Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, "The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust" (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, "The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust" (Simon & Schuster, 2024)
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 Drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir, supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, both historians and Holocaust experts, have reconstructed the story of this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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
View all episodes
By Marshall Poe
3.8
7474 ratings
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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography
More shows like New Books in Biography
View all
In Our Time
5,389 Listeners
The Book Review
3,857 Listeners
Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!
38,689 Listeners
Fresh Air
38,189 Listeners
History Extra podcast
3,193 Listeners
New Books in History
209 Listeners
99% Invisible
26,162 Listeners
New Books in Psychoanalysis
193 Listeners
New Books in Military History
162 Listeners
New Books in African American Studies
161 Listeners
New Books in Political Science
63 Listeners
New Books in Sociology
46 Listeners
New Books in Medicine
17 Listeners
New Books in Philosophy
110 Listeners
The LRB Podcast
293 Listeners
New Books in American Studies
29 Listeners
New Books in Intellectual History
61 Listeners
The History of Literature
1,098 Listeners
The New Yorker Radio Hour
6,670 Listeners
The Book Club
85 Listeners
The Great Women Artists
523 Listeners
The Rest Is History
13,053 Listeners
Empire
2,107 Listeners
Close Readings
67 Listeners
The Critic and Her Publics
72 Listeners