White

In 1989, historian Elizabeth ”Barry” White unexpectedly received the unpublished memoir of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg, a math professor at Illinois Institute of Technology who had died twenty years earlier. The memoir contained a startling revelation: Mehlberg, a Jew, had survived the Holocaust by posing as the Christian Countess Janina Suchodolska in Lublin, Poland. As an official of a Polish welfare organization and an officer in the Underground Polish Home Army, she saved the lives of untold numbers of Polish prisoners at Majdanek Concentration Camp. 

Barry found the memoir’s claims so astonishing that she doubted they were true. How could  a Jewish woman have won permission from SS and Nazi authorities to deliver food and medicines – even decorated Christmas trees — to prisoners at Majdanek, where 63,000 Jews were murdered in gas chambers and shooting pits? How could she have dared to use those deliveries as cover for smuggling supplies to resistance members in the camp? 

Then a mother of young children and a “Nazi hunter” for the U.S. Department of Justice, Barry lacked the time and resources to investigate the claims, particularly as she did not know Polish. Nearly thirty years later, Barry teamed with historian Joanna Sliwa to uncover the truth about Mehlberg. Through research in 35 archives in 6 countries, they not only confirmed Mehlberg’s claims but discovered that her accomplishments were even more astonishing than her memoir reveals. Their biography of Mehlberg, The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles during the Holocaust, (Simon and Schuster, January 2024). 

Barry earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia. From 1983 to 2010, she worked for the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, becoming Deputy Director and Chief Historian, then served as Deputy Chief and Chief Historian of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section. For both offices, she directed research to investigate and prosecute Nazi criminals and other human rights violators. From 2012 to 2015, she was Research Director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide. Currently, she works for the Museum’s Senior Historian office as an expert on the Holocaust, World War II, post-Holocaust genocides, and international justice. 

Barry has authored German Influence in the Argentine Army, 1900-1945 (Garland, 1991) as well as articles, official reports, and papers on such topics as SS crimes, U.S. intelligence postwar employment of Nazi criminals, and U.S. government efforts to deny safe haven to human rights violators. Her findings for the State Department that gold looted from Nazi victims — including gold teeth — was distributed to European central banks after the war led to the establishment of an international assistance fund for Holocaust survivors. She has given numerous public talks and interviews on the Holocaust, genocide prevention, and the quest for justice for Nazi crimes. For more:  www.ElizabethBWhite.com.