b'BC_5782_2021final_cmyk_Layout 18/8/219:46 AMPage 8Vladka Meed, born in Warsaw in 1921 with the name FeigelePeltel, was committed from an early age to activism, at 14 joiningtheJewishLaborBund,asecularsocialistparty.Aftertheestablishment of the Warsaw Ghetto in late 1940, she like otherJews was forced to live in squalid conditions with insufficient food.She joined the Jewish Fighting Organization (the ZOB) and becamea courier, relying on her Aryan looks to pass as a Polish Catholic,and worked on both sides of the ghetto walls, smuggling out Jewishchildren to live with Polish families, bringing rent payment to thehost families, and smuggling in guns and ammunition that wereused in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Along the way, sheendured many close calls where her identity or smuggled goodswere almost discovered.False identification carried She did this on her own; her father died in the ghetto of pneumonia,in Warsaw by Vladka Meed,which allowed her to pass as and most of the rest of her immediate family members wereCatholic. murdered at Treblinka.After the war, she married a fellow resistance fighter and they emigrated to the United States.Vladka was the name she used outside the ghetto as a courier, and she eventually adopted it asher permanent name. Her riveting memoir On Both Sides of the Wallwas originally published inYiddish in 1948; an English edition, with introduction by Elie Wiesel, came out in 1993. Shegave many talks about her experiences and was active in seminars and gatherings of Holocaustsurvivors.'