to protect the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

As conditions worsened in Poland, Irena, who was a social worker, was able to obtain a pass to enter the Warsaw ghetto.  When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, the Polish resistance quickly grew.  Irena met Dr. Helena Radlinska, who was a leading force behind the resistance of Warsaw.  Irena was in a position to falsify official paperwork and create new identities.  This helped provide children with an escape.  Many of the children were given to Catholic families and taught Christian prayers so that they could fool the German soldiers if questioned.  Irena kept careful records of the children’s old and new identities so that the children could be reunited with their surviving parents after the war.  After the war, however, many of the children were orphaned.

Irena was captured by the Gestapo and imprisoned.  She was tortured, but never gave up any information.  She feared being executed, but a bribe by her fellow resistance fighters on the outside saved her.

After the war, Poland was under Soviet control and many of the resistance fighters were persecuted, thus much of the history of the resistance was suppressed.  I found this book a bit confusing.  It was written almost like it was a translation from another language.  It is an important piece of history, however, and is one that should be read by all.

Books Set in Eastern Europe: Poland

The Librarian of Auschwitz, by Antonio Iturbe (2012; English Translation, 2017)

The Librarian of Auschwitz is based on the real-life experience of young Dita Adler Kraus.  She and her family were Jews living in Prague, when there were round up by the Nazis and first sent to Terezín, before being transferred to Auschwitz.  At Auschwitz, they were placed in the Block 31, the Family Block, where, although men and women were separated, families could remain somewhat intact.

Fredy Hirsch, one of the prisoners, ran a secret school, to keep some sort of normalcy for the children.  Although books were forbidden, the school had a collection of 8 dog-eared and ragged books that had been smuggled into the camp.  Dita was chosen to protect the books.  The novel depicts daily life in the camp and the struggle to stay alive, while maintaining a modicum of humanity.

Life in Block 31 was hardly without its struggles, and one never knew when the Nazis would transfer prisoners to the gas chambers.  Many of the characters in the novel are real people.  The author met with and interviewed Dita when she was well into her 80s.  In the afterwards, the author acknowledges that he took some artistic licenses with the story, but does present a summary of the lives of some of the other characters.  One such real-life person was Rudy Rosenberg (also known as Rudi Vrba), who escaped the camp and wrote a detailed report to inform the world of the horrors of the concentration camps.  His report, however, was unheeded.  Fredy Hirsch was another real person who life continues to spark controversy.

Read:  February 20, 2018

4 Stars 

Books Set in Europe: Poland

Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly (2016)

Lilac Girls, by Martha Hall Kelly, is based on true events that took place during World War II.  Two of the main characters are actual historic figures ~ Caroline Ferriday was an American socialite who was involved in assisting refugees, raising funds and sending relief packages to war-torn France, and Herta Oberheuser was a Nazi physician at Ravensbrück, the women’s concentration camp.  The third main character, Kasia, is a fictional young Polish teen whose short-lived time in the Resistance landed her at Ravensbrück.

Herta, the Nazi doctor, was hired to perform experiments in the form of horrific surgeries all in the name of “research.”  Kasia became a victim of Herta’s surgery, which left her with horrible deformities in her legs.

The characters don't come together until the final few pages of this novel, and Caroline's contribution to saving the young women deformed by the events at Ravensbrück is not well defined.

I really wanted to like this book, but I was left with a feeling of something missing.  I wanted more background about the actual events.  As I read this book, I found myself researching certain events so I could better understand and clarify the events described by the author.

Read: April 25, 2017

3 Stars