Janina Mehlberg’s heroic story
THE COUNTERFEIT COUNTESS The untold story of the Jewish heroine who defied the Holocaust
ELIZABETH B. WHITE AND JOANNA SLIWA 336pp. John Blake. £18.99.
BEFORE AUSCHWITZ became a symbol of the Holocaust, there was Majdanek. Located within earshot of Lublin, just off the main road between Chelm and Kraków, Majdanek was the first of the functioning extermination camps to be liberated by the Allies when the Red Army arrived on July 23, 1944. “I have just seen the most terrible place on the face of the earth”, wrote W. H. Lawrence of the New York Times after visiting the camp soon after. He found gas chambers, crematoria with bone ash still in the furnaces, piles of corpses and, in a storehouse where the SS kept the property of those murdered, “literally tens of thousands of shoes spread across the floor like grain in a halffilled elevator”.
In 1939 the Nazis imagined the Lublin district, then the easternmost division of occupied Poland, as a vast reservation into which all Jews and Roma in the occupied regions could be deported. When German plans shifted from deportation to extermination, Majdanek played an integral role. Built with Jewish forced labour in the autumn of 1941 to hold Soviet prisoners of war, by the following spring Majdanek’s role had evolved into that of a forced labour camp and killing centre for the extermination of Polish Jews. On November 3, 1943, during what came to be known as Operation Harvest Festival, 18,000 Jews were killed in the camp on a single day. From then on it held primarily ethnic Poles.
The Counterfeit Countess: The untold story of the Jewish heroine who defied the Holocaust by Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa tells the previously unknown and remarkable story of Janina Spinner Mehlberg, a Jewish woman from Lwów (now Lviv), who survived the war in Lublin under the false identity of a Polish countess named Janina Suchodolska. As Suchodolska, Mehlberg joined the Polish Home Army of the underground and received a position with the Polish Main Welfare Council, through which she provided welfare relief to ethnic Poles in Majdanek and, at times, saved Polish lives at great personal risk. Based on her recently discovered memoir and verified with extensive archival research, the book portrays Mehlberg, who had earned a doctorate in philosophy and logic before the war, as a rational humanitarian with a great deal of chutzpah.
White and Sliwa recount in engaging prose how on multiple occasions she confronted the corrupt and diabolical camp commandant, and stood up to the over-cautious and prejudiced bureaucrats in the Polish Red Cross in order to provide aid to needy prisoners and service the underground. When the countess received permission for the families of Polish prisoners to send limited packages with food and medicine to their imprisoned loved ones, for
