On Both Sides of the Wall: A Resistance Fighter's Firsthand Account of the Warsaw Ghetto

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.

First published in Yiddish by the Educational Committee of the Workmen’s Circle in New York in 1948, On Both Sides of the Wall was based on a series of 27 articles Vladka wrote in the Yiddish-language The Jewish Daily Forward (Forverts) in 1946–47. In this revised translation, which includes exclusive, new material and photographs, Vladka’s son, Dr. Steven D. Meed, captures the vibrancy and passion of his mother’s original Yiddish text, preserving the testimony and memory of this valiant woman for a new generation of readers.