Counterfeit Poles

What if survival depended on becoming someone else?

In Counterfeit Poles: A Story of Survival Under Nazi Occupation, Nathan Drew recounts how he and his wife Helen stayed alive in occupied Poland by posing as Christians, moving through Warsaw with forged identities while working with the underground and living one mistake away from death. The memoir begins with the destruction of Jewish life in Łomża and follows Nathan through terror, escape, false papers, betrayal, hunger, and the daily calculations required to survive in Nazi-controlled Europe. The book also preserves his determination to name the dead and remember them not as statistics, but as people.

But this is more than a wartime memoir. Alongside Nathan’s account are family letters preserved by Ruth Simon, a sister who had left Poland before the war and later received the telegram no one thought would ever come: “we [are] alive.” Those letters, written before, during, and after the Holocaust, restore the humor, worries, ambitions, and grief of a family shattered by history.

For readers of Holocaust memoir, Jewish history, and World War II survival narratives, Counterfeit Poles is a rare and unforgettable record of courage, loss, and the fight to remain human when everything human was under attack.