The Counterfeit Countess: A Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust

Jewish mathematician Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg operated in Lublin, headquarters of Aktion Reinhard, the SS operation that murdered 1.7 million Jews in occupied Poland. Masquerading as a Polish aristocrat, the “Countess” persuaded SS officials to release thousands of Poles from Majdanek concentration camp. She secured permission to deliver food and medicine for thousands more inmates, and she smuggled supplies and messages to incarcerated resistance fighters. Incredibly, she eluded detection, survived the war, and emigrated to the US. Piecing together her history, co-authors Elizabeth White (former Research Director for the Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) and Joanna Sliwa (historian at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) shine a bright light on this unrecognized hero, disrupt the narrative norm of non-Jews helping Jews, and interrogate why Dr Mehlberg has remained out of the frame for the better part of a century.