After EB White delivered an academic conference paper on Majdanek, a Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, an American history professor from the University of Florida approached her with a carbon copy of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlber’s unpublished memoir.

In the memoir, Mehlberg, a Jewish mathematician, claims to have delivered food for thousands of prisoners at Majdanek and to have smuggled supplies and messages to members of the resistance imprisoned in the camp, all while pretending to be Countess Suchodolska, a Polish Christian aristocrat.

Mehlberg’s husband had given the memoir to the University of Florida professor [when?]in hopes of getting it published, but efforts had failed, and both Mehlbergs had died.

Publishers previously said, “It’s an interesting story, but the experiences of one Jewish woman Holocaust survivor don’t make a compelling case for publication.”

Despite being an expert on the Majdanek concentration camp, White didn’t believe she was the right person to tell Mehlberg’s story since she didn’t know Polish, so she held onto it for decades.

“I knew that copies of the memoir were in some archives, so I figured another historian would find it and do something with it,” White said. “The story haunted me, and I started worrying that maybe I had a responsibility to it.”

In 2017, White was working at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and had access to its resources and archives. White began investigating Mehlberg’s memoir and other resources and was able to verify Mehlberg’s identity.

“She had survived the Holocaust in Poland under the false identity of this countess, and she’d used it to become a very prominent official of a Polish relief organization in the city of Lublin and also an officer in the Polish underground,” White said.

When White began the process of confirming Mehlberg’s tale, she sent the memoir to Joanna Sliwa, an expert on the Holocaust in Poland.

White detailed how this was the beginning of a massive undertaking. “We ended up doing research in archives and databases and libraries and through contacts in 10 countries on four continents.”

Through this research, White and Silwa discovered not only that the extraordinary tale was true, but Mehlberg’s life before, during, and after the war was even more remarkable than Mehlberg had told.

At the age of twenty-two, Mehlberg had broken the glass ceiling and earned a PhD in Poland. By the 1960s, she was a tenured full professor of mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

“There were practically no tenured women mathematicians at that time,” White said.

Going back to their research, the next step was to for White and Silwa to determine what to do with the story. They agreed that if the memoir were published on its own, modern audiences might not be able to understand it fully. Commentary would need to be added to explain the context of the memoir’s events and to recount Mehlberg’s other remarkable accomplishments before, during, and after the war.

White sent her and Sliwa’s idea to Debbie Cenziper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction author, who advised them to take a different approach.

“We wanted to make Janina’s story accessible to as broad a readership as possible,” White said. “So, we decided to write her story as a non-fiction narrative of her whole life.”

White wrote another description of the project, which got them their agent, Joelle Delbourgo, who then taught them how to write a book proposal.

The proposal resulted in two publisher offers, one of which was from Simon & Schuster.

With a publisher deal in hand, the duo undertook additional research beyond what had already been conducted.

They reviewed thousands of pages of wartime records, including from Majdanek.“We pored over photographs and maps from the era,” White said. “We reviewed scores, if not hundreds, of accounts of people who experienced the same events, like former Majdanek prisoners and guards, people who worked with her.”

The journey even took White and Silwa to Poland, to the Majdanek concentration camp, to walk in Mehlberg’s steps. They spent time seeing where she lived and worked—walked the same path the sick and starved prisoners took to exit the camp.

“I couldn’t have written the story the way I did without doing that,” White said.

White recollected one of the most emotional moments in the memoir as being when Mehlberg met and helped Izio, a young Jewish boy in Majdanek. Mehlberg was even able to get messages from his mother—who residedin another part of the camp—to him.

Mehlberg had so much hope that she would be able to deliver and smuggle enough supplies to stave off starvation not just for Polish prisoners, but for the Jewish ones as well.

“Reading this as a historian of Majdanek, I knew what was about to happen,” said White. “On November 3rd, 1943, the SS shot all the remaining 18,000 Jews in Lublin at Majdanek. And when Janina was finally able to get back into the camp after this massacre, her first question was, “Where is Izio?” And she was told, “He’s gone. They’re all gone.”

After knowing what happened to her people, Mehlberg continued to go into the concentration camp, knowing that she would be tortured and killed if either her smuggling or her identity were discovered.

“She was not fearless. She was determined,” White stated. 

Once they had concluded their thorough research, White began to write the narrative. Before each chapter, White would pour over all the notes to triangulate the information and step into Mehlberg’s brain and feelings.

It began with the prologue, which set the stage for the story by depicting one of Mehlberg’s heroic feats in 1943, when she won the release of over 2,000 prisoners from Majdanek. It concluded with the last few pages from Mehlberg’s memoir, so that the narrative of Mehlberg’s life could end in her own words.

“The memoir isn’t chronological. It’s more a collection of topics and vignettes with many digressions, and she rarely specifies when something happened,” White said. “She was also very economical in her descriptions and not forthcoming about her feelings, especially as a Jewish woman witnessing the destruction of her people.”

Piecing the story together took incredible and resilient effort to match up pieces from the memoir to recorded historical events.

When holes arose, White leaned on her imagination, a tool that she permitted herself to use after reading books such as “Ghetto Girls” by Judy Batalion.

White stated, “It was imagination that was thoroughly grounded in very rigorous analysis of the sources.”

When leaning on her imagination, White appreciated having Silwa as a co-author because it allowed her to bounce her ideas around to ensure each word was presented most accurately.

They went back and forth until they both agreed.

Throughout this journey, White stayed as determined as Mehlberg and never once thought about giving up.

“We still look for more information,” White said. “We’re obsessed with this.”

White and Silwa’s goal was to honor Mehlberg’s life through sharing her story, but there are many ways we can continue to honor her and other survivors.

“Follow her example in terms of her compassion and her empathy,” White says,
“She wrote very movingly about the terrible choices that the war forced people to make between being true to their values and surviving and she decided not to judge, but to approach each person as a fellow human and to help them if they were suffering.”

White offered a piece of advice for anyone who wants to write nonfiction.

“Find something that you think might make an interesting story, but don’t go in with a preconceived notion about what that story is,” “Be as thorough as you possibly can with the research and then… trust the facts to guide you through the story.”