Counterfeit Countess

Josephine Janina Mehlberg was a Jewish mathematician who held a doctorate. In Nazi-occupied Poland she lived under the name "Countess Janina Suchodolska," using the identity papers of a Polish aristocrat. This book tells her story, which has been little known until now, and it draws on her own unpublished memoir.

She operated in Lublin, the headquarters of Aktion Reinhard, the SS operation that murdered 1.7 million Jews in occupied Poland. Working as a welfare official and serving in the Polish resistance at the same time, she used guile, cajolery and steady persistence to talk SS officials into releasing thousands of Poles from the Majdanek concentration camp. In all, she is credited with rescuing more than 10,000 imprisoned Poles.

She also won permission to bring food and medicine to thousands more of the camp's prisoners, and even to bring Christmas trees. Meanwhile she personally smuggled supplies and messages to imprisoned resistance fighters at Majdanek, where 63,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers and shooting pits. She was never found out, survived the war and later emigrated to the United States.

The authors, Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa, are professional historians and Holocaust experts. They combine Mehlberg's sometimes harrowing personal testimony with the wider history of the period, supported by extensive research, to reconstruct her full story.