Vladka Meed (1921–2012)

Vladka Meed was the pseudonym of Feigele or Fagele Peltel, born to a Jewish family in Warsaw, Poland. She was a teenager when the German invasion of Poland in World War II began. She belonged to the Zukunft, the youth movement of the Jewish socialist-democratic party, and joined the Jewish underground. She adopted the nom de guerre Vladka Meed when she was assigned to work as a courier to the non-Jewish side of the city. She smuggled weapons, provisions, and money into the Ghetto and helped smuggle Jewish children out to be sheltered in Polish rescuer homes. Her father died in the Warsaw Ghetto, and her mother, sister Henia, and brother Chaim were all killed at Treblinka. Vladka survived, and shortly after the war, she married another survivor, Benjamin (Czeslaw) Miedzyrzecki, later known as Ben Meed, with whom she emigrated to the USA in 1946. The couple had two children. Mrs. Meed became a public speaker on the Holocaust, and together with her husband, was an impassioned leader in Holocaust education. Her memoir, On Both Sides of the Wall, was originally published in Yiddish in New York in 1948, and in English in 1972. The 1993 English-language edition contains an epilogue entitled, "33 Years Later," which describes her first return visit to Poland.