Seats available. Doors open at 6:45 p.m. 

Elizabeth White and Joanna Sliwa’s The Counterfeit Countess recounts the incredible true story of Dr. Josephine Janina Mehlberg, a Jewish mathematician who saved more than 10,000 lives in Nazi-occupied Poland. Drawn from Mehlberg’s unpublished memoir and a broad range of historical research, it details her remarkable masquerade as a Polish aristocrat who secretly served as a resistance member and humanitarian.

Dr. Elizabeth White recently retired from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she served as historian and as research director at the institution’s Center for the Prevention of Genocide. She formerly worked at the US Department of Justice on investigations and prosecutions of Nazi criminals and other human rights violators, as deputy director and chief historian of the Office of Special Investigations, and as deputy chief and chief historian of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section. Her many works include German Influence in the Argentine Army, 1900-1945, as well as numerous articles about the Holocaust.

A historian and administrator at the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Dr. Joanna Sliwa previously worked at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and at the Museum of Jewish Heritage. She taught Holocaust and Jewish history at Kean University and at Rutgers University, and has been a historical consultant and researcher for academic texts, websites, TV programs, exhibits, and films, including the PBS documentary In the Name of Their Mothers: The Story of Irena Sendler. Her book Jewish Childhood in Kraków: A Microhistory of the Holocaust won the 2020 Ernst Fraenkel Prize from the Wiener Holocaust Library.

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Books will be available for purchase at the library on event night.
A book signing will follow the presentation.
Books provided by Uncle Bobbie's Coffee and Books

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