About

Vladka Meed (1921-2012)

Vladka Meed, (born Feigele Peltel) was a teenager in 1940 when Nazi Germany forced the Jews into the ghetto of Warsaw. The ghetto was a functioning city: Jews educated their children, worked and uplifted their spirits with plays, concerts and social groups. However, starvation and disease were rampant and there was a constant fear of being deported to death camps.

In an act of resistance, Feigele took on the name Vladka and joined a group of guerilla fighters from Warsaw to resist the Nazis. Because of her “Aryan” appearance, Vladka was able to sneak in and out of the ghetto. She smuggled weapons across the ghetto wall to the Jewish Combat Organization and helped Jewish children escape and be sheltered in Christian homes. She helped connect Jews in labor camps with partisans in the forest. Vladka survived, but her father died of pneumonia in the ghetto, and her mother, sister, and younger brother were murdered at Treblinka.

Vladka met her future husband Benjamin Meed, who was also fighting the Nazis. After the war, they married and emigrated to the United States where they became leaders in Holocaust education, working tirelessly so that “we would never forget.”

Vladka was the primary force in creating the Holocaust and Jewish Resistance Teachers Program. She brought educators to Holocaust sites in Europe, to Yad Vashem in Israel and to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The program has prepared 1,100 teachers from every state to spread the message about the resiliency and resistance demonstrated by the Jewish people during the Holocaust.