Q&A with Steven D. Meed

  

 

 

Steven D. Meed is the translator of a new edition of his late mother's (Vladka Meed, 1921-2012) Holocaust memoir, On Both Sides of the Wall: A Resistance Fighter's Firsthand Account of the Warsaw Ghetto. The book was originally published in Yiddish in 1948. Steven Meed is a retired physician.

 

Q: How did this new edition of your mother’s book come about, and what role did you play?

 

A: Vladka, born Feige Peltel, was a young woman, 17 at the outset of the Holocaust. She was one of the members of the Jewish resistance that gradually organized  within the Ghetto and was part of the resistance that became the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

 

She was better known both during the war and after she came to the US as Vladka, which had been one of her early false identities during the war.

 

Her importance was that she was one of the earliest couriers, young women who carried documents, guns, and ammunition, and provided for the needs of the surviving Jews who survived after the uprising was crushed. 

 

She was there from the earliest days in the Ghetto throughout the German occupation and was responsible, sometimes directly, sometimes with other comrades, for saving the lives of several hundreds of other Jews in hiding in the Ghetto and on the Aryan side.

 

She was famous for her coolness in the most dangerous situations, her ability to avoid capture and arrest, and her dedication to the needs of her clients.

 

After the end the war, she was one of the first eyewitnesses to publish what she had seen in the Ghetto and uprising, and her firm belief that the most heroic acts done were the acts of the those around her in the Ghetto, who resisted by remaining as Jews and staying with their loved ones, even in the worst of conditions, and even when death was imminent.

Vladka Meed

 

Her memoir, which first appeared in a series of articles in 1946, and then was worked into a memoir published in 1948, was one of the first documents that depicted the humanity of the vast majority of the Jewish population.  

 

In 1971, I worked with my mother on creating an English translation of the text. This book appeared in several editions over the next 20 years, but has been out of print since 1992.

 

When I started the project I soon saw that the original English text and illustrations of the previous editions did not do justice to the eloquence of Vladka's original Yiddish text. 

 

Also, most contemporary readers would not be familiar with the actual events in the story, and the participants. 

 

After discussions with several historians, I decided to try to do an updated translation of the original translation that would contain the original memoir, but add to it extra material from subsequent oral histories done by Vladka.

 

These would emphasize her personal experiences, and would make it easier for the reader to follow the story and have a better sense of who Vladka was, and what led her to do what she did.

 

Q: How was the book initially received, and what impact did that have on your mother?

 

A: When she first arrived in New York City at age 24, Vladka was already known as a spellbinding speaker in Yiddish and Polish, travelling cross country to speak first to Jewish audiences, and then gradually in English as well.

 

She dedicated herself to the task of speaking about the Holocaust and at a time when few people were speaking about the experience of those who died and especially the experience of those who survived,  giving dignity to the stories of other survivors who found that those around them did not wish to talk about the reality of their experience.

 

Together with my father, she worked to eventually produce a proper memorial in the form of the USHMM in Washington, and supported the work of the Ghetto Fighters Museum and Yad Vashem in Israel.

 

For 25 years of her life she created a program for American high school teachers to train the next generation of “witnesses to the eyewitnesses.”

 

The responsibility for preserving the Yiddish culture and literature and song, as well as keeping the memory of those who perished now and in the future, was the responsibility of her life. 

 

Q: Especially given the increasing antisemitism in today’s world, what do you hope readers take away from the book?

 

A: There are so many messages that I would want to be transmitted.

 

First, to take away a sense of long-term roots of the antisemitism in Poland, and throughout Europe, beyond the Nazis, and how the entire world, with only few exceptions, turned its back on the Jews and refused to pay attention to the hostility and murder of some 90 percent of Polish Jewry.

 

Although the Nazis were responsible for building the structure of the ghettos and killing centers, they were supported by a large number of the local population who eagerly cooperated with Nazis to eradicate the Jews.

 

And yet, as Vladka tells the reader, if it weren't for the sadly all too few Christians in Poland who did help the Jews, then even the  handful (about 30,000 Jews in all Poland out of a prewar 3.3 million) would not have survived.  

 

Vladka's approach was to respect the few Poles who did help,  honor the memory of those "Righteous Gentiles," and try to educate the next generation of school-age students. She felt that supporting institutions against antisemitism was the best approach. She created a school teachers training program to train American teachers in how to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to a new generation.

 

She would have been deeply saddened by the swing of many back to embracing or accepting antisemitism. But she would have kept doing what she could do to help hold it back.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: When I started this project, I did not anticipate the flood of antisemitism that has been unleashed here in the US, and around the world.

 

But I still see this book as a tool, to teach those who read it about the universality of lessons about Holocaust, or the Jews, but represent an ongoing problem throughout the world.

 

I hope that this new translation and with the additional material added, will help more people, both Jew and Gentile, be attracted and fascinated by Vladka's story, and develop a better understanding of what happened in the Holocaust, and how it speaks to our time.

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb