FAKE ARISTOCRAT WHO HOODWINKED THE NAZIS

AMID THE barbed wire, gas chambers and shooting pits of the horrific Majdanek concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, Countess Janina Suchodolska was a surprising yet frequent visitor in 1942.

- Peter Sheridan

A pretty brunette with blue-green eyes, an aristocratic air and the authority derived from generations of nobility, she made demands of the camp's commandant and guards, SS officers and Gestapo as if she owned the place.

She brought food, medicine and hope to the camp that held 23,000 starving prisoners dying of disease with no running water, open latrines and contaminated wells showered with ashes from the crematorium burning the relentless flow of bodies.

Barely 5ft 1in tall, she risked her life standing up to Nazi murderers, while secretly ferrying messages and supplies to imprisoned members of the Polish resistance, and smuggling in tools to aid escapes.

Yet it was all a dangerous act.

"She was not a countess at all," reveals Elizabeth White, co-author of the gripping new book The Counterfeit Countess. "She was unique: a Jew who saved thousands of nonJews from the Nazis." Oskar Schindler famously saved 1,200 of his Jewish factory workers from the Holocaust, immortalised in Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List, but the numbers he rescued were dwarfed by those saved by the woman claiming to be a countess.

"It's one of the most remarkable, selfless acts of heroism of the Second World War, yet astonishingly her story has never been told before," says the book's co-author, Polish Holocaust expert Joanna Sliwa.

"Her real name was Janina Spinner Mehlberg, a brilliant mathematician, an officer in the underground Polish Home Army, and a Jew. She was a charismatic woman who hid her fear as she confronted the Nazis." Born in 1905, she worked as a maths lecturer in Lvov until she and her husband, who taught philosophy, managed to escape the Jewish ghetto following the Nazi invasion and occupation. Assuming non-Jewish identities in Lublin, they lay low.