Smuggled weapons into Warsaw Ghetto
Wrote of destruction of Jewish community
Vladka Meed worked as a courier for the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto. She smuggled in pistols, gas and dynamite, which were used in the doomed uprising of 1943 — when lightly armed fighters emerged from the sewers and alleyways to challenge the forces of the Third Reich.
Meed, who had Alzheimer’s disease, died Wednesday in Phoenix at the age of 90.
The Germans established the ghetto in October 1940, herding some 400,000 Jews — 30 per cent of Warsaw’s entire population — into a 2.6-square-kilometre zone surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire. Over the next two years, 100,000 Jewish inmates, including Meed’s father, succumbed to disease, starvation or random killings.
Meed was born Feigele Peltel on Dec. 29, 1921, and was still a teenager when she and her family were frogmarched into the ghetto. She recalled that despite all the suffering, ghetto life was rich with clandestine cultural activities.
“Some just refused to commit suicide, continued to educate their children in secret, celebrated their holidays,” she wrote in On Both Sides of the Wall (1948), one of the first major eyewitness accounts of the destruction of Warsaw’s prewar Jewish community.
She witnessed the deportations that took place between July and September 1942, when between 250,000 and 300,000 ghetto residents were sent to their deaths in Treblinka, including her mother, 13-yearold brother and married sister.
At first no one knew the fate of the deportees: “Nobody imagined any gas chambers. They thought they were going away to work,” she recalled.
Feigele Peltel survived because, due to a labour shortage, she was allowed to leave the ghetto to work in a tailor’s shop sewing Nazi uniforms. But as news began to arrive of the true fate of the deportees, she joined the Jewish Combat Organization and assumed the personality of Vladka Meed, an ethnic Pole, so that she could move freely on the Christian side of the wall. With her light-coloured hair and Aryan features, she was able to maintain the pretence for almost three years.
For the next few months Meed bought black-market weapons and ammunition, paid for with rings, watches and other valuables, and she smuggled them into the ghetto.
Meed observed the uprising from relative safety outside the ghetto. The fighting lasted for 28 days during which the bullets and improvised bombs of the Jews were met by machine guns, tanks and flame throwers. The rebellion ended in the complete destruction of the ghetto.
After the uprising, Meed continued to work for the underground. In 1944, she married Benjamin Miedzyrzeck, another member of the Jewish resistance. They remained in Poland until the Russians liberated the country toward the end of the war. In 1946, they boarded a boat to New York.
In the U.S., they changed their name to Meed and Benjamin founded an import-export business. They also took a leading role in helping survivors and in efforts to educate children about the Holocaust. They were instrumental in founding the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization and the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
Meed’s husband died in 2006, and she is survived by their son and daughter.