‘The Counterfeit Countess’ Book Talk

“The Counterfeit Countess,” a new book by Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa, recounts the remarkable story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg, a Jewish mathematician who saved thousands in Nazi-occupied Poland by posing as a Polish aristocrat. The narrative, based on Mehlberg’s unpublished memoir, describes how she, under an aristocratic guise, worked in the Polish resistance and negotiated with SS officials to release and aid prisoners at the Majdanek concentration camp while smuggling supplies to resistance fighters. The authors will discuss their book with Andrew Nagorski, author of “Saving Freud: The Rescuers Who Brought Him to Freedom.”