Vladka Meed's 'On Both Sides of the Wall'
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Book Talk
Co-sponsored by the Gross Family Center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust Admission: Free |
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 with the partisans in the forest.
In this newly revised translation of the original Yiddish memoir, which was published in 1948, Vladka’s son, Steven D. Meed, preserves the testimony and memory of his mother for a new generation of readers. Join YIVO for a discussion with Steven D. Meed about this translation, led by Samuel Kassow.
Buy On Both Sides of the Wall.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.
About the Speakers
Steven D. Meed is a retired internist and rheumatologist who earned his medical degree from New York University, where he also later served as an assistant professor of medicine. A founder of the Second-Generation group in New York City, he has spoken widely on his parents’ experiences in the Warsaw ghetto.
Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a PhD from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish Research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, which opened in 2014. Professor Kassow is the author of Who Will Write Our History? Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007), which received the Orbis Prize of the AAASS; was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and has been translated into eight languages. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany.