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VLADKA
An
Introduction
By
Leo Melamed
1999
It is a most difficult task to properly introduce to you Feigele
Peltel-Miedzyrzecki, or as she is better known, by her polish
pseudonym, Vladka. For to do so, I have to take you back to a
time and place in 1939 when Vladka was but a seventeen year old
teenager, a member of the Skif, the youth organization of the
Bund, the Jewish faction of the socialist movement in Poland
dedicated to emancipating Jews and bringing equality to the world.
It was a movement that had captured the passion and soul of a
multitude of the Jewish masses, among them my parents.
I have to take you back to a time when Warsaw was the European
Mecca of Jewish cultural emancipation. When Polish Jews were
beginning to discard the inhibitions of past generations, taking
off their kapotes, and starting to take their rightful place
among the leadership of European intelligencia. When the giants
of Yiddish literature, the likes of Y.L.Peretz, Sholem Aleichem,
Chaim Bialyk, Avrom Reisen, Sholem Ash, were at the forefront
of Yiddish influence, when Mamme Loshn was flourishing, when
Yiddish theater was entertaining the masses, and the brazen words
of Bundist Shleime Mendleshon, demanding equality, were ringing
in the ears Jewish workers. A time when Warsaw streets and cafes
were teeming with Jews of every stripe, and life was full of
hope and promise.
I have to take you back to a time when the German army marched
into Warsaw, and the world went mad. When all normalcy ended
and Jews were ostracized from the rest of Polish society–who
for the most part did not care, and isolated from the rest of
the world–who for the most part did not take notice. When Hitler
and Himmler and Goebbels and Eichman devised so sinister a plan
of such satanic dimension that it had no equal in the annals
of human history, one that gave special meaning to the word Holocaust.
A time when Jews were marked for extermination by an armed enemy
devoid of morality, and who methodically succeeded in murdering
over six million, among them over one million children--thereby
extinguishing an entire generation and their offspring and their
offspring, leaving a blot on human history that can never be
expunged.
A time that Elie Wiesel, in his introduction to Vladka Meed’s
Warsaw ghetto memoirs, describes as a period so difficult to
understand that somehow it “belongs not to our own history, to
our own lives, but to some ancient legend that the immortal elders
tell a thousand times that same night.” Listen to a passage from
Vladka’s On Both Sides of the Wall, first was published in Yiddish
in 1948 and has since then been translated into a number of languages:
“Several wagons went by, loaded with Jews, sitting and standing,
hugging sacks that contained whatever pitiful belongings they
had managed to gather at the last moment. Some stared straight
ahead with vacant eyes, others mourned and wailed, wringing their
hands. Women tore their hair or clung to their children, who
sat bewildered among the scattered bundles, gazing at the adults
in silent fear. Running behind the last wagon, a lone woman,
arms outstretched cried: My child! Give me back my child!”
Indeed, in order to properly introduce to you Vladka, I have
to first take you back to the time I was myself a teenager and
whenever in my household in Chicago her name was mentioned by
my father or mother, I would feel as if I should stand at attention,
for my parents I was certain, were speaking of a great heroine
of Jewish history.
A heroine who volunteered to serve in the Jewish resistance
and, because she spoke fluent Polish and looked Gentile, on December
5, 1942, for the price of 500 zlotys, took her life in her hands,
escaped from the walls of the ghetto–to the Aryan side–and became
a member of the Jewish underground in Warsaw.
A heroine who, while her contemporaries around the world were
attending school, was on a mission to save the lives of Jewish
children, to act as a courier for the Jewish Coordinating Committee
of the ghetto, to find lodging for others who made it over the
wall, to assist those in hiding, to find sources for arms, to
arrange for their purchase and to smuggle them back into the
ghetto for the fighters preparing for the uprising.
A heroine who from the moment of her escape was drawn deeper
and deeper into the perilous undertaking of assisting the underground
and resistance, risking torture and death every day for the next
two and a half years, and working in close contact with the most
important leaders of the underground, people the likes of Mordecai
Anilewicz, commander of the Warsaw uprising, and Abrasha Blum,
leader of the Bund.
A heroine who assumed false identities, endured constant danger,
hid like a frightened animal, moved from dwelling to dwelling,
escaped from the hands of Polish szmalcownicy (blackmailers),
bought armaments from Polish sources, smuggled revolvers and
dynamite into the ghetto, trained herself and others in the use
of firearms, procured files for use by Jews to escape from the
trains bound for the gas chambers, forged foreign passports,
placed Jewish children into the hands of Gentiles for safety,
memorized the formulae for making homemade bombs, smuggled chemicals
and bottles into the ghetto for Molotov cocktails, escaped capture
time and again, endured the darkness of a jail cell, and once
jumped from a fiery ghetto wall as a German patrol was hot in
pursuit.
A heroine who lost everything during the Holocaust, not even
her father’s grave remained, but lived to see the first battle
by the ghetto fighters on January 18, 1943, and was back in the
ghetto on the eve of the final uprising, the morning of April
19, 1943, the eve of Passover. And later, a heroine who triumphantly
carried into the ghetto pamphlets that proudly read, “We will
avenge the crimes of Dachau, Treblinka and Auschwitz. The struggle
for your freedom and ours continues.”
My heroine, Vladka
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