Courier for Jewish resistance
Published eyewitness account of life, and death, in Warsaw’s ghetto
Vladka Meed, who has died aged 90, worked as a courier for the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto. She smuggled in pistols, gas and dynamite that 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.
The Germans established the ghetto in October 1940, herding some 400,000 Jews — 30 per cent of Warsaw’s entire population — into a one-square-mile zone surrounded by a high wall topped with barbed wire.
Over the next two years, 100,000 Jewish inmates, including Vladka’s father, succumbed to disease, starvation or random killings. Individual food rations amounted to less than 200 calories a day and corpses were left to rot on the streets.
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 attended literature classes, remembering “the atmosphere, the elevation, being together with the people and talking about the writer and the character.” It was, she explained, a way to “hold on to culture and history so that the spirit should not be crushed.” The subsequent uprising had only been possible, she felt, because of this “inner preparation to stand up against the enemy.”
She witnessed the deportations that took place from July to September 1942, when between 250,000 and 300,000 ghetto residents were sent to their deaths in Treblinka, including her own mother, 13-year-old brother and married sister.
In an almost unbearably moving account she recalled: “Running behind the last van, a lone woman, arms outstretched, screamed: ‘ My child! Give back my child!’ In reply, a small voice called from the van: ‘Mama! Mama!’”
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. “When rumours of the truth began to circulate, people did not believe them.”
Feigele Peltel survived because, due to a labour shortage in Warsaw, 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 (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa), and assumed the personality of Vladka Meed, an ethnic Pole, so 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. As a woman, she had a further advantage: men were often exposed as Jews by the fact that they were circumcised.
For the next few months, Meed bought black-market weapons and ammunition, paid for with rings, watches and other valuables, which she then smuggled into the ghetto: “I would smuggle dynamite and gasoline for the bombs past the gates. We would wrap it up in greasy paper as if it was meat. Or sometimes we would just bribe a Nazi guard.”
According to the Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum, it was Meed who brought the news that confirmed the worst — that trains filled with Jews were returning empty from Treblinka, that no food was being shipped into the camp and that there was an all-pervasive stench of burning and rotting flesh.
Meed sometimes managed to smuggle out Jewish children to be placed with sympathetic Christian families, but she claimed that most ethnic Poles were unsympathetic: “Quite a large number of them were openly anti-Semitic and even, in a way, having satisfaction,” she said in 1973.
After the uprising, Meed continued to work for the underground, carrying provisions and money to Jews in hiding.