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Counterfeit Countess, The - Elizabeth White, Joanna Sliwa

Counterfeit Countess, The

The untold story of the Jewish heroine who defied the Holocaust
Buch | Softcover
336 Seiten
2025
John Blake Publishing Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-78946-750-5 (ISBN)
CHF 19,15 inkl. MwSt
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Drawing on the manuscript of Mehlberg's own unpublished memoir, supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa, professional historians and Holocaust experts, have uncovered the full story of this extraordinary woman. They interweave Mehlberg's sometimes harrowing personal testimony with broader historical narrative. Unsparing yet inspiring, The Counterfeit Countess is an unforgettable account of selfless courage in the face of unspeakable cruelty, and a major addition to the history of the Holocaust.

Elizabeth White (Author) Dr Elizabeth 'Barry' White recently retired from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she served as historian and as Research Director for the museum's Center for the Prevention of Genocide. Prior to working for the USHMM, Barry spent a career at the US Department of Justice working on investigations and prosecutions of Nazi criminals and other human-rights violators. She served as deputy director and chief historian of the Office of Special Investigations and as deputy chief and chief historian of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section. She lives in Falls Church, Virginia. Joanna Sliwa (Author) Dr Joanna Sliwa is an historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) in New York, where she also administers academic programmes. She previously worked at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. She has taught Holocaust and Jewish history at Kean University and at Rutgers University and has served as a historical consultant and researcher, including for the PBS film In the Name of Their Mothers: The Story of Irena Sendler. Her first book, Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust won the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize awarded by the Wiener Holocaust Library. She lives in Linden, New Jersey.

Erscheinungsdatum
Verlagsort London
Sprache englisch
Maße 130 x 197 mm
Gewicht 240 g
Themenwelt Literatur Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
Geschichte Allgemeine Geschichte 1918 bis 1945
ISBN-10 1-78946-750-0 / 1789467500
ISBN-13 978-1-78946-750-5 / 9781789467505
Zustand Neuware
Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR)
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