Vladka Meed

Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Fighter

Meed was born Feigele Peltel, (Dec 21, 1921-Nov 24, 2012) in Warsaw, Poland. The oldest daughter of Shlomo and Hanna Peltel, she had two younger siblings: a sister Hania and a brother Chaim, and an older sister Henia. Feigele graduated Yiddish Folkshul, a secular school that taught all the subjects in Yiddish. As a young person, Vladka was active in the Zukunft, the youth organization of the Jewish socialist-democratic party founded in 1897 to advocate the teaching of Yiddish language and culture and secular Jewish nationalism.

In October 1940, German occupying officials decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, consequently confining 400,000 people to just 1.3 miles of the city. The German authorities sealed off the ghetto from the rest of the city in November 1940. A wall of over 10 feet high topped with barbed wire enclosed the ghetto; guards prevented movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.

Vladka’s family had to sell many of their possessions just to afford food. Both daughters worked in factories; Vladka was a machine operator sewing Nazi uniforms. Her father died of untreated pneumonia in the ghetto in 1940. In the mass deportations from July to September 1942, the Nazis transported her mother Hanna, her married sister Henia, and her 13 year old brother to Treblinka and murdered them.

Vladka channeled her grief into fighting the Nazis, operating as a courier on both sides of the wall, bringing in supplies for the resistance and smuggling intelligence and children out of the ghetto. She had learned to speak fluent Polish from her younger sister who attended public Polish school. This proficiency in Polish undoubtedly contributed to her survival. Due to her fair complexion, she was able to operate outside of the ghetto disguised as a Polish woman. It was often easier for women to pass as a gentile (non-Jew) on the Aryan side of the city. In an interview in 1983 Vladka said: "If a man in the underground went on a mission, he could be recognized as a Jew by his circumcision. A woman's body might be searched, but it could not give that information." As couriers/smugglers, this meant that a woman’s true religious identity could not be revealed by their physical body.

 Vladka would bribe guards and use secret passages to sneak in and out of the ghetto. She smuggled weapons and dynamite into the ghetto to support the resistance. Just as important, she smuggled information from the Underground to the Polish resistance and the allies, including the first reports that the Nazis killed nearly everyone who they deported to Treblinka on arrival.

Vladka faced many dangers. For example, once when the work party she was in was laboring outside the ghetto, she carried one of the first maps of the Treblinka death camp. Guards randomly singled her out for inspection in a guard shack. They asked her to undress and remove her shoes. A well timed distraction allowed her to escape and the map went undetected. That same day she met Benjamin Miedzyrzecki (later shortened to Meed), whom she later recruited to work for the resistance, and they fell in love even in their harrowing circumstances.

When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began, Vladka was still outside the ghetto disguised as a Pole. She was able to contact the uprising leaders and tried to rally other resistance groups outside the ghetto. The Nazis arrested Abraham Blum and Vladka, and although she was able to escape, Blum was murdered by the Gestapo.

After 27 days of fighting block by block in the ghetto, the Nazis began burning the ghetto to the ground. On May 16, they blew up the Great Synagogue of Warsaw. In the months that followed, Vladka and Ben worked to extricate fighters hiding in bunkers or in places outside the ghetto. They provided money and provisions to Jews in hiding, to partisan units, and to resistance cells in camps and ghettos across Poland. 

In August 1944, Vladka fought alongside Poles in the Polish Uprising in Warsaw, a two-month battle between the Polish Home Army and the Germans. Vladka, Ben, and his parents survived in a small village disguised as Christians for the remaining few months of the war.

A series of 27 articles Vladka wrote for the Yiddish Daily Forward became one of the earliest chronicles of the Holocaust. In 1948, she published a book, On Both Sides of the Wall, which was one of the first eyewitness accounts (translated from Yiddish in 1972) and became the central source for the 2001 television movie “Uprising.”

Vladka and Benjamin had two children and five grandchildren. They were founders of the American Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, were involved in the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and created numerous educational, remembrance, and survivor resource organizations.  As vice president of the JLC, Vladka ran the Yiddish Cultural and Welfare Department for many years and was responsible for a filmstrip and an exhibit on the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. For about ten years, she served as the JLC’s Yiddish-language commentator on a weekly program on WEVD, the Yiddish radio station in New York.

Vladka was also a leader in the effort to create a Holocaust memorial in Battery Park in lower Manhattan in the 1960s. Although the project was ultimately unsuccessful, she was instrumental in having the renowned architect Louis Kahn design a memorial sculpture for the site. She was the chairperson of cultural events for the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, held in Jerusalem in 1981, as well as the group’s second meeting in Washington, D.C. in 1983. In 1985, she initiated – and for many years directed – the annual American Teachers’ Seminars on the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance, which take place in Poland and Israel. She also coordinated the biennial Alumni Teachers Conferences, co-sponsored by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Vladka received many honors and awards, including the 1973 award of the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (WAGRO), the 1989 Morim (Teachers) Award of the Jewish Teachers’ Association, the 1993 Hadassah Henrietta Szold Award, and the 1995 Elie Wiesel Remembrance Award. She received a Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causa from Hebrew Union College in 1998, as well as a similar degree from Bar Ilan University in Israel.

For all the valor Vladka saw among the resistance fighters, in her testimony it was her mother, and other mothers, she wanted to honor.

“We talk about uprising. We talk about resistance. …But about these simple, quiet, and dedicated souls we give very little attention. And I think history has to see them a little bit more sharp, as they were.”

US Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Benjamin (Międzyrzecki) Meed