![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landofnowhereNettle and Bone, T. Kingfisher. I found this dark fairy tale satisfying and atmospheric, but didn't super stick with me. Some really great worldbuilding elements, though.
The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust, Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa. So a colleague caught my attention by say "I got a book about a woman mathematician at Costco". Which is accurate -- Josephine Mehlberg's mathematical career, in Poland before WWII and in the US afterwards would have been interesting enough to me -- but the book focuses on what she did during the war years, while living under false papers as "Countess Janina Suchodolska", which is truly fascinating. Having decided that saving her own life and her husband's was not enough, "Janina" decided, rather than wait out the war as a Jew in hiding, to brazen it out and not only joined a resistance movement, but also a took a major role in a social welfare organization and helped maneuver it into a position to provide food and other aid to the prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp, and then use that aid as a cover for smuggling and passing messages for the resistance. (Officially they were only allowed to aid the non-Jewish Polish prisoners, though Janina tried and hoped to aid all in the camp, including the Jews.)
The book is substantially based on Janina's unpublished memoir, but the authors did an impressive research job of corroborating the memoir and fleshing out the story using other sources. They generally do a good job of providing the often depressing historical context, which I didn't know as much as I'd like -- it wasn't a good time to be anyone in Poland during WWII, but especially not to be a Jew. I do wish it had provided more context as to what the social status of countesses was at the time. Janina's masquerade as a countess is a bit less stunning given that she had a childhood as landed gentry before her father lost his life and lands during WWI, and then went on to live among the intellectual elite in the interwar period (though her career prospects were limited as a woman and Jew).
There are some extremely dramatic sequences (often taken from Janina's memoir), though other parts drag a bit more, I would say due to the "banality of good" -- Janina rescued many people by convincing the Nazis to let her organization take those prisoners unfit for labor off their hands, but this isn't something she even mentions in her memoir. The authors remark that Janina "displayed no heroic tendencies before the war", which I find in some respects true and inspiring, that she could go from being an ordinary intellectual in her thirties to saving thousands of lives -- but I also want to question what "heroic tendencies" are and whether she really displayed none of them. (I also wonder whether being a high school math teacher is better preparation for being a humanitarian countess than one might think?)
Recomended if you can handle the depressingness of the setting and want to read about an amazingly competent woman doing good in very dark times.
The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust, Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa. So a colleague caught my attention by say "I got a book about a woman mathematician at Costco". Which is accurate -- Josephine Mehlberg's mathematical career, in Poland before WWII and in the US afterwards would have been interesting enough to me -- but the book focuses on what she did during the war years, while living under false papers as "Countess Janina Suchodolska", which is truly fascinating. Having decided that saving her own life and her husband's was not enough, "Janina" decided, rather than wait out the war as a Jew in hiding, to brazen it out and not only joined a resistance movement, but also a took a major role in a social welfare organization and helped maneuver it into a position to provide food and other aid to the prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp, and then use that aid as a cover for smuggling and passing messages for the resistance. (Officially they were only allowed to aid the non-Jewish Polish prisoners, though Janina tried and hoped to aid all in the camp, including the Jews.)
The book is substantially based on Janina's unpublished memoir, but the authors did an impressive research job of corroborating the memoir and fleshing out the story using other sources. They generally do a good job of providing the often depressing historical context, which I didn't know as much as I'd like -- it wasn't a good time to be anyone in Poland during WWII, but especially not to be a Jew. I do wish it had provided more context as to what the social status of countesses was at the time. Janina's masquerade as a countess is a bit less stunning given that she had a childhood as landed gentry before her father lost his life and lands during WWI, and then went on to live among the intellectual elite in the interwar period (though her career prospects were limited as a woman and Jew).
There are some extremely dramatic sequences (often taken from Janina's memoir), though other parts drag a bit more, I would say due to the "banality of good" -- Janina rescued many people by convincing the Nazis to let her organization take those prisoners unfit for labor off their hands, but this isn't something she even mentions in her memoir. The authors remark that Janina "displayed no heroic tendencies before the war", which I find in some respects true and inspiring, that she could go from being an ordinary intellectual in her thirties to saving thousands of lives -- but I also want to question what "heroic tendencies" are and whether she really displayed none of them. (I also wonder whether being a high school math teacher is better preparation for being a humanitarian countess than one might think?)
Recomended if you can handle the depressingness of the setting and want to read about an amazingly competent woman doing good in very dark times.
Re: 'Heroic tendencies'
Date: 28 Mar 2024 12:55 (UTC)