Vladka Meed, born Feigele Peltel, was just a teenager when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. Increasingly devastated by the deportation and murder of 300,000 Jews—including her mother, brother, and sister—who were sent from Warsaw to the death camp of Treblinka, she heeded the call for armed resistance, joining the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), established in Warsaw in July 1942.
With her typically “Aryan” looks and fluency in Polish, Vladka could pose as a Gentile, so the ZOB asked her to live on the Aryan side of the wall and serve as a courier. In this role, she smuggled weapons across the wall, helped Jewish children escape from the Ghetto, assisted Jews hiding in the city, and established contact with both Jews in the labor camps and the partisans in the forest.
Her book, On Both Sides of the Wall, first published in Yiddish in 1948, was based on a series of 27 articles Vladka wrote in the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) in 1946–47. In 2026, Vladka's son, Dr. Steven D. Meed, released a revised translation of the book.
Dr. Meed will discuss his mother's life and writings with his wife Dr. Rita Meed and Dr. Avinoam Patt, the Maurice and Corinne Greenberg Professor of Holocaust Studies at New York University.