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 Drawing on Mehlberg’s own unpublished memoir, supplemented with prodigious research, Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, both historians and Holocaust experts, have reconstructed the story of this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/eastern-european-studies
View all episodes
By New Books Network
4.2
2626 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/eastern-european-studies
More shows like New Books in Eastern European Studies
View all
New Books in Philosophy
112 Listeners
History Extra podcast
3,192 Listeners
New Books in History
211 Listeners
New Books in Military History
161 Listeners
New Books in Critical Theory
146 Listeners
New Books in Sociology
46 Listeners
New Books in Political Science
62 Listeners
New Books in Economics
26 Listeners
New Books in Psychoanalysis
185 Listeners
New Books in African American Studies
163 Listeners
New Books in Environmental Studies
23 Listeners
The History of English Podcast
6,458 Listeners
New Books in Intellectual History
60 Listeners
ChinaTalk
287 Listeners
Cold War Conversations
453 Listeners
In Moscow's Shadows
364 Listeners
The Ancients
3,240 Listeners
The EI Podcast
17 Listeners
The Rest Is History
14,665 Listeners
Ones and Tooze
344 Listeners
School of War
453 Listeners
Battleground
328 Listeners
Geopolitics Decanted with Dmitri Alperovitch
158 Listeners
The Foreign Affairs Interview
439 Listeners
Empire
2,501 Listeners