COUNTERFEIT COUNTESS, THE

The Holocaust has given rise to many accounts of resistance and rescue but The Counterfeit Countess is unique It tells the remarkable untold story of Countess Janina Suchodolska a Jewish woman named Janina Mehlberg who rescued more than 10 000 Poles imprisoned by their country s Nazi occupiers Janina Mehlberg operated in Lublin headquarters of Aktion Reinhard the SS operation that murdered 1 7 million Jews in occupied Poland Using the identity papers of a Polish aristocrat she worked as a welfare official while also serving in the Polish resistance With guile cajolery and steely persistence the Countess persuaded SS officials to release thousands of Poles from the Majdanek concentration camp She won permission to deliver food clothing and medicine for thousands more of the camp s prisoners At the same time she personally smuggled supplies and messages to resistance fighters imprisoned at Majdanek where 63 000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers and shooting pits Incredibly she eluded detection survived the war and eventually emigrated to the USA Drawing on the manuscript of Mehlberg s own unpublished memoir supplemented with prodigious research Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa professional historians and Holocaust experts have uncovered the