December 29: The Ghetto Courier

Vladka Meed (Feigele Peltel), who was active in the Warsaw Ghetto underground from its earliest days while living on the “Aryan” side of the Ghetto wall, was born in Warsaw on this date in 1921. Active in Zukunft, an anti-Zionist Bundist youth group, and educated in the Yiddish shule system, she was fluent in Polish and used this to become an underground courier for the Jewish Fighting Organization, feeding them supplies, money, and weaponry, including dynamite, while also helping Jewish children to escape the ghetto for Christian homes. Her own parents and siblings all died in the course of the Holocaust. Vladka met her husband, Benjamin Meed, in the Warsaw underground, and with him helped to establish the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in the 1980s and to campaign for Holocaust education for children. Her book, On Both Sides of the Wall, was first published in Yiddish by the Workmen’s Circle in 1948, and has since been translated into English, Hebrew, Spanish, Japanese, and German. She died in November, 2012 at age 90.
“There was very little left to fear.” —Vladka Meed