Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust

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.)