Baruch Dayan HaEmet: Woman Who Smuggled Guns To Warsaw Ghetto Fighters Passes Away

Vladka Meed, who with her flawless Polish and Aryan good looks was able to smuggle pistols, gasoline for firebombs and even dynamite to the Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto, and who after the war became an impassioned leader in the national effort to educate children about the Holocaust, passed away last week.

 

The New York Times reports:

Vladka Meed, who with her flawless Polish and Aryan good looks was able to smuggle pistols, gasoline for firebombs and even dynamite to the Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto, and who after the war became an impassioned leader in the national effort to educate children about the Holocaust, died Wednesday in Phoenix. She was 90.

She died after a steady decline from Alzheimer’s disease, said her son, Dr. Steven Meed.

With her husband, Benjamin, and a handful of other survivors, Mrs. Meed took a leading role in efforts to get the world to acknowledge what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe. It was a difficult proposition, given the impulse of so many people after World War II to put the slaughter behind them.

The Meeds helped start the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization in 1962 and then the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which, beginning in 1981, rallied thousands to reunions in Jerusalem and in several American cities.…

With her brownish hair and prominent cheekbones, she could pose as a gentile, so the Jewish underground asked her to live on the Christian side of the wall and become a courier. Born Feigele Peltel on Dec. 29, 1921, she took the Polish nickname Vladka.…

In the mid-1980s, with the Holocaust beginning to become part of the American curriculum, Mrs. Meed arranged with the American Federation of Teachers and other groups to train teachers in Holocaust education. Every year a few dozen teachers would take a three-and-a-half-week program in Israel and Poland on teaching the Holocaust, including visits to the death camps and to the Warsaw that Mrs. Meed knew so intimately.

The program continues, and Steven Meed estimates that 750 teachers have been through it.

In a 1988 interview, Mrs. Meed explained her motivation.

“Our ranks are getting thinner and thinner,” she said, “and we were thinking how and who will continue to tell the story, but to tell the story in the right way.”

[Hat Tip for the video: Wayne Levin.]

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[Wayne Levin]

You can see Mrs. Meed's Shoah Foundation Testimony at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKLeGBfyrJA

[ah-pee-chorus]

goodnight, Hero.