On Both Sides of The Wall: A resistance fighter’s firsthand account of the Warsaw Ghetto

A riveting account of Warsaw Ghetto resistance           Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin

During the Second World War, Jewish teenager Vladka Meed was thrust into the cauldron of Jew-hatred that seethed in Warsaw, a city under Germany’s brutal rule; where Polish blackmailers relentlessly tracked hidden Jews, extorting from them whatever they possessed, threatening to hand them over to the Gestapo, which they often did anyway to secure a 100 zlotys reward. Jews were outliers, marginalised by Poles. While there were righteous gentiles who sheltered Jews at the risk of their own safety and that of their families, overall, the Polish population was deeply antisemitic and indifferent, if not immune, to the cruel treatment meted out to the Jews.

Fortunately, Vladka had a rare survival skills set on which she drew in the multiple life-threatening situations she endured daily. Intelligent and resourceful, unlike most Jews, she spoke fluent unaccented Polish and, most importantly, she was blessed with country-girl looks so vital for survival—blue eyes and ‘Aryan’ features—that enabled her to pass as a Polish Christian. Seemingly overnight, confronting the challenges of her world, she transformed from a naïve 17-year-old into an empowered and infinitely courageous member of the Jewish resistance whose couriers operated on both sides of the Warsaw Ghetto wall and further afield in Polish towns and villages.

As a schoolgirl, Vladka had joined SKIF, the children’s arm of the Bund, a political party of Jewish labour socialists, with a social welfare agenda. In Yiddish secondary school, she participated in the older youth group, Zukunft, where she formed lasting friendships that provided crucial support throughout the war and especially during the Ghetto years. When the Nazis created the Warsaw Ghetto in November 1940, they forced all Warsaw’s Jews to relocate there. An estimated 375,000 Jews were imprisoned inside; and over the next 18 months another 75,000 to 80,000 Jews from other sites in Poland were forced into the Ghetto. At its peak, the Ghetto held an estimated 450,000 Jews or possibly more. By the time the deportations began, many had already succumbed to starvation, illness, arrest and murder.

Without money for bribes or hiding places and without contacts among the Polish people, Vladka’s family, her parents, her younger brother and herself moved into one room in the Ghetto. Their condition deteriorated rapidly. Although the family was starving, Vladka’s mother gave a precious share of their bread to a melamed (tutor) in exchange for barmitzvah lessons for her son, Chaim. Fear, hunger and pain had already taken a terrible toll on their health and mental and emotional well-being.

Vladka, who left the family to move in with Bund comrades, begins her story with the first Ghetto deportations launched on 22 July 1942. Despite Nazi propaganda that deportees would be relocated for work to other parts of Poland, few were under any illusions. A month earlier a report had reached Warsaw describing the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews; and a short time later the Ghetto learned the truth about the Treblinka death camp to which deportees were sent. It took time, however, before people absorbed and accepted these horrendous truths and their implications.

Vladka documents daily life in the Ghetto, creating a vivid picture of sirens wailing, soldiers shooting randomly at passersby, or shooting into the windows of surrounding buildings. With devastatingly accurate observation of every critical detail, she conveys the stress, fatigue and helplessness of a captive, poverty-stricken and suffering population and the dire scenes amid which they struggled to survive. ‘Everywhere you look, there are lines of transport wagons, each filled with desperate Jews—crying children, men and women, young and old being driven to the Umschlagplatz, a Nazi euphemism for a railroad siding by the north wall of the Ghetto,’ she writes. ‘From there over 250,000 Jews loaded into cattle cars were sent to their deaths.’ She notes that Adam Czerniakow, the head of the Jewish Council, the Judenrat, since the start of the Warsaw Ghetto, had committed suicide. ‘Some say that knowing the destination of the deportations and powerless to stop them, he had suffered a breakdown,’ Vladka comments. ‘Whatever the reason we no longer give it much thought. We can only concentrate on our loved ones, our closest, on ourselves’.

Vladka introduces us to a range of her contacts and friends in the Ghetto, who haunt the reader’s memory long after we first meet them on the page of this heartrending yet inspiring saga. Foremost among these is her mentor Abrasha Blum, one of the main leaders of the Socialist Bund in the Ghetto, ‘revered as the very soul of the entire organisation’. She gives vivid portraits of others who play a leading role in Ghetto resistance, including Abramek Bortenstein, a major figure of the Zukunft, the youth arm of the Bund, with whom Vladka worked on underground projects in the Ghetto. Their suffering is intensified by the Jewish police, the Mundiren, a force established by the Germans so that the Gestapo could have their edicts executed without dealing directly with the Jews. ‘They made our daily life miserable with their strict enforcement of the Nazi decrees,’ Vladka notes. In addition, there is the brutal treatment meted out by Ukrainian guards.

When the Aktsies (Yiddish for deportations) began, the beatings and shootings were relentless. As the Germans intended emptying the Ghetto, Jews were instructed to proceed to the Umschlagplatz. Only those working directly for German factories could remain. German propaganda manipulated the Jews in cunning ways— at the Treblinka railroad siding, minutes before entering the gas chambers, the Germans forced their victims to write postcards that told of new homes and jobs. Many of these cards conveyed coded messages that warned loved ones in the Ghetto.’

Vladka, susceptible to the overwhelming terror and violence, experienced fear and despair. ‘What are we? I think to myself,’ she says. ‘Nothing but a herd of humanity. Anything can be done to us.’ With the deportation of her mother, brother and sister, she notes, ‘My heart has turned to stone’. She gives an eye-witness account of the final march to the Umschlagplatz of the staff and children of Janusz Korczak’s orphanage. ‘There is Korczak, now stooped and old, leading a line of his little orphans. In each hand, he holds the hand of one of his charges….The children march in perfect order, with great dignity. Silently. Not a cry, not a word.’

All Vladka has left are her comrades, and together they live to fight a glorious chapter in the annals of Jewish resistance. Her friend Abrasha Blum, now head of all Bund activities in the Ghetto, reported that all remaining Jewish political and resistance groups should combine and organise armed resistance and an uprising. He tells Vladka that she is needed as a courier on the Aryan side. Thus begins an unimaginable saga, that of a young girl thrust into dangerous roles to bring support to hidden Jews, to check on hidden children, even travelling along dangerous routes to aid partisans in the forests and Jews subsisting precariously in villages in the countryside. What Vladka accomplishes, with little regard to her personal safety, is beyond belief.  And the heroic role she continues to play in preparing for the Ghetto uprising and supplying vital ammunition is a saga that imprints itself indelibly on the reader’s mind. Once read, never forgotten.

While Vladka’s words and testimonies to these shattering events constitute a valuable and enduring record, this new and superb translation by her son Dr Steven Meed has added interest for readers and scholars. There is a foreword by historian Samuel D. Kassow, a preface by Steven Meed, and an introduction by Elie Wiesel from an earlier edition. In addition to a useful historical timeline, there is an informative and fascinating transcript of an interview conducted with Vladka in 1991 by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Finally, there is an Afterword by author Judy Batalion; a postscript titled ‘Life after the Holocaust’ by Steven Meed; and the insightful text of a letter from Sara J. Bloomfield, Director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

This is a superbly personal and unrivalled eye-witness account of Ghetto life and the Ghetto uprising. I recommend it unreservedly for general readers, students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

 

On both sides of the wall: A resistance fighter’s firsthand account of the Warsaw Ghetto

By Vladka Meed

A new translation by Dr Steven D. Meed

Available 24 February 2026