027: Stand Against Darkness - Janina Sucholdolska

Intro
[Intro Tone]
So, the story begins like this.
In the year 1346, during the grinding Hundred Years’ War between England and France, English King Edward the Third decided to mount a new campaign in France to capture lands he claimed as part of his Norman birthright. After landing 10,000 men in modern day Belgium, he marched them south to face the army of King Philip the Fourth of France. As the two armies approached, the looming mismatch became woefully apparent.
The French army numbered nearly 30,000 – a three to one advantage over the English. Not only that, it was loaded with horse-mounted knights and French noblemen schooled in the art of war, while Edward’s army consisted largely of conscripted peasants. Centuries of European history had shown that a small number of trained and mounted armored knights could effectively obliterate a much larger force of men on foot. And here, the number of mounted Frenchmen nearly equaled the total number of English soldiers.
Philip the Fourth was so confident in his army’s superiority both in numbers and in training that the made a list of English knights and lords that he wished to take prisoner once he had won the impending battle. However, he was unaware of a strategic English plan that had been decades in the making.
Fourteen years earlier, Edward the Third had committed himself to a revolutionary idea: that a large number of longbows, fired in unison, could create a barrage of missiles that allowed a smaller army to defeat a larger one – knights and all. There was just one problem. English longbows were as long as a man was tall, required immense arm strength to even draw the string, and required perhaps a decade of training to fire an arrow over distance with accuracy.
Fortunately for him, sixty years earlier, King Edward the First had issued the “Statue of Winchester”, which ordered that archery targets be set up in every English town so that all Englishmen should practice with the longbow. By Edward’s day, there were thousands of common Englishmen who had been practicing with the longbow for most of their lives. As a measure of serendipity, the cost of gathering and training bowman was miniscule when compared to the cost of fielding mounted knights.
The French, meanwhile, had never seen the English longbow in action to any significant degree. They considered archers defensive troops rather than offensive ones, and so favored smaller, more accurate bows for close-range fighting – within 100 meters. On the other hand, the longbow in the hands of a skilled archer could be accurate at 300 meters – triple the distance. Despite the size of the longbow, a well-trained archer could fire six or seven arrows per minute. And because of the enormous draw strength of the bow’s line, the arrows flew at such high velocity that they could do the unthinkable – penetrate armor. Armor such as that worn by mounted knights.
When the two armies met at Crecy, the English quickly won an archery battle against the Genoese archers employed by the French – and then turned their bows against the massed French army waiting, in theory, out of range. As an unending barrage of arrows fell into the French forces from an unheard of distance, the French mounted an impromptu cavalry charge that, according to history, should have quickly obliterated the English foot soldiers.
However, the power of the English longbow mowed down French knights who were wholly unprepared for this new thing they faced. They just weren’t equipped for this sort of enemy. The battle turned into a rout and an enormous victory for the underdog against a superior force. If Edward had been wrong about the longbow’s capabilities, the English army would have been annihilated.
Now, we like the story of an underdog, especially one who risks everything against a foe who seemingly has the power of life and death over them. Every country’s history lionizes the underdogs who defeated a much stronger adversary. That said, our favorite type of underdog is the one who stands alone against the darkness when others turn away.
One of the most famous photos of the last 50 years is of an unknown Chinese man standing in a road to block a column of Chinese tanks – tanks leaving Tiananmen Square, where they had just helped disperse a pro-democracy protest with deadly violence. We don’t know his name. He was undoubtedly disappeared by the Chinese government. But we do know that he stood alone against an unbeatable adversary and likely paid with his life. Today, we just know him as Tank Man, a symbol for standing against the darkness.
Hello! And welcome to another episode of Plot Twisted History, where we dive down historical rabbit holes in search of the stories with surprises and plot twists along the way. I’m your host, David Nix, a writer of historical fiction and an amateur public historian. Today, we hear the only recently publicized tale of a woman who journeyed into the belly of the beast to stand against one of the greatest evils in human history – time and time again.
[Opening Music]
Act 1: The Little Countess
To begin our story, we need a little historical context. Hopefully, much of the context will be familiar to you. On September the first, 1939, the combined forces of the Nazis, Soviets, and Slovak Republic invaded Poland. Against overwhelming odds, Poland fell in less than six weeks. The Germans and Soviets divided Poland between them according to a secret treaty that had been signed earlier by Hitler and Stalin.
Less than two years later, the Nazis turned on the Soviets, launching an invasion of Russia in 1941. They called it vernichtungskrieg – war of annihilation. From that point forward, the Nazis gained control of the entirety of Poland, whereupon they began to enact a policy called Lebensraum – living space. The Nazis considered the mostly Slavic Poles as subhuman and planned to eventually eradicate 85% of the Polish population, Germanize those considered to have sufficient Aryan ancestry, and enslave the rest. As for the Jews, the Roma, and other quote “undesireables”? Well, they were to be exterminated as soon as possible.
As part of this plan, the Nazis began establishing extermination camps – couched as work camps – in which to gather Jews, Roma, and a steady stream of Poles for elimination. While the Jews and Roma were rounded up without pretext, the Nazis knew that mass incarceration of the average Pole would lead to open rebellion. Instead, they rounded up Poles a little at a time by manufacturing crimes against individual Poles, throwing them into camps, and then giving their land and houses to immigrants from Germany.
At the time of the Nazi invasion, Poland had a long history of kings and aristocracy, and there are hundreds of titled individuals living in the country – those who haven’t fled, anyway. Because of their social rank, the Nazis mostly leave them alone, perhaps hoping to leverage them when the time is right.
Late in 1941, one such aristocratic couple moves from their home in the city of Lwow to the Polish city of Lublin. They are Count Piotr and Countess Janina Sucholdolska. Intelligent, charming, stylish, pretty, and petite, the countess makes an immediate impression on those she meets in Lublin. Initially, the couple do what most other nobles do – keep their heads down and try not to cross the Nazis. After all, such a strategy might allow them to survive the war. And this strategy might prove successful for a strange reason. Even though the Nazis have supposedly eradicated social classes, most of the leadership are Prussian. And like Poland, Prussia possesses a long history of aristocracy. Prussians, Nazi or otherwise, have been raised to respect and even fear aristocrats.
This initial plan begins to change for Janina in the spring and summer of 1942. As the Nazis become further entrenched in Lublin, the once beautiful city becomes a chaotic collecting place for Polish people displaced by the Nazis in the name of Lebensraum. As Janina walks the streets of the city, she is appalled by the sight of gaunt and sickly Polish children standing outside the grim tenements where their families have landed.
Meanwhile, her status as a countess does not grant her any more access to food than it does anyone else. She travels outside the city to farms in search of produce and milk but learns that farm surplus is mostly going to the Germans. The rest finds its way into the black market. Though Janina is able to participate in the black market economy, she anguishes over the teeming masses that cannot afford it. How will they survive?
Most troubling of all, though, is what is happening outside the city of Lublin. The Nazis are building what will become the largest and ultimately deadliest concentration camp system of the war. The four camps are called Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and the largest of them all, Majdanek.
Originally planned for Soviet POWs, Majdanek is an enormous camp replete with housing, fences, and crematoriums. Janina doesn’t know at this time, but the Nazis are executing a grand plan of elimination that goes like this. Before the war, they had already begun eliminating people by killing 70,000 Germans – people with mental or physical disabilities. Through this process, they learned how to efficiently murder people in large numbers.
Underlying the aforementioned plan of rapidly killing Polish Jews and Roma while more slowly exterminating the Christian Poles is Aktion Reinhard. Over the next 20 months, this operation will murder 1.7 million Jews and an unknown number of Roma at the Lublin camps. For context, this is double the number of people murdered in the Auschwitz camp system. It will become by far the deadliest of all Nazi camp systems.
Under this operation and its precursor, the Nazis begin rounding up Jews in earnest in March of 1942. By April, everyone in Lublin has begun to understand what is really happening. The Jewish people of Poland are being liquidated in the nearby camps, while displaced non-Jewish Poles are being herded into the camps by the thousands – not for immediate murder but for death by attrition.
In the midst of the spiraling madness, the tipping point for Janina comes in the form of a story that is being circulated among the citizens of Lublin. The central figure in the Lublin black market is a family called Rylski. In Janina’s mind, the Rylskis are cutthroat businessmen who profit from the suffering of others. When she hears the story, then, she is fascinated.
It goes like this. A tailor in the Jewish ghetto of Lublin became certain that he and his grown daughter would be targeted for extermination at any time. In desperation, he appealed to the Rylskis for help. Much to everyone’s astonishment, the 22-year-old son of the Rylskis, Olek, decided to save the young woman – a woman he had never seen – by staging a sham wedding. He arranged for her to be smuggled out of the ghetto, obtained for her a false identity, and married her in a church. Afterward, he moved her to a safe place where she would survive the war.
This story fascinates Janina for a couple of reasons. One, it seems to her now that anyone is capable of great sacrifice and courage, regardless of what others think of them. And two, those with the most power bear the greatest responsibility to help. With this story in her thoughts, Janina does something incredibly strange to those who have met her when she moved with her husband to Lublin. She applies to join the Polish resistance. The Polish underground army. With the recommendation from another nobleman – Count Skrzynski (SK-SHIN-SKI) – she passes the vetting process and is accepted into the ranks of the Polish Home Army, or the AK.
Now, why would a Polish countess – a woman who retains some semblance of protection from the Nazis by virtue of her aristocratic title – risk everything by joining a group where mere membership will get her killed? Well, she has a reason, which we will come to in time.
Given the codename Stefania, Janina immediately leaps into the fray. Her first job is to serve as a night courier, ferrying information, money, and orders among various AK cells and command posts during the dead of night. Capture will get her killed, but she does it anyway.
She also joins Count Skrzynski (SK-SHIN-SKI) in listening to foreign language broadcasts on illegal radios and translating them into Polish. She is well suited for this task, because she speaks six languages fluently, including the specific style of French spoken by aristocrats all across Europe.
In May, Count Skrzynski (SK-SHIN-SKI) is invited by the Polish puppet government to become head of the Lublin branch of the Polish Main Welfare Council, or the RGO. The RGO is a strange organization tasked with ensuring the welfare of “acceptable” Poles under the leadership of SS officials in charge of executing Hitler’s racial purification ideas. For the Nazis, the benefit of the RGO is that it offloads from them certain responsibilities in caring for the Polish population. Thinking that he can do some good from the inside, Skrzynski (SK-SHIN-SKI) agrees. And he immediately brings along Countess Janina to help.
Before she can work for the RGO – while clandestinely belonging to the underground – she must pass a screen to determine if she is Aryan enough to hold a position with the RGO. As an aristocrat with supreme fluency in German, she passes with flying colors.
The primary function of the RGO is to provide relief assistance to thousands of Poles, many of them children, through food, clothing, and shelter. In her role of coordinating amongst the various points of aid, she is allowed a bicycle.
Now, you might think that joining the RGO is safer than spying for the resistance, but you’d be wrong. The RGO is rife with underground agents and a target of repeated SS housecleaning. Over the course of the war, the SS will execute 385 members of the organization. From the beginning, this is a dangerous position.
In the meantime, the Soviet POWs initially sent to Majdanek have died through intentional starvation, so the camp has been fully converted to killing center for Jews and Roma, and a concentration camp for displaced Poles incarcerated on false charges. And these Poles begin receiving the same treatment as the Soviet POWs – to work them to death or starve them to death.
Well, knowing what the plan is for the inmates of Majdanek, Janina becomes convicted that she must do something. And so, she proposes an outlandish mission – to somehow feed the prisoners at Majdanek and keep them alive. No one else thinks it can be done. But Janina has a plan.
She first goes to the Nazi authorities in Lublin and then to the commandant of the camp itself with a minor request – to allow family members outside the camp to deliver care packages to those within. Time after time, those she meets with try to dismiss her, but she will take no for an answer. So finally, they let her have her way just to be rid of her. Which is a bad plan. Because when Countess Janina asks for a finger, she will soon come for the whole hand.
By March of 1943, the RGO is delivering 1700 packages a month to the Polish inmates at Majdanek, though they are denied access to the Jewish prisoners. However, Janina decides this is not enough. If they deliver bread, then perhaps all prisoners could benefit – maybe even the Jewish prisoners.
Once again, Janina becomes a pest, camping on the doorsteps of power and appealing to logic in various ways. “You are so busy and have so much on your plate. Let the RGO help you by feeding the prisoners.” Or, “The regional director of the SS gave the RGO permission to do this, but you say no. You don’t want to be seen disobeying an order from the SS, do you?”
Because of her life among aristocrats, Janina knows how to manipulate male power structures. She knows what appeals to them. She knows what they fear. And, of course, she speaks immaculate German with an aristocratic accent, which intimidates the dutiful Prussians.
In April of 1943, Janina leads the first bread deliveries right to the gates of Majdanek. There, she begins socially engineering the guards. “Can you believe it?” the guards say. “A great lady remembering our names and treating us so kindly. And asking after our children?”
From the guards, Janina soon hears about a new problem. Typhus has broken out in the camp. Fortunately, the RGO has a supply of typhus inoculations. When she requests to speak to the camp’s medical staff, she is denied. And so, she takes an even greater risk. She harangues the commandant in order to gain entry to the camp itself – the belly of the beast.
Once inside the gates, she engages the camp’s doctor in an intense standoff where he threatens to have her arrested and kept in the camp. However, the tiny woman does not back down. Instead, she manages to convince the doctor of the necessity of the inoculations while making him believe it is his idea.
After leaving the camp that day, Janina is shaking with the post-traumatic stress of pure terror. Why so much terror, you might ask? After all, she is still a countess, right?
Well, Janina hides a dark secret that most of her Lublin friends don’t know, that even the Polish resistance doesn’t know. Countess Janina Sucholdolska is a fake. Her real name is Pepi Mehlberg. She is not a countess, but a mathematician.
Oh – and she is Jewish.
[Transition Music]
Act 2: The Mathematician
The woman known to the people of Lublin as Countess Janina Sucholdolska was in fact born Pepi Spinner in 1905, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish estate owner, in a part of Poland that now belongs to Ukraine. For the sake of the story, I will continue to refer to her as Janina, for reasons that will become apparent. Given the family’s wealth, Janina experienced little overt antisemitism. Her family mixed effortlessly with the Polish aristocrats who owned neighboring estates, and Janina grew up playing with the children of nobility.
It was these interactions that taught her how Polish nobles thought, howe they dressed, how they acted, and how they spoke. Because of her extraordinary intellect, Janina assimilated the clues like a sponge. By her late teens, she spoke Polish, aristocratic French, fluent German, some Russian, English, and Ukrainian, and likely knew some Yiddish.
At the age of 16, Janina was accepted into university to study under two of Europe’s leading mathematicians, earning a doctorate in 1928. It was at school that she met a fellow Jewish student, Henry Mehlberg. Mehlberg was a brilliant man who could be overbearing in conversation, turning everything into a heated discussion of ideas. Janina, however, was the perfect foil for him. She matched and bested him in debate, but in a disarming manner that drew him deeply in love with her. It was only a matter of time, then, before the couple married.
The couple’s idyllic life as teachers would not last forever. When the Nazis and Soviets invaded Poland in 1939, Lwow came under Soviet control. When two Russian officers came to confiscate their apartment, Janina greeted them in Russian, appealed to their love of literature and learning, and got them to leave without taking further action. Her strategies of managing outcomes was already at work.
Life under the Soviets was tough, including starving winters and four roundups of those deemed enemies of the Soviet state. However, Janina and Henry avoided deportation as they tried settling into their new normal. That all came undone in June of 1941, when the Nazis turned on the Soviets and took all of Poland.
The murdering of Jewish people began immediately, convenient scapegoats for everything the Nazis did not like. All Jews were ordered to wear the armband featuring the Star of David – marking them for persecution. In particular, the Nazis began hauling away men to concentration camps, and the Mehlbergs feared that Henry would be next.
About that time, the janitor of their apartment building turned out to be a Nazi collaborator, turning in Jews to the authorities. However, when the Ukrainian militia turned up at her apartment with the janitor, Janina said she was a visitor, and the Mehlbergs were not home. The janitor, who knew her well, corroborated her story and they left. Why did he not turn her in? Because Janina was kind to the man and had at one point helped his sick daughter get medical treatment. Here, she learned a strategy for later. Human kindness was a superpower.
Eventually, though, Ukrainian policemen showed up at their door in the middle of the night to drag Henry to a work camp. Janina followed them outside, trying to argue that he was a teacher and not fit for work. The policemen screamed for her to leave, but she refused. She stood silently in the policeman’s face and would not move, so he cracked her head with his rifle butt.
At that very moment, a German Wehrmacht officer happened to witness the assault. When he told a shaken Janina to go back inside, she still refused. Her courage and determination so impressed the officer that he had Henry assigned to a local bakery – a cushy job compared to the hard labor he would have otherwise faced. In this, she learned another strategy. Never, ever back down from a bully – even if it kills you.
After this, Janina and Henry knew they must try to escape Lwow. They decided to join their extended family in another town where Jews were not yet being forced into ghettos, and received word that Janina’s father was sending a horse-drawn carriage to collect them.
When it arrived, they opened the door to the surprise of an unexpected visitor. Count Andrzej (AHN-jay) Skrzynski (SK-SHIN-SKI), an old family friend, had come with an offer. In his company, he could get them to Lublin where he lived. And once there, he could give them false identities that would allow them to survive. And what identities did he propos?. Well, none other than the Count and Countess Sucholdolska, nobles of pure fiction.
Henry and Janina accepted his offer and found themselves en route to Lublin with the Count by train. After a couple of close calls during random searches, they arrived in Lublin. While the men went to retrieve the luggage, Janina stepped outside to call a cab. The Count returned alone, saying that Henry had been detained by German police, and that she should come along with him. Of course, Janina refused and instead ran back into the station. She found a German official berating Henry for bringing luggage from Lwow against regulation. She realized that if the official checked Henry’s papers and found him to be a Jew, he would be arrested.
Calling up every bit of her aristocratic training, Janina stepped in the front the official and denounced him with authority, arguing that it was not against regulation when they had left. The cowed official let the Mehlbergs leave without checking their papers or paying the required fine. This incident taught Janina a critical lesson about confronting malicious power. Later, she would record it this way.
“What do you do with your fear and trembling in a confrontation with a swaggering bully? You confine it to the small prison of your heart, letting none seep into the muscles of the eyes, hands, or legs. You quake within but show calm authority without – you pull off a hoax. You must not toady them. You must not let them sniff blood. Composure and coolness toward them implied the backing of power, and in the face of power they might very well shrink.”
She would employ this strategy over and over in her many confrontations with men who could send her to her death if they ever saw through the hoax. And she had to do it alone. Because Henry could be physically identified as a Jewish man due to his circumcision, he had to remain mostly at home to avoid random inspections from the Nazis.
The best thing for Janina’s safety was to do the same – to not draw attention to herself. Instead, she joined the Polish resistance. And why does she do this? When she realized that the Nazis intended to murder all Jews, she decided that she had no chance of surviving the war. And rather than hiding, she must use her false identity as a countess to do as much good for as many people as possible before the Nazis killed her.
Thereafter, every time she set foot in a Nazi office, arrived a Nazi guard post, or journeyed inside a Nazi camp, she expected those moments to be her last. With the acceptance of inevitable death, she was able to banish the fear into that “prison of the heart” and sell a hoax of “charming authority” to men who would see her dead.
[Transition Music]
Act 3: The Belly of the Beast
Now, let’s intercept Countess Janina’s story where we left it earlier. She has badgered a German concentration camp doctor into allowing her to bring in typhus inoculations to stem the outbreak at Majdanek. However, she decides that the RGO must do more. And so, Janina turns her attention toward getting as many Polish prisoners as possible freed from the camp.
She starts with the children. Under the extreme conditions of the camp, children are especially vulnerable. Lack of nutrition hollows them out quickly, allowing measles, mumps, and typhus to sweep through their numbers. In June, she manages to get 153 children released from the camp to the Lublin hospital under the argument of “let us take them off your hands.”
The authorities put up a fight, Janina refuses to let it go, and eventually, the children are released. Bolstered by her success, Janina decides to extract more people. So, Janina arranges a meeting with SS Major Hermann Höfle. Höfle is in charge of the logistics of moving Jewish people into the Lublin concentration camps where they can be systematically killed, and he will be ultimately responsible for organizing the murder of 1.5 million Jews. He is a true believer, a Nazi’s Nazi.
At the meeting, the Jewish woman disguised as a countess somehow manages to convince Höfle that many of the non-Jewish detainees at Majdanek are there by mistake, transferred there illegally from transit camps for those who had been expelled from their land. He even provides a list to her of those who can be released.
Shortly after, she receives a visit from an SS Sergeant who is a member of the resettlement commission. He flatly refuses to allow any releases from Majdanek. Armed with her knowledge of manipulating male power structures, Janina explains that the SS ordered the release and that she would be happy to call up Major Höfle so that the sergeant can explain to his superior why he was unwilling to comply with the Major’s order. The sergeant buckles immediately but says he does not have the personnel to handle the paperwork and transfer.
“Not to worry,” she tells him. “The RGO will handle everything.” Almost overnight, Janina organizes hundreds of people into a massive effort to handle the paperwork, move thousands of people from the camp to other housing, feed them, care for their medical needs, and obtain work for them.
Once the operation is ready, she goes to Majdanek to begin collecting the people on the list. To her dismay, nearly half of those on the list are already dead, and the first few to be released are barely able to stumble down the road the two kilometers from the work fields to the gate. Some fall dead in the road, so close to freedom.
Janina is dismayed as she realizes the expellees cannot make the long walk. And so, the RGO needs to drive the transport trucks into the massive camp to get them. Only the commandant, Hermann Florstedt, can authorize this. And he is highly annoyed with the persistent countess. Nevertheless, she cows the gate guards into letting her through and dashes to the camp headquarters without permission – a move that could get her shot. Florstedt is initially enraged to find the countess on his doorstep – again. However, she helps him understand that pleasing Major Höfle would be good for his career. In the end, he caves into her demands.
So, from the Majdanek camp headquarters, Janina calls the Red Cross, the fire department, several businesses, and an estate owner to assemble transport vehicles. Within two hours, a Dunkirk-style fleet trucks and horse-drawn wagons arrive inside the camp to begin accepting the expellees. Over the next four days, Janina oversees the release of 2100 sick and starving prisoners. Inside the camp, the word begins to spread among the inmates. The countess is at work on our behalf. And the countess can do anything. Nobody knows that she is Jewish.
And as we’ve seen, once Janina finds something that works, she keeps running that play again and again until it no longer works. She will continue to argue for the release of prisoners for the next year, with repeated success.
Meanwhile, her role in the underground resistance gets her involved in the organization of planned escapes where inmates being transported by rail overthrow their captors and flee. This soon puts her on the radar of the Gestapo.
During one high stakes meeting with Gestapo agents, Janina and two of her male comrades are effectively accused of aiding the resistance. When her associates freeze and appear ready to confess, Janina takes over. She traps the Gestapo agents in a mental logic puzzle by using their rules and loopholes against them. The frustrated agents leave without further problems, unable to trap the countess.
That very night, as she leaves the meeting with trembling hands, she is approached by a few men who have escaped a transport car at the Lublin train station. The explain that 450 men remain inside, and that they are illegally being taken to a work camp. So, she immediately appeals to the German authorities to release the men. This earns her another visit from the Gestapo. When they refuse to release all the prisoners, Janina says, “If you don’t give them all to me, I will go over your heads. I want every single one.” Once again, in the face of this indomitable little countess, the Gestapo folds.
In October of 1943, the camp commandant Florstedt is arrested for stealing supplies and is replaced. Janina takes advantage of the change of administration to argue that instead of dropping deliveries at the gate, they can take them into the camp to save the SS from the having to do the work. This allows her deeper and more frequent access to the camp. More importantly, it allows her to befriend even more guards. Remember the incident with the janitor? Janina certainly does.
Initially, she uses her countess persona to get the new commandant, Martin Melzer, to allow postcard deliveries with the argument “this will keep people from coming to your gate everyday asking about loved ones.” Melzer sees the logistical benefit and agrees. However, when Janina arrives with the first set of cards, Melzer’s underling, a nasty piece of work called Lieutenant Thumann, won’t accept the cards. He is a brutal man with a pathological hatred of Jews. But Janina cannot quit. She cannot let this terrible man win.
So, on October 15th, with typhus again raging in the camp, Janina takes an enormous risk. She makes an unannounced visit to the commandant, Melzer. There, she casually reports that Thumann appears to not be following Melzer’s orders regarding the postcards. Again, we see one of her best strategies at work. Get a superior to allow something and then appeal to military hierarchy by tattling when underlings don’t cooperate. “Why, they just aren’t following your orders, sir.”
Melzer calls Thumann into his office, humbles him, and orders that the postcard deliveries be allowed. Thumann is seething, but he complies. The countess, though, has earned a dangerous enemy.
It is then that Janina grabs for the brass ring. “Let us deliver soup to the sick inmates in infirmaries, as we are already delivering bread,” she says. Did I forget to mention that Janina had convinced the Nazis to allow them to bring thousands of kilos of bread per week into a Nazi concentration camp? Sorry, about that. She did.
Anyway, Melzer berates Janina for suggesting such a thing – helping enemies of the Reich by feeding them soup. Isn’t the bread enough? As usual, she refuses to back down and wears Melzer to a nub. Finally, he agrees that she may bring soup twice per week to the 800 sick Polish prisoners. As she leaves, though Melzer makes a veiled threat. “One can always gain entrance here,” he says, “but the exits may not be quite so obvious.” He wants Janina to know that at any time, he can make her an inmate. Janina already knows this, though. Every time she goes to the camp, she leaves her keys at the office along with instructions about what to do if she never returns.
This is the thing. Every time Janina confronts a Nazi official, every time she goes to a camp, she is absolutely terrified. But she locks that terror in her heart and goes anyway.
After getting permission to deliver soup, Janina gets all of Lublin to help in the operation and rounds up 50 25-liter milk cans from surrounding farms. On October 19th, she makes the first delivery to the gates of Majdanek. The murderous Thumann meets her there, and he is irate, threatening to kill her. “I have permission,” she calmly explains. “From you superior.” Again, Thumann is forced to relent and tells her to come back the next day to get the empty cans.
Shortly after, Janina has false bottoms put into the milk cans for hiding messages and medicine and then makes a big deal to several of the inmates that they should “scrub the bottoms of the cans more thoroughly” before returning them. She says this right in front of the SS guards. If she is caught smuggling, she will be killed. But she doesn’t get caught.
Next, Janina gets permission to take the trucks directly to the work fields instead of unloading at the gate, again, with the logic that it will save the guards the work. She begins bringing along an attractive young woman called Hanka Huskowska – to distract the guards so she can pass along whispered messages to the inmates at the fields. When she realizes that the SS aren’t checking the quantity of soup, she increases it a little at a time.
All is going well until the night of November 3rd, 1943. That night, the sound of persistent gunfire emanates from the camp. The next morning, she learns the awful truth. The remaining Jews in the camp are being murdered en masse. When she eventually gets access to the camp gate again, one of the guards she has befriended tells her the awful truth. The SS has murdered and burned 18,000 Jews in response to ongoing Jewish resistance in Warsaw, a mass breakout from Treblinka, and violence in the Lithuanian Jewish ghettos.
Janina is saddled with immense dejection and guilt. Regardless of those she has saved so far, she had been powerless to help her own people. However, she cannot quit. After all, she is still breathing and her countess ruse is holding. She has some level of power, and she must use it for good.
When Melzer is replaced by a new commandant called Weiss, Janina uses the change of administration to increase the soup deliveries to three days per week. Then she requests that a Christmas feast be brought into the camp. Weiss resists, she wears him down, and he agrees. She continues to use the false bottoms to smuggle in medicines for the sick prisoners and even smuggles in a pneumothorax machine right beneath the noses of the SS guards.
By January, she is delivering 21,000 kilograms of bread, 5400 liters of soup, and 6000 rolls every week to the camp. But the Gestapo is again getting suspicious and even conduct a surprise inspection of her office. She lies her way out of trouble with calm, charming authority, so they try to entrap her in a sting operation. She senses the danger, and the trap fails. With the Gestapo on her back, rather than pulling back, Janina goes right back to Majdanek and wrangles Weiss into allowing deliveries five days per week.
By Easter of 1944, the Soviet Red Army is advancing into Poland, so Majdanek is being evacuated of prisoners, sent west on trains. In the chaos, Janina convinces Weiss to let her supply each prisoner with a travel ration – a few days worth of food. When she makes the food delivery, Thumann rides up on a horse and again threatens to kill her. But he does not search the food rations. And thus, he does not find the rudimentary weapons hidden in them.
As the camp empties, Janina goes into overdrive, organizing the release of more and more prisoners to the RGO. When the Germans finally leave the city as the Russians close in, they leave behind the corpses of prisoners at a nearby castle prison, gunned down by the departing soldiers. When Janina hears about the massacre, she rushes to the prison. On arriving outside the castle, she is told that it is booby trapped and to not go inside. She, of course, goes inside. There, she finds a few men still alive and organizes a medical rescue mission.
Majdanek is liberated by the Soviets on July 25th, 1944. Because the Soviets consider the Polish resistance a danger to the state, Janina must hide her affiliation with the underground while planning an escape from Poland for her and Henry. However, due to her reputation, the new government names her to a governing board of a social welfare organization. She is assigned the task of caring for the 169,000 Polish orphans under the age of 3. As the new government begins enacting new discrimination laws against Jews, she is forced to keep her secret identity while her husband takes a job elsewhere.
In 1948, Henry makes it to New York, but Janina can’t get away from Poland. After waiting for her for a year, he decides to go back. When she learns of his planned return, Janina somehow gets to East Germany, obtains a VISA at the Canadian Mission in Berlin, and escapes to Toronto. It took her nine days to get from the Polish border to Berlin. She never explains how she did it.
The couple moves to the US in 1956 and become citizens in 1961. She goes by Janina Mehlberg, keeping the fictional first name as a nod to her former life. In the US, she becomes a beloved math professor at Illinois Institute of Technology. And she keeps the secret of what she did in the war – never telling anyone about that extraordinary part of her life.
It is only in the late 1960s that she decides to write down her memoir in response to a growing narrative about the Jews – that they had been helpless victims who did not resist their enemies. Janina knew better. The Jewish population of Poland resisted viciously against the Nazis and nearly succeeded in throwing them out of Warsaw during the summer of 1944.
After Janina dies in 1969, Henry passes on the memoir to an English professor, who passes it along to others. And finally, in 2024, her story became a book: The Counterfeit Countess.
In telling Janina’s story, I had to leave out so much. It would have required a three-hour episode to do her story justice. However, I want you to hold on to perhaps the most important legacy of Pepi Spinner, AKA Janina Sucholdolska, AKA Janina Mehlberg. Over the course of two years, she pretended to be a countess and repeatedly confronted an unbeatable power that would have killed her on the spot had they known the truth of her identity. In doing so, she became a unique story of World War II – a Jew who saved non-Jews, by the thousands. Her efforts resulted in the release of nearly 10,000 prisoners, and her food and medical deliveries kept alive untold thousands more.
Her secret weapons? Not a longbow. Not a killing instrument at all. But instead, deep empathy, astonishing courage, and the willingness to die to help as many people as she could. And today, eighty years after her incredible acts, she whispers into our ears, encouraging us to do the same. Lock away your fear. Stand up to bullies. And do what is right no matter the cost.
And that, my friends, is the story.
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If you want to learn more, I recommend the aforementioned book The Counterfeit Countess by Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Silwa. There were the last in the line of custody Janina Mehlberg’s manuscript and conducted extensive research to prove not only that the manuscript was true, but that Janina did more in reality than what she wrote about. In any case, this should be a movie.
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Thank you for listening to this episode of Plot Twisted History. I have been your host, David Nix. If you found this podcast interesting, you can help expand its reach by leaving a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice. And please, recommend this podcast to others who might find it interesting.
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And so, until we meet again, may your story hold surprises and your plots be slightly twisted.