Ep. 24- The Counterfeit Countess with Joanna Sliwa and Elizabeth White

 The story of Countess Janina (Mehlberg) Suchodolska is something that would be rejected by Hollywood as too far-fetched, but it is a true story.  Janina was a Jewish Pole hiding in plain sight as a Polish noblewoman who then went on to rescue prisoners from one of the deadliest concentration camps.

In this episode, I talk with historians Joanna Sliwa and Barry White about their incredible new book about Janina Mehlberg.  We talk about her incredible story, but also what it means for our understanding of rescue and Polish-Jewish relations.

Joanna Sliwa is an historian and Administrator of the Saul Kagan Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies and of the University Partnership Program in Holocaust Studies at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

Elizabeth White is an historian who has worked as an historian in the US State Department’s Office of Special Investigations tracking down Nazi war criminals and also at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Sliwa, Joann and Elizabeth White. The Counterfeit Countes: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust(2024)

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You can find a complete reading list with books by our guests and also their suggestions here.

Transcript

Waitman Beorn (00:00.402)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Holocaust History Podcast. I'm your host, Waittman Bourne. And today I am really excited to bring together, to bring to the podcast two historians with a story that, as I was talking with them earlier, you know, if this was something you saw in a Hollywood movie, you would say, you know what, this is just a little bit over the top. There's no way this could have happened. But it's an amazing story about a rescuer in Poland.

during the Holocaust. And I'm going to leave it at that and let our guests talk more about who this is and what this is. But I have with me, Joana Slevo and Barry White. Welcome to the podcast.

Barry White (00:42.8)
Thank you, Wykman. We're so excited to talk to you today.

Waitman Beorn (00:46.45)
Awesome. can you guys take a minute and introduce yourselves and tell us sort of, how you got into the, into sort of the Holocaust and where you're at and what you're doing.

Barry White (00:56.304)
Sure, I'll start. I'm Elizabeth Barry White. I have a PhD in modern European history, specializing in German history. And I spent a career at the US Department of Justice, working on investigations and prosecutions, originally of people who were involved in Nazi crimes, who immigrated to the United States after the war. And then that expanded to include other kinds of human rights violators. So I was at Justice, I was the...

Deputy Chief and Chief Historian of the Office of Special Investigations, Deputy Director, and then the Deputy Chief and Chief Historian of the Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section. After that, I went to the U .S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as the Research Director of its Center for the Prevention of Genocide. And then in the last few years before I retired last year,

I was a historian at the Holocaust Museum and an expert on issues related to the history of the Holocaust, post -Holocaust genocides, and international justice.

Waitman Beorn (02:00.37)
And can I just ask this question and I hope the answer is what I think it is. Did you have a badge that said historian on it? When you, it's so awesome. I love it. I love it though. I know someone else. I'm not going to spoil it. It was coming on the podcast later on this year. but this idea that you can investigate Nazis, track them down and you have a badge and it says historian on it is kind of like a dream. I think for all of us, that's amazing.

Barry White (02:08.268)
Yes.

Barry White (02:25.872)
Hahaha.

Waitman Beorn (02:28.817)
Join us.

Joanna Sliwa (02:29.814)
My name is Joanna Sleva. I have a PhD in Holocaust history from the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University. And currently, I am a historian, and I have an ID that says historian. I don't have a badge. Yes, I don't have a badge, but an ID. I'm a historian and administrator of two academic programs, the Sol Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Joa Studies and the University Partnership in Holocaust Studies.

Waitman Beorn (02:44.498)
All right.

Joanna Sliwa (02:59.382)
at the conference on Jewish material claims against Germany, in short, the claims conference.

Waitman Beorn (03:05.65)
Amazing. And I, I, I'm on, I'm on the website for claims conference. I had posted this other day that, it's, it's cohort 17, right? Of, of graduate students with, with fellowships. And I was in cohort one and I just felt, man, I am, I'm officially old.

Joanna Sliwa (03:25.11)
But I think not only that, it also shows how much you've accomplished since then in all these various projects that you've been working on. And both Whitman and I are former Salkagan fellows. So we have that connection.

Waitman Beorn (03:41.106)
Absolutely. It's a really great opportunity. It was amazing. It got me to Israel for the first time as well, I think. I think we had a conference on the conference. So tell us, tell us about the story that we're going to hear about today. How did you discover this? What is the rough outlines? And then we'll get into some of the details.

Barry White (04:03.696)
Okay, so this goes all the way back to 1989, talk about being old. I gave a paper on my Donic concentration camp at the American Historical Association convention. And after the panel and the story and I didn't know Arthur Funk at the University of Florida handed me a carbon copy manuscript saying that it was the unpublished memoir of Janina Nalberg, a Polish Jewish mathematician.

who had helped prisoners at Majdanek while pretending to be a Polish Christian aristocrat. And she had died in Chicago in 1969. Her husband then gave the manuscript to Dr. Funk, who had been trying to get it published but not succeeded. So he was donating copies of the memoir to different archives, but really wanted me to take this copy because I was writing about Majdanek, so he thought maybe...

I could make the memoir story known. I read that memoir and I was so astonished by it that I really had to question whether it could be true. She claimed that she survived the Holocaust in German occupied Lublin, Poland by posing as the Countess Janina Sukodolska.

And she used this guise to become an official of a Polish relief organization that the Germans allowed to operate in Lublin, but only to aid non -Jewish Poles. Because she had perfect German, she negotiated face -to -face with Nazi and SS officials in Lublin for measures to aid Poles. She also ran a program of her organization to provide aid for Polish prisoners at Majdanek concentration.

And she badgered the SS relentlessly, just kept going back and asking for permission to deliver ever greater quantities and types of supplies for the prisoners, to the point that she was able to deliver massive quantities of prepared soup and bread for 4 ,000 prisoners five days a week at Maidana. And she was bringing these deliveries herself inside the camp.

Barry White (06:18.672)
place where 63 ,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers and shooting pits. And she was using the deliveries as cover to smuggle messages and supplies to members of the resistance in the camp because she was also an officer in the underground Polish Home Army.

So I was able to confirm that there was a countess, Janina Szygodolska, who did do relief and resistance activities at Majdanek. She's mentioned in a few post -war studies and by some former prisoners, but there was no indication anywhere that she was using an alias, much less that she was a Jew. So I could imagine trying to publish something about this and then having the real countess or her relatives come forward and accuse me of fraud. And I had no way then to...

try to verify the memoir. And one of my biggest impediments is that I don't know Polish. So I figured another historian would find the memoir and do what was necessary to bring it to life. But then years passed, Arthur Funk died. And I never forgot this incredible story. I worried that I was the only historian who knew about it and started to wonder whether I had some kind of responsibility to it. So.

After I was working at the Holocaust Museum for a while, I really started digging into who this Janina Malberg was and found enough to make me think that she probably was Countess Janina Szygidowska. It was actually in a reference in the 1975 book review, in the Polish review. And that's when I ended up reaching out to Joanna, whom I only knew by reputation as an expert on the Holocaust in Poland.

and sent her a copy of the memoir. So let her take it from here.

Joanna Sliwa (08:09.334)
So Barry and I did not know each other in person until 2018 when we were connected through my former doctoral advisor, Professor Deborah Dwork, who was a scholar in residence at the time at the Holocaust Museum. And she met with Barry and spoke about, and they discussed this project. And so Deborah reached out to me and said, and told me, Barry's working on this fantastic, really fantastic project.

and story, would you be interested in speaking with, meeting with Barry and learning more about the story? And so of course I was really curious, you know, I've never heard anything like this. And we are, you know, the three of us here are Holocaust historians. We read, you know, hundreds of accounts, listened to oral histories, met with survivors. And I mean, I know that I've never heard or read anything like Yanina's story.

And so I was immediately interested in learning more. And that's how Barry and I started working together and really digging into the archives in various countries and in records in various languages. And we really quickly found definitive proof that Janina Countess, Janina Sochodolska was Pepe Melberg and before that Pepe Spinner.

before the war.

Waitman Beorn (09:38.098)
Wow. I mean, what an amazing, what an amazing way for the topic to even come up. I mean, it's amazing to sort of have someone put you onto something, but then also for both of you to have done such amazing work in tracking this person down. Because as I understand it, with the exception of the memoir, you know, this is not something that she ever talked about. So you really had to sort of...

Barry White (09:51.12)
Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (10:06.706)
It sounds like in some ways like reverse engineer the story.

Is that right?

Barry White (10:11.856)
Yes, yeah, that's one way of putting it. Yeah, we had to prove that first off that she was Danina Sukodolska. And then we had to prove that she did the things that she claimed in her memoir. And in the course of our research, we found out that her memoir doesn't even begin to do justice to what she actually accomplished during the war. So it was just based on archival, wartime archival records.

that we discovered that she negotiated the release of 9 ,700 Poles from captivity with the Germans, which is just an astounding number. And how many other people survived, thanks at least in part to the relief and resistance activities that she performed is impossible to calculate. So the numbers are staggering.

Waitman Beorn (11:05.778)
And it's worth pointing out, and I think we'll get to this maybe in a minute, you know, that even if she hadn't done any of that, she's a remarkable woman, certainly for her time in terms of what she accomplished, just sort of personally and professionally. I mean, maybe that's the place to start is a little bit of what she did before the war and how she sort of came into the opportunity or the moment where she could become the Countess and also begin to rescue people.

Joanna Sliwa (11:38.102)
So she really was an exceptional woman, you're right, Whitman, for her time. She was born in 1905 in Żurawno, which is a small town in what used to be the Austrian Empire when she was born. Then it was part of independent Poland, the second Polish Republic. And she was born into this, and today is Ukraine, right? Żurawna is in Ukraine.

And she was born into a family that was rather wealthy, that was acculturated, even assimilated. Her father was a wealthy landowner. And that gave Yanina the opportunity to be educated by private tutors. She knew several languages. She knew, of course, Polish and German and Russian and Ukrainian and Polish, of course.

She may have known some Yiddish and Hebrew, I'm sure, because of her upbringing and her background. And so later on, as Janina was growing up, at some point she moved to Lwów. And Lwów, of course, I don't have to explain to you, Whitman, the importance of Lwów for Jewish history, but just for our listeners, in interwar Poland,

Lviv was really a place, it was the big city. It was a place of interaction among Jews and non -Jews. The city offered various opportunities for Jews and Jewish women such as Pepe at the time, that was her name, she was born Pepe Spinner. And Pepe attended the university, Yom Kajemish University in Lviv. She obtained her master's degree in mathematics.

which was already unusual for a woman at that time. And she was really gifted in math and she wanted to pursue a higher degree. But at the time, this was a discipline that was limited to men. And so she knew that she could not obtain a PhD. So she was determined and here we see her determination. She was determined and instead,

Joanna Sliwa (14:02.358)
She pursued a PhD in philosophy. She studied with the famed professor Kazimierz Twardowski, who was the founder of the Lvov Warsaw School of Philosophy. And he was this charismatic professor who accepted women and Jews among his students. And he kept very friendly relations with his students. He was beloved by his students.

We have an entire cache of letters that Janina's later husband, Henry, who was also a Twardowski student, sent to his professor. So that already tells us about these close relationships that existed, warm relationships that existed. In 1928, Janina received her PhD in philosophy. A few years later, in 1933, she marries her fellow student, Henrik Melberg.

Henrik was also from what today is Ukraine, used to be part of Poland, from Kopoczynska. And they lived in Lwów. They taught in the schools there. Henry taught French and philosophy. Janina taught mathematics. And they had the circle of intellectual friends. They loved living in Lwów. This was their city. So this was kind of Janina's background.

before we get into the countess. But the other thing that I do want to mention is, of course, one thing is education, which exposed her to being part of these intelligentsia and scholarly circles. But because she had this special upbringing of her father being the landowner, having contact with the nobility, Janina also had experience kind of dealing with the upper classes of the Polish society. She knew...

their mannerisms, their ways of speaking, she of course knew French. So all this later helped her when she assumed the false identity of the Polish countess, Sobodolska.

Waitman Beorn (16:15.794)
Wow. I mean, and just that as you did a really good job of showing, I mean, she is someone who seems incredibly driven and someone who doesn't take no for an answer.

Barry White (16:30.8)
Yes, yes, that's how we describe her, definitely. And that's, she used that in her negotiations with German officials during the war.

Waitman Beorn (16:44.978)
So what happens in 1939 when the Nazis invade and the Soviets invade Poland? What is her experience? What is she up to at that moment?

Barry White (16:58.32)
She and Henry are in Lvov teaching and she had to hide her privileged background so she lied about she said her father was a bookkeeper on an estate so that she wouldn't be branded a class enemy and deported as so many hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews were deported by the Soviets to Siberia and Kazakhstan. And so they survived the

the Soviet terror, they were able to keep their teaching positions since she knew Ukrainian and Henry taught French so he didn't have to know Ukrainian. And then of course, 1941, the Germans come in and everything changes and they're immediately faced with massive violence, the constant threat of death. And in December 1941, they're faced with, they're being forced to move into the ghetto and they know.

They don't want to go to that. There's nothing but death waiting for them there. So they're trying to figure out how to escape. And at the last moment, they receive a visitor, Yanina's old family friend, Count Andrzej Strzynski, who came to Lwów from Lublin on the first civilian train that was able to get through in order to seek them out and to persuade them to go back with him to Lublin.

because he was in the resistance and he said that he would be able to get them false papers there and work. And so that's when they decided to go to leave Levyth and go to Libya.

Waitman Beorn (18:38.258)
And one of the things you highlight, I think, in the book, but it bears mentioning here is the nature of the difficulty of that choice. Because what happens to the rest of her family in the sense of they remain in the vove, right?

Joanna Sliwa (18:55.126)
Well, we know that her mother died in 1933, so that was right before the war. Janina's father died in World War I. Janina, from what we were able to uncover, had two sisters. One of them left Poland in around 1928, and the other one we don't know.

We don't know if she had any other siblings apart from those two sisters who immigrated to South America, but we do know more about Henry's family. And they were all, they all were living in Copecchenza at the time in summer 1941. And that is actually where the Melburks were intending to go because there was no ghetto yet in December 1941 in Copecchenza. And so they thought that they would just stay there with the family.

And it must have been a really harrowing choice for them to to go instead with Count Skrchensky, go into the unknown to Lublin where Janina had no connections. She did not have family there. She had no acquaintances, friends, nothing. Henry used to teach in Lublin at a girls school. So he had that connection. However,

He, I'm sure, also realized that that could expose him to danger because people could recognize him as being a Jewish man. So it was really a difficult decision for them, but a decision that they thought would save their lives. And they had someone, a Polish aristocrat, a Catholic, who was there risking his own life to save his friends.

Barry White (20:39.984)
And it was a very dangerous, yeah, it was also a very dangerous journey for them to go from Lüft to Liebman because they had to go without any identity papers or any markings as Jews. So if they'd been caught, they would have been shot and scrimped probably also.

Waitman Beorn (20:40.114)
And what do you think motive, sorry, go ahead.

Waitman Beorn (20:57.746)
Yeah. And I mean, what do you think motivated Krasinski to sort of go out of his way to sort of do this? It seems like it's an amazing act, but also one that required a lot of effort on his part to sort of reach down and help these people.

Barry White (21:14.384)
Yeah, someone once asked me what are the questions you'd still like to answer and that was the first one I mentioned. What was the nature of that relationship? Why did he go to such extraordinary lengths to save them? I don't know, I can't explain it.

Joanna Sliwa (21:30.038)
They must have been kind of close, right? This is one of the kind of outstanding questions for us. And the Sksensky, Andrzej Sksensky and Janina in particular, and her family must have been close from the research that we were able to do. And we found out that the Sksensky family owned Zhuravno, the town of Zhuravno where Janina was born and where she lived with her parents. And so there could have been a connection there.

that the family, Janina's father, her family might have known the Skrzanski family, or there might have been another connection that we just don't know. The interesting piece here to say is that, you know, we write about Skrzanski. We, in the book, we did a lot of research trying to find more about him and the connection to Janina. And through social media, we were connected with Skrzanski's granddaughter in Poland.

And this, of course, we were hoping to find more information. However, his granddaughter did not know that her grandfather, Andrzej Skrzynski, saved a Jewish couple. She knew that her, what her grandfather, the role that he played during World War II, some of it she knew. I mean, we can talk, I'm sure we will talk a little bit more about this later, but she did not know any more details. So.

This is something that as we are speaking in your podcast, Waitman, as we're doing these public programs, we always mention these stories in the hopes that someone will hear this and something will spark, you know, and be like, no, I know this. We have a document. Let's look for it. So we're constantly looking for more information.

Barry White (23:12.128)
Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (23:16.05)
And this is something that that actually has happened a couple of times on here where, you know, I've, I've said, and I echo that completely. you know, I was in a program last week, with some service Academy cadets going around Poland. One of the questions they had for me was, you know, what, what do you think is the, the, the biggest outstanding piece of, you know, historical information it's going to come about, you know, what's, what don't we know about the Holocaust? And, you know, obviously I don't know it because we don't know it, but the,

The point is that, you know, if you, if you have stuff in your attic, you know, and it, it has to do with, you know, it's important to tell somebody about it because, you know, there are, I'm sure, I'm certain that there are, you know, lots and lots and lots of stories out there that merit, you know, investigation and can, can still add to our understanding of the Holocaust and what it was, and what it was about. And, and also challenge, I think in some ways, you know, our, our notions of,

In this instance, things like resistance and who's rescuing who, for example, right? Which we'll probably get to in a bit. But these things are still out there. And I think I speak for all historians on this podcast, as well as all historians in general, in saying that if you have these things and you bring it to us, we will be very happy. And we'll be very happy to investigate them, because this is what we do and this is what we're interested in.

great. So maybe, Gosh, I mean, so she, I guess another question that I had just reading the book was of all the things that you could pretend to be to hide from the Nazis or anybody really. Why choose to be essentially what seemed to mean to be like a high profile, you know, in some ways, easily fact checked kind of.

I mean, why not become Joe Smith and, you know, be under the radar rather than pretending to be literally nobility?

Barry White (25:22.512)
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it had to do first with Strzecicki, who was introducing them, who got them a place to live first off with two Polish aristocratic ladies. And so he introduced them as cousins of his wife and then got

somehow got them the false papers is Count and Countess Sikudolski. And in a way, I mean, it was brilliant because at least in the case of Yelena, because of her upbringing, she was able to carry that off, carry off that role so well that we don't think anybody ever suspected that she was Jewish. And so it's kind of like, you know, hiding in such plain sight that no one would think that you were hiding in a way. So it was...

Brilliant in a way.

Waitman Beorn (26:17.394)
Yeah. And again, I mean, I think hiding in plain sight is a great way to put it because it is one of those things where, and we'll see as we talk about her story, you know, she puts herself out there and it's almost one of those sort of fake it till you make it kind of situations where, you know, who, who meeting her, meeting this strong woman who can talk the talk would question.

You know, like it would be, it would be absurd. Nobody would imagine anybody would make this up. Right.

Barry White (26:48.944)
Cheers.

Waitman Beorn (26:51.666)
So how does she get involved, I guess, with the Home Army? And how does she begin doing what she ends up doing?

Barry White (27:04.208)
Well, so they're in Lublin and they're safe from being persecuted as Jews for the moment, but they find out, well, they're still being subject to persecution as Poles. And this is particularly driven home to Yanina one night when Henry was nearly seized in a Gestapo raid that was taking men for forced labor. And as soon as he underwent a physical exam, he would...

the fact that he was Jewish would be exposed. And this is in 42, just as the Operation Reinhardt, the largest murder operation of the Holocaust, is starting in the city of Lublin, where it was headquartered. And she, like everybody else living in Lublin, must have witnessed the very bloody deportation action that sent 30 ,000 Jews to Belgetz to be gassed there.

And so she reached a point where she just felt like she just couldn't bear living in terror any longer and desperately trying to think of how they were going to survive. They were not going to survive. So the question to ask is, you know, how am I going to die? You know, how can I live what's left of my life and die a meaningful death? And so she decided to...

resist her country's occupiers and help as many people as she could. And since Szczepinski was in the Home Army, she got him to sponsor her membership into it. And so that's how she joined it. And then in the spring of 1942, Szczepinski was appointed the head official in all of Ludwig District of the Polish Main Welfare Council, this Polish welfare organization. And he made

Yanina basically his right hand in that organization.

Waitman Beorn (29:03.09)
And really quickly, before she does this, are they basically just in hiding? Kind of just sitting around, you know, with essentially with nothing to do in this house of with the two, the two elderly, nobility women, noble women.

Joanna Sliwa (29:23.062)
They were not really in hiding, meaning that they were confined to this one place without the possibility of leaving the room and showing their faces outside on the streets. They were living under false identity. Janina and her husband, Henry, they were living as these countess Janina and Count Piotr Suchodolski. And, you know, for Henry,

Bill Piotr. He, of course, had to be extra careful for the reasons that Barry mentioned and I mentioned earlier. We don't know much about how he was taking all that, how he was coping with it and processing. The memoir is more about Janina's actions and about her thoughts, the conversations that she had. So we don't know about Henry. But no, I think they were

they were getting acquainted with the city. They had to learn their way around. Janina also got, she was very close to Skrzynski, so of course she very quickly then joined the Maine Welfare Council. And the Maine Welfare Council was an organization that was approved by the German authorities in 1940 to provide assistance to Poles, ethnic Poles.

There were separate organizations, the Jewish Social Self -Help, which was for Jews, and then another organization for Ukrainians. And the interesting thing about the main welfare council, the one for ethnic Poles, was that many of those involved in running the organizations, especially in the leadership, definitely in the leadership, were members of the Polish aristocracy.

So here, Yanina fit very well into that. As a member of the aristocracy, she didn't necessarily have to be from Lublin, because there was a lot of movement of people during the war escaping from places and coming into these big cities. So that wasn't really probably questioned. And why did she find herself here in Lublin all of a sudden? And why did she and her husband have to live with these two aristocratic ladies?

Joanna Sliwa (31:42.838)
that wasn't really like a major questions. That was kind of the norm during the chaos of the war. But Nina fit very well into this kind of leadership of the main welfare council for the Lublin district.

Waitman Beorn (31:58.258)
And I think one question that certainly sprung to my mind, and I'm a Holocaust historian, but I think it also obviously will spring to the mind of our listeners, which is why do the Nazis care? Like, why do they allow this organization to exist in the first place? Right. Because we know, we know about, you know, how the Nazis viewed non -Jewish polls, you know, and what the plans were for them had had things gone, had the Nazis been more successful.

And so number one, just ideologically, like why would they allow an organization to exist to sort of help these people? And then almost again, again, this sort of, and you hit on this a little bit in the book, but from a practical perspective, you know, I would think that it doesn't take, you don't have to be sort of a genius to think that this would be a great way, a great place for resistors and people in the home army to hide as members of an organization like this. So.

You know, what are the Nazis thinking?

Barry White (32:59.856)
Well, I think this is one of the peculiarities of the general government, which was the part of Occupy Poland that Germany didn't annex to the Reich.

And they governed it instead as a colony. So it was completely governed by Germans. There was no Polish public state there, Polish government administration underneath it. There were Poles were only in low level positions and directly under Germans. So the Germans ruled it, but they didn't really take any interest in the welfare of their so -called alien people. So the people who weren't German did it. But still you have all these millions of people who live there and they need to.

shelter. You know, they're being massively displaced in ethnic cleansing campaigns, you know, so they've got to go somewhere. You know, they have to find something to eat, they have to get some work, you know, and so they were happy enough to delegate that to a Polish organization. You know, again,

not letting one organization deal with all the people in the general government because you can't let the different groups do any work together at all. The Germans were very clever about manipulating the ethnic hostilities and grievances amongst the people of Poland. And so they were happy enough to delegate this to the RGO.

or to care for the non -Jewish ethnic cults.

Waitman Beorn (34:36.53)
And it bears mentioning it's a great, that's a great example of, and I talked about this before on the podcast, but this idea, this sort of mythical idea that the Nazis are this kind of super ultra efficient, you know, rational, you know, bureaucracy, which, you know, this example is one of a number, right? That show that actually, you know, number one, they're not. And number two, they're, they're sort of fumbling their way through figuring out how to do this.

But also, you know, I think that they're not always sort of ideological purists, right? That, you know, there's a practical piece of this, which is, you know, and Hans Frank's a great example of this, because he's a guy who obviously doesn't care for polls at all, but he's trying to run a state of his own, and he wants it to look good and work, and, you know, so he's willing to sort of...

make concessions so that things work better? I mean, is that the sense that you get when you're looking at sort of this whole operation?

Barry White (35:40.496)
Yeah, I mean, they had to get it to work in some fashion, you know, that was supposed to be the bread basket for the rice. So we had to produce food and send it back to the rice and other supplies. And so, you know, the people had to work, it had to function. And.

So as you say, Frank was, you know, he was all in on the eventual annihilation of ethnic Poles as well as Jews. But in the meantime, you know, he had to find some way, you know, one of our chapters is called the Polish question. And he actually asked the question, you know, do we start the Poles to death or do we feed them so that they can work for us?

Joanna Sliwa (36:29.494)
And I think, I mean, what you're saying about the efficiency, right? This myth of the efficiency of the German bureaucracy. I think what the book does is really counters this myth through showing how Janina was able to meet with, negotiate with, persuade certain officials to do certain things. And if they did not agree, if one official did not agree, she would say, okay.

So I'm going to the next one and I will get to the bottom of this. I will find out who is the person responsible for a certain thing, for certain matters. And the most outrageous meeting that she had, I think, and we often talk about this, was with the manager of Operation Reinhardt, the operation that Barry mentioned earlier. I mean, in order to secure the release of 3 ,600 Polish peasants,

who were held in Majdanek, she met with this manager of Operation Reinhardt. And not only that, she managed to persuade him to grant the release of these peasants. And in the end, she managed to secure the release of 2 ,800 of them. And she doesn't even write about this in her memoir. We discovered that in the archival record.

But I think this example shows you different things, right? But one of them that I want to say is about this myth of efficiency of German bureaucracy. And she did this time and again. And I think this, you know, we laid earlier, we talked about, you know, how was she able to do this? In her head, I think she just had, she was able to map out the different German authorities, what they were responsible for.

Barry White (37:54.128)
Thank you.

Joanna Sliwa (38:17.366)
And she just went from one place to the other and never ever took no as an answer of Whitman what you said earlier and what we kind of wanted to show of how her, through her upbringing, education, early career and how that carried over into the wartime.

Waitman Beorn (38:37.682)
Well, and also one thing.

Barry White (38:37.808)
Yeah, the other half of that though is also that she framed her requests not as requests, but as measures that were obviously in the interest of the Germans. So she, you know, she really knew them. She really was able to think from their perspective and frame these things. She's not asking for humanitarian aid for Poles. She's asking for public health measures that will protect Germans from the spread of disease, for example. And so,

Yeah, so she's just so clever in the way she goes about it. So it's not that she was always in people's faces. She could be very charming. And I think there was just something about her, this countess who would waltz in with her perfect German and address these officials that made them sit up and pay attention. But she was...

Yes, very, very. And she mentions and makes an allusion at one point in her in her memoir to the fact that she knew the regulations better than the Germans did, because the general government, here's this whole place that the Germans have taken over. Who's going to govern it? You know, not not government officials from Germany, they already have jobs. So you bring in all of these carpetbackers, many of them who have no background in government administration whatsoever.

they're all extremely corrupt. So, you know, in the general government, you know, if you didn't have money, you couldn't get anything done. But if you did have money, you could get almost anything done because there was just so much corruption.

Waitman Beorn (40:23.026)
And this is something that comes through also, I think one of the things that I noticed about her is not only does she savvy about what the sort of organizational and jurisdictional positions are, but she recognizes what the individual pressure points are for all of the officials, right? What they're interested in and like who they're getting along with or not getting along with, who they want to sort of...

do better than or arrivals because this is another element, right? Which again, the general government is a great example of this, which is that, you know, sometimes the way that policies in the third Reich in an occupied territories unfold is it seems irrational, but it's in the context of, you know, one guy wants his star to rise. And so he's going to try to sabotage somebody else, you know, and so there are all these interpersonal.

And, you know, sort of selfish, selfish, ambitious kind of reasons. And it seems like that she is able to sort of identify, okay. And that, that helps her as well, as you've mentioned to kind of determine which, which tack to take in terms of her argument and her justification for each person so that she can sort of set, set the system against itself. So that ultimately, you know, it, it ends up with a response that is positive for the group that she's trying to trying to help in the end.

And maybe before we talk a little bit more about that, if we can maybe talk a little bit about Maidanek itself, because that's kind of the one of the centers, I suppose, of her resistance activities and probably a place that many people are unfamiliar with. And so maybe if one of you would like to start and sort of give us a give us some background, what is Maidanek and how does it then become part of Janina's story?

Barry White (41:49.584)
Yeah.

Barry White (42:17.264)
Right, so Midonic was a concentration camp that was established in.

1941, at the moment when Nazi leaders thought that Germany was just about to defeat the Soviet Union, and so they would finally have their Lebensraum, or living space, in the East. And Heimdall Kimmler, who was the head of the SS and police, had great plans for that, and Lublin played a very important role in those plans. It was to become the military and industrial base that would supply the SS forces that were going to control the living space.

in Eastern Europe. And Majdanek, he ordered the creation of a concentration camp that was to hold at one point as many as 250 ,000 prisoners who were going to be doing all of the building and working for these industries and military bases. Originally it was going to be Soviet POWs. That didn't work out. The first 2000 were all dead in three months. So then with the start of Operation Reinhardt, it's Jews.

Jews start to be so able -bodied Jews are instead of being sent to the killing centers for Operation Reinhardt, they were Belzec, Sibybor and Treblinka. Many of the able -bodied Jews were taken off and sent to Majdanek or certain other camps in and around Lublin to provide forced labor until they could no longer work and then they were murdered. So Majdanek became a part of this Operation Reinhardt in 1942.

a camp for Jews. Then 1943, Germany is not on the brink of winning the war. In fact, victory is starting to look a little uncertain with the Battle of Stalingrad and Allied forces landing in North Africa. And so the Germans need workers because all the German men have to go to the front. And Himmler especially wants workers in his concentration camps. So he orders that in the general government,

Barry White (44:22.706)
meant Poles who were in prison or who are able -bodied but don't have work permits be sent to concentration camps, especially Majdanek and Auschwitz. So this is when Majdanek comes to be thousands of Polish.

political prisoners are sent to Majdanek. So it is a camp for Poles as well as Jews and eventually other nationalities who were picked up in anti -partisan actions, Belorussians, more Soviet POWs. But it's at this point when it becomes a camp for Polish political prisoners that the RGO gets standing to help the prisoners there.

because the RGO won permission to provide food and some supplies for Poles who were in prisons in certain camps in the in the general government.

So that's in February 1943, RGO got permission to provide bread and products for prisoners' soup and to work with the Polish Red Cross to get packages to prisoners from their families. And Janina was put in charge of that program and she ran it. And yeah, so that's the background of that.

Waitman Beorn (45:44.242)
And so what does she do? She's put in charge of this program, but a lot of the amazing research that you've done and comes out in the book is sort of the things that she does to both help people and help sort of ameliorate their day -to -day existence, but also literally to free them, which again, just seems insane. If you were to sell this as a movie script, people would be like, I'm not sure. So how does she, what does she do?

Barry White (46:10.352)
Yeah.

Joanna Sliwa (46:16.758)
So one is that she does what the RGO or the Polish Main Welfare Council is tasked with. And that is just what Barry said to provide these relief from food through food, medicine, straw to prisoners in Majdanek. That also means helping orphans in the Lublin district, because let's not forget, Janina's activities were not only confined to helping prisoners in Majdanek.

She was responsible for the Lublin district together with her supervisor, superior, Andrzej Skrzynski. So she was receiving reports about what is happening in other parts of the district, right? And she also had to make certain decisions with Skrzynski, provide directives to the Polish committees in other towns in the district. So...

So there were, I think, so we can divide those activities that she was engaged in in those kind of legal and those that the organization was tasked with. And then those that were semi -legal or completely illegal that she engaged in, such as to get smuggling messages together with the approved food items into Mydonic. And through those messages,

she was able to learn and the Polish underground was able to learn what was happening in the camp. Through those messages, the Polish underground was able to pass on information to the resistance members who were prisoners in Majdanek. So they were able to foster support the resistance network among prisoners. But Janina also smuggled other things to kind of...

provide relief to the prisoners, including books by famous Polish writers that brought joy, some sort of joy to the women prisoners who were brought to Majdanek from Ravensbruck. And so these were extremely meaningful efforts that she took. More than that, Janina, she was Jewish, right? Let's not forget, she was Jewish, hiding as a Catholic.

Joanna Sliwa (48:41.142)
right? And still she understood what was important to these Catholic polls behind the wire in the Majdanek and that was to give them strength, to give them hope, including by providing various items for Christmas, Christmas in Majdanek. I mean, we haven't heard about this happening in other camps. And what we mean by Christmas in Majdanek is...

Christmas trees being brought into the camp for the prisoners to enjoy, to have a beautiful Christmas, right? To give them this hope and strength that I just talked about and to give them special food that would remind them of life in freedom with their families. She also made sure that prisoners had this kind of Easter fair.

for the Easter holiday, right? Those kind of eggs and other traditional Polish food eaten on this Catholic holiday. And this is not only described in the memoir. We got this proof also from other sources, from prisoners who survived, former prisoners who survived, and who wrote about how extremely meaningful it was for them to celebrate.

these holidays in the camp and for Countess Suchodowska, that's how they knew her, the Countess, or Countess Suchodowska, to bring these items to them. And one of the sources that we have is from Dr. Stefania Peżonowska, who was a former prisoner. She was tasked with creating the women's infirmary in Majdanek. And she was the one, Stefania Peżonowska, was the one meeting.

with Yanina, upon Yanina's first entry to the camp to bring in her deliveries. And Pezhanoska wrote in her memoir after the war, she described these kinds of lorries coming in with these Christmas trees. It's a surreal sight for these prisoners to see, but so extremely meaningful. And so meaningful that the prisoners created these gifts for Yanina, Yanina described.

Joanna Sliwa (51:06.134)
in her memoir. And we can also think about how much resistance efforts that took from prisoners to kind of collect these pieces in order to create a gift for Yanina and then for Yanina to smuggle it out of the camp. And that was a risky endeavor in its own right. Of course, there are many other instances and Barry should definitely pick up here to talk about other instances of what else, you know,

How else did Janina help Polish people, the prisoners in Majdanek, but also in the district?

Barry White (51:40.848)
Thank you.

Yeah. And then you were asking about the releases that she negotiated. So and, you know, we were talking about how she sort of took advantage. She understood some of the different rivalries that were going on. And so.

In the summer of 1943, she took advantage of a kind of change in the power relationship in the general government, whereas the SS and police had been a law unto itself and basically could ignore German civilian officials. The SS and police carried out this massive ethnic cleansing and anti -partisan campaign that was such a spectacular failure and incited so much.

organized armed resistance in Lublin district that it was becoming almost ungovernable. And so the head of the SS and police, Odiro Gwobachnick, was ordered out, lost his position. And the German civilian officials for a little while kind of had the upper hand. And so she was able to take advantage of that. And those officials were interested in trying somewhat.

kinder and gentler approach towards the polls in hopes of getting them to be more obedient. And so they were more open to her request. So in the case that we mentioned earlier, the manager of Operation Reinhardt, he was the chief of staff to Yelur Klobocna after it was ordered that the SS and police had to stop this.

Barry White (53:28.336)
ethnic cleansing campaign and turn over all of the prisoners that they had taken, he wanted to wash his hands of the whole thing. There were 9 ,000 peasants had been put in Majdanek and there were still 3 ,600 of the able -bodied adults who were all sent off immediately to the rise for forced labor, leaving behind the children, the elderly, the infirm, who were very rapidly dying from the conditions there.

Majdanek at this time had by far the highest mortality rate among prisoners of all of the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. And so Janina was really desperate to get these prisoners released. And so she succeeded in that, but then she went on and pushed her advantage with civilian officials and got many more prisoners who'd been seized off the streets in raids and put in Majdanek for no particular reason. She got them released, she got hostages released who'd been held longer than them.

than the regulations specified. And so she got over 4 ,000 prisoners released from I don't think and then she also negotiated releases from other places of captivity.

Waitman Beorn (54:41.778)
And it's one of the amazing things, this isn't a side that, that I hadn't realized. Cause you talk about mortality rate, that's what, what's what spurred this to my, to my memory. And I remember reading, you know, that there somehow having a low mortality rate was actually like a positive sort of professional achievement for, for camp commandons. And so the actual, the replacement commandant for my MEDONIC was chosen in part because.

he had been very successful in lowering the mortality rate. And I guess as someone that studies mainly the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, I just kind of, that kind of blew my mind that, you know, this was something that, that the Nazis were actually concerned about. But I guess it also, I guess it speaks number one to the, the differing nature of camps, but also the, the changing status of prisoners as labor as well. Is that.

Barry White (55:34.64)
Right, yeah, as everything with the Holocaust, you know, and German policies during the war, you have to keep in mind what's happening in the war on the battlefield, you know, and as the war drags on, then the labor of prisoners becomes much more important and Himmler wants the SS to be in charge of this huge labor force, right, that is going to give him a leading role in the war economy. So,

For that, he needed the prisoners to be able to work. And so that there became, starting in late 42, there was this emphasis on trying to keep the prisoners, trying to retain their capacity to work. And that's when Himmler allowed packages to be sent to prisoners. So some of the different regulations that the RGO was able to use in order to help prisoners at McDonald's.

So exactly.

Waitman Beorn (56:33.906)
And one of the things that, yes, I, one of the things that, that I think is for me was a particularly sort of emotional impact was, was thinking about her. Cause you talk in the book about her as you, as you've already pointed out, and this is another area of discussion for going into the camp. And I'm just trying to, as I'm reading the book, I'm just trying to wrap my head around what it must have been like for a Jewish person hiding.

And then voluntarily going into a place like Maidani knowing full well what's going on there and who it's and, you know, who it is most fatal to, IE Jews. And then, you know, going in there, I mean, it is the amount of just sort of personal courage that it would take one to do that is, is, seems to be kind of staggering, let alone to do that.

and then be able to act with sort of the confidence and panache that she seems to do to accomplish these kinds of things. It just was astounding. And I guess that leads to another area that I'm very interested in, which is sort of, she spends most of her time rescuing non -Jews. And I'm curious, you know, as someone who was Jewish and had this sort of position of power and authority, what her thoughts and feelings were.

about Nazi policy against Jews and what she might have been able to do with regards to Jewish prisoners or believing Jewish suffering. Of course, there is also with this a time element as well. You know, that when she begins to be perhaps effective, there is perhaps less opportunity to save Jews based on the developments of Reinhardt. But I'm curious about about this side of it as well.

Joanna Sliwa (58:33.11)
So Yanina really believed that the help that she was providing, that she was securing for ethnic Poles, would extend also to the Jewish prisoners in Majdanek. And we see that in the memoir and in the book, like how her hopes keep rising. And especially when she goes into the camp, she makes her observations.

She meets with a Jewish prisoner, a runner. She manages to arrange for a meeting with the boy's mother in the camp. And she really believes that now I will be able to add more food to the common colons. Now I will be able to help the Jewish prisoners. And then what happens? And then it's Operation Harvest Festival, Eindhovenfest. November 1943, 40 ,000 Jews were shot.

in the in the Lublin district, 18 ,000 of them in Majdanek. And that is crushing to Yanina. She learns about what happens through a report that is slipped out of the camp. So she's among the first people to learn about the tragedy that befell the Jewish prisoners. At that point, Polish prisoners as well lose hope. They really believe that they will be the next ones.

to be shot. Yanina is desperate to go into the camp to bring her deliveries, to collect more information, find out what's happening. And we cannot even imagine what is going through her head at this point. And still, after all this, she continues to be determined. And she continues to help the prisoners, including by...

kind of being involved in this planned escape of prisoners from a deportation train. Meaning that if she's the only one entering the camp at this point, from the outside, from outside the camp, right, entering the camp to bring deliveries, and she's the one who has contact with the prisoners and smuggles in these razor blades and other things for the prisoners to use, then if that...

Joanna Sliwa (01:00:58.134)
breakouts from the train was successful, all these would point to her that she was involved in that, meaning a death sentence to her. And still she goes along with it. She thinks it's important to resist. She thinks it's important to help the Polish prisoners until the end. And this is, you know, pure determination and something that is just amazes me about Janina.

Barry White (01:01:18.672)
Thank you.

Waitman Beorn (01:01:25.362)
And so, I mean, there are so many other stories and examples, but, you know, it's a good reason for our listeners to buy the book. But maybe we can talk a little about, you know, what happens towards the end and then after in the post -war period to to Yenina and and then and then maybe a little bit about what what causes her to write the memoir and her sort of desires about whether or not people know her story and these kind of things.

Barry White (01:01:54.32)
Yeah, well, the Soviets took Ludwig in July 1944 and they immediately began hunting down members of the Polish Army. They were very suspicious of members of the RGO, many of them aristocrats and many of them

rightly suspected of being in the home already. So Skrinchke had to leave Lugland in disgrace. But they still needed the services of RGO. So they asked Yonina to stay on. And she realizes that it's not safe for her to go back to her true identity. There's too much danger involved. Questions about how she got her identity. Also, she doesn't know how.

Her coworkers will react if they find out that she's the fight to them all upon and she's really a Jew. So she instead becomes, instead of Countess Janina Szypadowska, she is a doctor Janina Szypadowska social worker. She actually rose to be the deputy director of Poland's National Social Welfare Organization in the immediate post -war years.

And she was, again, because of her language abilities, she was the organization's face with the foreign funders, international funders. And through that, through her international connections, she was able to travel some abroad. So Henry, in the meantime, didn't want to go on as Peter Sipidowsky. He wanted to go back to his work. He reverted to his pre -war identity.

He got a professorship at a couple of different Polish universities, but they couldn't live together. And then in 47, he got a warning that the Polish, the communist secret police were monitoring his lectures. So Janina kicked into rescue mode, used her foreign connections to get a fellowship from the UN to travel in the United States studying child welfare.

Barry White (01:04:11.6)
services and she uses connections there that eventually lead to Henry going to Canada on a fellowship. And she eventually was able to escape Poland. She showed up at the Canadian military mission in Berlin and defected and joined Henry in Canada as Dr. Josephine Janina Bednarski -Sukodilkowska -Mailberg.

mathematician, giving her age as 10 years younger than it actually was. We think because she was hoping to get an academic appointment in math, we knew that her odds were low and would be even lower for a woman in her mid -40s than in her mid -30s. And then they went to Chicago in 56 where Henry got a professorship. He was a philosopher of physics at the University of Chicago.

And in the 1960s, Yanina became a fully tenured professor of mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology. So extremely unusual for a woman at that time.

Waitman Beorn (01:05:19.154)
Yeah, I mean, it's like she just, she does one amazing thing and then she's like, I'm going to do something else amazing after that. and just keeps on, yeah, it keeps on succeeding. so what about this memoir? you know, because it, it sounds like, that she very much is someone who sort of sees a project, sees it through, moves on to something else. you know, she isn't there to sort of get thanks or praise. but then.

What about this memoir? What's it like? Why does she write it? What are her instructions about sort of its publication? And then also just a professional question, which is kind of like the, what does it sound like? I mean, I know there's a little piece of it at the end of the book, but how does she describe herself when she's talking about her story? So a lot of questions there, but.

Joanna Sliwa (01:06:16.63)
There are many questions, many interesting questions. But Janina did not look for praise. I don't think she did. In fact, when she did get some praise during the war for her service to the main welfare council and she received some kind of a certificate, she kind of dismissed it in a memoir, being annoyed even by this that she received this. We actually found it in the archives. So anyway, she was not looking for praise.

We believe that she wrote the memoir in Polish in the 1960s. Janina passed away in 1969, so it had to be sometime in the 1960s. And she wrote it in a particular context, political, social context of that time. And one is that even though she was living in Chicago at the time, Chicago has a large and had a large Polish diaspora.

She had access, I'm sure she had access to Polish papers. She could hear the conversations happening among the Polish, Polish Americans and so on. And she was also, you know, she was, she was interested, I'm sure she was interested in what's happening in Poland at the time. And in the 1960s and especially in 19 something is culminated in 1968, there was a campaign of that the government billed as anti -Zionist campaign, but was in fact anti -Semitic campaign.

What that meant was that the Polish communist government accused Polish Jews of not being loyal to the Polish state because the Jews supposedly cheered for Israel in the 1967 war with the Arab states. And so suddenly Jews found themselves under this magnifying glass. They lost their positions. People who had some Jewish background,

were dismissed from school, from universities. Sometimes this was the first time that some people, younger people who are students found out, university students found out that they were Jewish. They didn't know what that meant and what, you know, I'm a Zionism. What does that mean? So there was also violence against Jews at the time.

Joanna Sliwa (01:08:34.518)
I know their doors were smeared. They were told Jews go to Zion and all of that. And in the end, around 30 ,000 Polish Jews were forced to emigrate, to leave. They went to Israel. They went to the United States. They went to some Canadian countries, to Australia, and so on. And Janina observed this. So that was one part of the story. Another part of the story was that the Polish government, communist government at the time,

was also promoting the story of how Jews kind of were passive and it was they survived thanks to the Polish people. So the Polish people were rescuers. And here you have Jews who are ungrateful to the Polish people for saving them. So Janina's memoir can be considered a response to these narratives.

of what was happening in Poland. Another narrative, of course, we have of competitive suffering. So who suffered more, right? The Polish people as a whole or the Jews. So here you have Janina also presenting the Polish suffering, focusing on the persecution of the Poles during the Nazi times. She was persecuted as a Pole, right? Because she was hiding under false identity. She was also persecuted as a Jew because she was forced to assume a false identity.

in order to survive. So I would say that these are the most important context. Janina wrote this in Polish. Her husband, Henry, translated the memoir to English. We believe this was intended for Polish audiences, also because the way the memoir is written, it's written for someone who has knowledge of.

what was happening in Poland during World War II, something that, let's say, an average American reader may not have. Even for today, I mean, we've had to go very into a lot of this legwork to really, you know, check every single thing for chronology, especially for chronology, right, and to provide a broken context of what was happening, what Janina was writing about in her memoir, so that the reader today will understand what she was, you know, what Janina was writing about.

Joanna Sliwa (01:10:50.55)
and why that is significant. So I think those are the major points.

Barry White (01:10:57.136)
Yeah, and the memoir just just covers the wartime years and you say how does she portray herself? She doesn't even say what her name is. So she I mean she portrays herself as petite and very womanly womanly in her ways. She's obviously brilliant from the memoir because of what she does. She has a sense of humor, wry sense of humor.

Some of her remarks or observations are very witty. And also what really comes through is just her passion, her passion for saving lives. She really, with my Donna, I would say she was obsessed with the need to do something and ever more. So she was never satisfied. There had to be more that could be done to help those prisoners.

and she was really obsessed with it. And you feel, in the memoir, there's this undertone of sadness throughout it, and you just get the feeling that she was, continued to be haunted by the many lies that she was not able to say.

Waitman Beorn (01:12:16.274)
Yeah, I mean, I wondered listening to this conversation if part of that is, is her inability to save Jews because they're just our work in many ways beyond saving. There's no way you're going to get them released. Right. And many of them that have already been that, you know, I've already been murdered, you know, by the time that she's able to able to do this. And so it almost seems like in some ways she's like, well, I can save I can save somebody. So I'm going to do that.

I guess since we're talking about saving people, I know this is a very recent book, but I'm curious if there have been or are or will be plans to recognize her. It seems like, you know, Poland does a very good job of honoring rescuers, certainly.

and also honoring particularly people that are rescuing Poles and are in the Polish Home Army, etc, etc. Is there any have you heard anything or has anybody reached out? Is there any opportunity for her to or was there any opportunity? Because even though it wasn't miss narrowly know that she might have been Jewish, but certainly people knew about her. Has she received any any official recognition for this?

Barry White (01:13:20.016)
Thank you.

Joanna Sliwa (01:13:34.902)
No, so the short answer is no, she has not received recognition. You are right, Whitman, and definitely something that Barry mentioned also earlier, that there was people knew about and scholars definitely knew about. There was a person, Countess Janina Sochodolska, who was part of the RGO, but no one knew that she was Jewish. This is something that we found proof for and through our research. But.

she will be recognized in the way that the book will be translated, is being translated into Polish. So Polish readers will have an opportunity to learn about this story and we are very happy about it.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:15.282)
Yeah, and I think this.

Barry White (01:14:15.568)
Yeah, and we've had a lot of interest. We were helped a lot by scholars in Poland in the course of doing our work, and particularly at Majdanek. They were really fascinated by this. They don't question what we found. I mean, they have really embraced it, and they put her on their website. So you can read about her. Yeah.

Waitman Beorn (01:14:39.922)
Well, this is again, one of those one of those fantastic stories. Not only though, though the story itself is enough, but not only because of the story, because it also complicates. And I think, you know, good history is complicated history. And this complicates our story, our understanding of the Holocaust and who rescues who and what roles are typical both from a sort of Jewish, non -Jewish, but also men and women. Right. Because, you know, this is.

One of the really important elements of this is here's you have a woman who is taking the lead in this. I half jokingly wrote in some of the questions that I suggested before this, what is her husband doing all of this? It's not because I was like, he should be doing something, but I can't imagine what it must have been like in some ways for him because he's A, at more risk because of being discovered, but he's also...

she's out there doing these amazing things. And I'm kind of like, well, you know, what, what is he doing this whole time? You know, how is he, is, you know, is, is he helping? Is he, you know, is he making dinner? You know, like what, what is, what is his role in this whole sort of relationship? It seemed really interesting to me. I don't know if you have the sense of that, but.

Barry White (01:15:49.616)
Thank you.

Barry White (01:15:55.568)
All we know is that he had a job with the large agricultural cooperatives for WEM. He described you as like a agricultural engineer or an egg farmer, different things. He said he had to memorize the formulas for different fertilizers. But he basically kept a low profile, which was necessary with both because...

If he attracted suspicion, it would be much simpler to prove that he was Jew than to prove that Janina was. Also, he didn't have Janina's background, so he was Count Piotr Szypadolski, but he spoke fluent French, so he could speak French with the aristocrats, but he wouldn't necessarily have known their particular style of French and all of their mannerisms and so forth.

He was not as equipped to carry off the role this year.

Waitman Beorn (01:16:58.034)
Well, I've taken up a lot of time, but this is, I think, a really, really fascinating conversation. And I, again, I highly recommend everyone check out the book, The Counterfeit Countess. It's amazing. And it does the stories that it tells and the things that she sort of repeatedly does. You know, I was, I was constantly sort of drawing the comparison to Schindler, Oscar Schindler, right? Where he goes, certainly from the movie, right? Where he goes in and he's sort of bartering. But he only does this a couple of times, whereas like,

This is something that you need is doing like over and over and she's cultivating this. It just I think it's really important in a book that everyone should go out and check out. But as always, speaking of books, our final question in the podcast is always for our guests to sort of suggest one book that they think is particularly important or has been particularly impactful to them. And then I'll share this with our readers. So this time we have a double.

double guests so we get two books at least. So what are your recommendations?

Barry White (01:18:03.152)
Well, for people who know something about the Holocaust but really want to understand it better, I always recommend Peter Hayes' Why, Explaining the Holocaust. I think it does a brilliant job of setting out the various contexts that made the Holocaust possible and influenced how it developed. And so that's a great book. And I may just add that...

Well, two other books, one if you're interested in Jewish women and the Jewish resistance, there's Judy Battalion's A Light of Days. And if you're interested in the experiences of Jewish children in the Holocaust, there's an excellent and very moving study by Joanna Sliba called Jewish Childhood in Krakow.

Joanna Sliwa (01:18:54.07)
Well, thank you so much for this plug and for the recommendation. I am very honored. Thank you so much. So I, you know, it's such a complicated question, you know, it's a big question to ask, wait, man, of your list, you know, of your guests here for Holocaust historian.

Waitman Beorn (01:19:13.746)
It's like, it's like, it's like what your favorite band is, you know, it can change. There's no, there's no sort of right or wrong answer, you know, but you have to pick something now.

Joanna Sliwa (01:19:18.038)
I know that it's nearly impossible because we all know about the books of our hosts, right, which really influence the way that we see and understand the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. And, you know, we're talking here today about Janina's story, about Majdanek and Lublin and Lwów, but then we will have Whitman's book to help us understand what happened in Lwów.

once Yanina left it, right? So what did she leave behind, you know? So I think that is extremely important. I will say that what I'm seeing right now in the field of Holocaust studies is this move to understand the immediate post -war years. And as an extension of the Holocaust, right, it's not just Jewish history, but it's...

Holocaust history as well, meaning how did the Holocaust affect Jewish life after the war? And I am primarily a historian of the Holocaust in Poland. So the book that I will recommend is by Jekiel Weitzman, Unsettled Heritage, Living Next to Poland's Material Jewish Traces After the Holocaust. And what Weitzman does, and he does so expertly, is to look at small towns.

throughout Poland and look at the discussions surrounding Jewish cemeteries. What happened to them after the war? How did the government, Polish communist government, what kinds of decisions did they make? How did local activists kind of react to the existence of these Jewish cemeteries? And it really is a discussion that reflects this.

coming to terms with the difficult past of the Holocaust in Poland through the discussion of cemeteries. It's a fascinating read and I highly recommend it to our listeners.

Waitman Beorn (01:21:25.618)
Well, thank you both so much. I will put those recommendations and they will be linked into the reading list. So please check those out. Once again, to all the listeners, thank you so much. If you can, I always say this and I need more people to do it. If you have a moment to give us a rating, leave us a comment for feedback. That's highly recommended and much appreciated.

but even more appreciated is the time of our two guests. Joanna and Barry, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and talking about you need the story.

Barry White (01:22:03.856)
Thank you very much.

Joanna Sliwa (01:22:04.182)
Thank you so much for having us. It was a really great conversation and honor to be on your podcast. Thank you.