World War II and the Holocaust have been the subject of many remarkable stories of resistance and rescue, but The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust (Simon & Schuster, 2024) is unique. It tells the previously unknown story of “Countess Janina Suchodolska,” a courageous Jewish woman who rescued more than 10,000 Poles imprisoned by Nazi occupiers. Assuming the identity of a Polish aristocrat, Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg (born Pepi Spinner) worked as a welfare official, served in the Polish resistance, and persuaded the SS to release thousands from the Majdanek concentration camp. Drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir, supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, both historians and Holocaust experts, have reconstructed the story of this remarkable woman.
Piotr H. Kosicki is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Catholics on the Barricades (Yale, 2018) and editor, among others, of Political Exile in the Global Twentieth Century (with Wolfram Kaiser). His most recent writings appeared in The Atlantic and in Foreign Affairs.
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