The counterfeit Countess The Jewish woman who rescued thousands of Poles during the Holocaust

Review by Choice Review

Monographs about the Final Solution often recount the rare instances of Gentiles rescuing Jews at great risk, but this volume is unique in that it recounts the story of Janina Mehlberg, a Polish Jewish woman who survived by hiding as a Gentile, Countess Janina Suchodolska, and whose actions saved thousands of Poles, both Gentiles and Jews. Historians White and Sliwa conducted extensive research, which they combined with Mehlberg's unpublished memoir, to craft this comprehensive and captivating narrative. Mehlberg was well educated, raised in a wealthy assimilated Jewish family in L'viv. Conversant in several languages, her social circle included Polish nobles and other elites, and she regarded herself as a Polish patriot. After the outbreak of WW II, Mehlberg and her husband Henryk escaped to Lublin with the help of Gentile friends and assumed new identities. As Countess Janina Suchodolska, she joined the underground Polish Home Army and worked with the Polish Main Welfare Council to provide food and other assistance to the prisoners in Majdanek. The volume also recounts instances in which Mehlberg received assistance from unexpected sources as she tried to rescue others. Profound and insightful, Mehlberg's life story makes for necessary reading. Summing Up: Essential. General readers through faculty. --Romuald K. Byczkiewicz, Central Connecticut State University

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

In 1989, a typed memoir surfaced that was purported to be written by Janina Spinner Mehlberg, a Jewish woman who posed as a Polish noblewoman during WWII. Countess Suchodolska supposedly saved thousands of Polish prisoners incarcerated at Majdanek, a notorious work camp. For nearly three decades, researchers strove to verify the manuscript writer's identity, and recent findings led to this engaging biography from Holocaust academics White and Sliwa. Their overarching account offers an abundance of background information on the political and social landscapes in war-torn Europe. The authors' historical commentary alternates with Mehlberg's personal anecdotes and reconstructed conversations. Mehlberg's growing arsenal of survival tactics lends immediacy to her ever-changing circumstances and helps readers fully appreciate the risks she took as she navigated through surreal scenarios. Mehlberg, who survived the war and emigrated to Chicago, describes horrific acts of cruelty and unimaginable suffering. The authors end with a quote from her memoir: "There is nothing left to do for them but to remember." This extensively documented account serves as powerful testimony.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Jan.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Holocaust historians White and Sliwa (Jewish Childhood in Krakow) masterfully piece together the previously untold story of a Jewish mathematician who, during the Nazi occupation of Poland, masqueraded as a countess while she helped free and feed thousands of Poles imprisoned at the Majdanek concentration camp. Josephine Janina Mehlberg (1905--69) was born to a wealthy Jewish family. Shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland, she and her husband obtained forged identity papers. White and Sliwa find her listed under a number of names in historical records (and her recorded age kept getting younger), but her most notable alias was as Countess Janina Suchodolska, an aristocratic identity she took on while trapped in Lublin, Poland. There she worked with the Polish Central Welfare Council to aid malnourished Polish prisoners at Majdanek with regular deliveries of bread, soup, and even, at one point, already-decorated Christmas trees. She also personally smuggled supplies and messages to resistance fighters and persuaded SS officials to release thousands of Poles from Majdanek. White and Sliwa draw on numerous archives, genealogical research, and the subject's own unpublished memoir. VERDICT A full portrait of a woman who saved thousands in Nazi-occupied Poland, with broad appeal for readers interested in Holocaust and eastern European history and survivor's stories.--Chad E. Statler

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The biography of a Jewish woman who impersonated a Polish countess during World War II to help those suffering during the Holocaust. As White, a former historian for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Sliwa, a historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, delineate, this meticulous biography began when White received a long-buried World War II memoir, written in the 1960s by Dr. Janina Mehlberg (1905-1969), in 1989. Although Mehlberg's manuscript covered only her war years, White and Sliwa dig deeper. The authors examine her life as a math professor before and her career after the war in Canada and the U.S. with her husband, philosopher Henry Mehlberg, and they offer a thorough portrait of the larger structure of Polish resistance to German occupation. Working as academics in East Galicia (now Ukraine), the Mehlbergs relied on aristocratic friends to slip under the radar when roundups for Jews began. Spirited to Lublin by an old friend of the family, Count Andrzej Skrzyński, they changed their identities to Count and Countess Sucholdoska. As Skrzyński's adviser, Janina was able to provide food and medicine to prisoners of the Majdanek, which was "designated a concentration camp on February 16, 1943." As an insider, she conveyed messages for the Polish Resistance. The authors show the great risk involved, as "officials had to tread a thin line between service to Poland and collaboration with its enemy." In her memoir, Janina wrote, "If I thought only of the dangers to myself or to those I loved, I was worth nothing. But if surviving meant being useful to many, I had to find the strength to survive." Her bravery in the face of Nazi brutality allowed her to save countless lives, and the authors bring her story to life. A fine delineation of personal heroism amid an era of utter human depravity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue PROLOGUE August 9, 1943 Lublin, Poland Once again, the commandant of Majdanek concentration camp found Countess Suchodolska in his office, making yet another absurd demand. SS -Obersturmbannführer Hermann Florstedt had served at several concentration camps in Germany, but Majdanek, he had found, bore little resemblance to them. Located in Lublin in German-occupied Poland, the camp was primitive and chaotic compared to the concentration camps in the Reich. Florstedt's assignment as the camp's commandant in 1942 had been a promotion, but also punishment for suspected corruption at Buchenwald. He had arrived at Majdanek to find a massive construction site with unpaved roads, no running water, contaminated wells, and open latrines that gave off an overpowering stench. Towering billows of smoke regularly belched from the camp's crematorium chimney, raining down the ashes of men, women, and children murdered in the gas chambers. Currently 23,000 prisoners were languishing in unimaginable filth. Infectious diseases were so rampant that even the SS guards sickened and died. Majdanek did have one compensation in Florstedt's view: it was the repository of the personal belongings of many of the hundreds of thousands of Jews being murdered by the SS in German-occupied central Poland. SS warehouses in Lublin held mountains of clothes, shoes, furs, and leather goods, and boxes full of currency, jewelry, watches, wedding bands, and gold teeth. It was Florstedt's responsibility to ensure that Majdanek prisoners processed these goods so that the SS could fully profit from them. But who would notice if Florstedt and his most trusted men took some of the riches as recompense for their service in plundering and murdering Germany's racial enemies? One of the vexations of Florstedt's work, however, was the meddling of Polish aid organizations that sought to provide food and medicines for Majdanek's Polish prisoners. The Polish Main Welfare Council and the Polish Red Cross were far more assertive than any similar organizations in the Reich. They had actually obtained permission to make weekly deliveries of bread and food products for the prisoners' kitchens, to supply the prisoners with packages of food and necessities, and to provide medicines for the camp infirmaries. And yet Countess Janina Suchodolska of the Polish Main Welfare Council continually pressed for more: to make more frequent deliveries of more food and more medicines. She even proposed delivering prepared soup for the prisoners. Such things would be out of the question in any other concentration camp. But when told no, the Countess simply made the rounds of higher SS and Nazi authorities until she finally persuaded one that her requests were somehow in German interests. To make matters worse, the Countess used her visits to Majdanek to spy on the conditions there. Efforts to deter her had proved fruitless. The petite brunette aristocrat remained utterly unflappable in the face of shouts and threats from the SS. Recently, she had even alerted health officials to a typhus epidemic among the prisoners, forcing Florstedt to arrange some semblance of treatment for them. Now she was pestering Florstedt about the thousands of Polish peasants in the camp. The SS had dumped them there in July after evicting them from their farms to make room for German settlers. Since the SS quickly culled the able-bodied adults for forced labor in the Reich, the peasants still in the camp were mostly children or elderly. After just a few weeks in the camp, these prisoners were already dying of dehydration, starvation, and diseases at a rate that was extreme even for Majdanek. Somehow, the Countess had persuaded German authorities to release the 3,600 Polish peasants still on Majdanek's rolls, but only on condition that her organization provided all the necessary paperwork and found places for them to live. In just a couple of days, Countess Suchodolska and her coworkers managed to do both. The Countess had arrived at the camp gate in the morning to receive the civilians. There she was informed, with no further explanation, that nearly half of them were no longer "available" for release. The remaining civilians had been assembled in the third of Majdanek's five prisoner compounds, about a kilometer from the gate where the Countess awaited them. The distance had proved too far for many to walk: the Countess had watched with increasing alarm as prisoners, trying in vain to hold each other up, stumbled, fell, and lay helpless in the dust. And so here she was in Florstedt's office, insisting that he allow trucks and ambulances to enter the camp and pick up the prisoners. Allowing Polish civilian transport inside a concentration camp was in complete violation of SS security regulations! But Florstedt knew there was no point in refusing--the Countess would just go over his head. Within two hours, trucks, buses, and ambulances arrived, recruited by the Countess from businesses and organizations throughout the city. In the end, 2,106 peasants were released from Majdanek in August 1943. More than 25 percent of them wound up in Lublin's two main hospitals, and nearly 200 died within days, over half of them children under age twelve. But some 1,900 survived, thanks to the efforts of Countess Suchodolska and her many colleagues. Her efforts to help the prisoners of Majdanek did not end there. The Countess relentlessly pressed Nazi authorities for more concessions, and gradually they agreed to permit increased deliveries of food, medicines, and supplies. They even allowed her to bring in decorated Christmas trees so that the prisoners could celebrate the holiday. By February 1944, the Polish Main Welfare Council was supplying soup and bread five times a week for 4,000 Polish prisoners in Majdanek, in addition to other deliveries of food and medicine. The Countess herself usually brought the soup into the camp, under the close supervision of SS guards. Throughout all her dealings with Nazi and SS officials, no one ever suspected that the indomitable Countess, so self-assured and aristocratic in her demeanor, was not a countess at all, nor was her name really Suchodolska. She was Janina Spinner Mehlberg, a brilliant mathematician, an officer in the underground Polish Home Army, and a Jew. Excerpted from The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust by Elizabeth B. White, Joanna Sliwa All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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