KENT—The Kent Memorial Library will present an evening with authors Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa Tuesday, Sept. 17, at 6:30 p.m. They will discuss their new book “The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust.”
It tells the astonishing story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg, a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands of lives in Nazi-occupied Poland by masquerading as a Polish aristocrat.
Mehlberg fled the Jewish ghetto of Lwów, Poland and reinvented herself as Countess Janina Suchodolska hundreds of miles away in Lublin, where she saved thousands of fellow Jews from annihilation.
Lublin was headquarters of Aktion Reinhard, the largest SS mass-murder operation of the Holocaust, during which 1.7 million Jews in Poland were slaughtered. German-occupied Poland was ground zero for Hitler’s “final solution,” the place where most Jewish victims perished, and home to Auschwitz, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Majdanek. The latter, with its seven gas chambers, two wooden gallows, crematorium, and 227 outbuildings was among the largest of Poland’s extermination factories. It held 250,000 prisoners and is the focus of this book.
The program will be held in the Reading Room and is free and open to the public. Registration is requested.
