Background
Meed was born in Praga, a district of Warsaw, Poland to Hanna Peltel (née Antosiewicz) and Shlomo Peltel. Her father ran a haberdashery store.
Meed was born in Praga, a district of Warsaw, Poland to Hanna Peltel (née Antosiewicz) and Shlomo Peltel. Her father ran a haberdashery store.
At 14, she joined Jewish Labor Bund and in 1942 the Jewish Combat Organization. They arrived in the United States in 1946 with $8 between them. In 1981, the Meeds founded the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors.
Vladka Meed"s book “On Both Sides of the Wall” was originally published in Yiddish in 1948 with a first hand account of her wartime experiences.
The book was translated into English in 1972 (with a foreword by Elie Wiesel), and later into German, Polish and Japanese. She also published in The Forward newspaper.
Foreign nearly 20 years she organized a number of summer trips for teachers, educating them on the Holocaust, and the Jewish history of Warsaw. According to The New York Times obituary, she was a central source of the 2001 television film Uprising.
She received an honorary degree from Hebrew Union College and Bar Ilan University.
