MEED, VLADKA

MEED, VLADKA (1921– ), World War II resistance fighter and educator. Born Feyge Pelte in Praga (Warsaw district), Poland, she joined the youth arm of the Jewish Labor Bund at age 14 and was thereafter active in its activities through the time of the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto. She then joined the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) when it was formed after the great deportations of the summer of 1942, when more than 265,000 Jews were shipped from Warsaw to Treblinka. Because of her flawless Polish and red hair, Meed could pass as non-Jewish. She worked as a courier, smuggling arms into the ghetto and helping children escape out of it. Meed's mother and brother were among those who were deported. She recalled: "There was very little left to fear … I was depressed and apathetic." However, despair gave way to fierce determination after she heard Abrasha Blum, a member of the Jewish Coordinating Committee that sought to unite the diverse political factions of the ghetto, give a rousing speech calling for armed resistance. As a courier she used the name Vladka, a name she kept even in freedom. Among her most important missions was to smuggle a map of the death camp of Treblinka out of the ghetto in the hope that solid information about the killing would spur a serious response in the West. She brought dynamite into the ghetto, which required not only courage, but also money to "grease" the path in and out. After the Ghetto Uprising she continued supplying money and papers for Jews in hiding. In her writings she alludes to the loneliness and pressure of her double life only in passing: "You can be my friend," she said to Benjamin Miedzyrzecki (Meed), who was also passing as an Aryan and who would later become her husband, "because if I don't come back, I want someone to care that I am missing." She married Benjamin Meed in 1943 and was the only member of her family to survive the Shoah. Immediately upon arrival in the United States in 1946, Meed traveled extensively as a living eyewitness to the Uprising. In 1948 she published "On Both Sides of the Wall," in Yiddish, one of the earliest accounts of the Ghetto Uprising and still one of the most compelling. When her husband, Benjamin Meed, assumed leadership of the survivor community, Vladka Meed organized a teacher training program, co-sponsored by the jewish labor committee and the american gathering of jewish holocaust survivors , one of the earliest such programs that took American teachers from the public school system and brought them to Poland and Israel to experience a Seminar on the Holocaust and Resistance. For almost 20 years, she unfailingly led the mission, which was suspended during the Intifada and resumed in 2005. Meed helped produce a dedicated and informed cadre of teachers throughout the United States. Central to this program were the direct testimonies of survivors, none more impressive than Vladka Meed's. (Michael Berenbaum (2nd ed.)