In May 1946, a reporter from the Yiddish newspaper, The Jewish Daily Forward, waited for Vladka Meed and her husband, Benjamin, as they disembarked from one of the first ships carrying European refugees from World War II to New York. The Jewish socialist publication knew that the 24-year-old Meed (a Bundist from childhood) had already spoken and written in Europe about her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto resistance, and wanted its chance to ask her about them.

By December 1942, Meed (born Feigele Peltel) was the sole survivor of her family. Her father had died from illness, and her mother, sister, and brother had been deported to the Treblinka death camp. Meed sought solace and support from her fellow young Bund activists, many of whom were building the underground Jewish resistance within the Ghetto.

They recruited Meed, who looked Aryan and spoke unaccented Polish, to escape the Ghetto. On the Polish side of the wall, she bravely served as a weapons and documents courier and smuggler, found safe hiding places for Jewish women and children, and provided supplies and information to Jewish partisans in the countryside. Her quick intelligence, grit, and innate gifts with writing and speaking were assets.

The dockside interview with the Forward led to Meed producing a series of 16 extended weekly articles for the paper. In 1948, she expanded her articles into a full memoir, “Fun Beyde Zaytn Geto-Moyer” (On Both Sides of the Wall), one of the first published Holocaust testimonies. It was later translated into six languages, including English.

Half a century after the English version appeared, the author’s son, Steven Meed, decided that it was time for an updated translation.

The new “On Both Sides of the Wall: A Resistance Fighter’s Firsthand Account of The Warsaw Ghetto,” was published in February 2026.

Meed, a New York-based retired physician, did the translation, and Holocaust scholars Samuel Kassow, Judy Batalion, and Sara Bloomfield contributed forewords, afterwords, and other supplementary material. There is also an introduction written in 1992 by Elie Wiesel.

“The original book in Yiddish is now more than 75 years old. I felt that a contemporary audience wouldn’t get it — the information, the names, the situation itself. None of those things would automatically ring true for a younger audience. I wanted to create a new book that was the old book, but with added elements that would make it more alive, more relevant to the reader… I wanted there to be context, and I wanted it to be able to flow as if it were a novel, although everything, including all dialogue, was factual,” said Meed.

Meed enhanced his mother’s simple yet effective language and sentence structure. “On Both Sides of the Wall” is highly immersive thanks to its detailed descriptions that take the reader wherever Meed was during the war. We feel as if we are by her side, laboring in a ghetto sewing workshop, watching the ghetto burn from the Aryan side, managing relationships with Righteous Gentiles, escaping blackmailers, sweet-talking Nazis, hiding with partisans, and participating in the failed Polish Warsaw uprising against the Germans in 1944.

The most important step for Meed was to shift the memoir’s narrative voice back to its original. While his mother wrote in Yiddish in the present tense and first person, the 1977 English translation switched it to the past tense and third person.

“In fact, all the translations ended up being third-person past, and that already, by itself, lost a certain amount of immediacy as to what the story is. It was the style in the ’70s to write [about the Holocaust] in the third person. But the Yiddish is much more emotional and gripping,” said Meed, who made sure to refer to his mother’s original Yiddish articles and memoir while working on this new translation.

The strategy paid off: “On Both Sides of the Wall” reads as narrative non-fiction, almost a thriller. Every emotion expressed by Vladka Meed affects the reader, and every dangerous mission she undertakes keeps them on the edge of their seat.

The heroism of ordinary people

Steven Meed emphasized that his mother never wanted her story to be about herself. She wrote her memoir, continued to give testimony throughout her life, and founded a Holocaust education institute so that people would know what happened to the Jewish people.

“Her agenda was not to speak about herself. It was to memorialize the people who had died and the people with whom she had fought,” Meed said.

“One of the things that Vladka spoke about all the time is the heroism of ordinary people. That was something that she wanted to highlight. She cites examples of her own mother, who starved herself to give bread to Vladka’s brother’s bar mitzvah tutor. Anybody who got up in the morning and thought about feeding their family or took a risk to go to a [secret] class or to send their children to [an outlawed] school deserves honor. Whether they eventually lived or died, they preserved their humanity and resisted in whatever way they could,” added psychologist Rita Meed, Steven Meed’s wife.

Batalion, author of the award-winning bestseller, “The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler’s Ghettos,” said she came to the book as a researcher who has read hundreds of Holocaust memoirs and testimonies.

“Vladka’s story stood out — not merely for its drama and her tremendous courage — but for how it was written. She provided context, developed characters, and included details. I was entirely drawn into her tragic and compelling world,” she said.

“Most testimonies from the time are hard to follow and often written in a distant third person or in lots of jargon (especially from the socialists), but Vladka’s story was a well-told, chronological narrative that really helped me understand the period,” Batalion said.

Steven Meed said that he did not have to do much research to provide the additional historical context and write the editor’s notes that appear throughout the new version. His parents met in the Jewish resistance, operated together on the Aryan side, and married in the first Jewish wedding in Warsaw after the war. They spoke openly to their children about their Holocaust experiences. Meed also absorbed a great deal from his parents’ conversations with other survivors and from helping his mother translate her speeches and articles.

“It was just part of the fabric of life. The family did not live in tragedy, but my mother, as did my father, had this obligation to keep this memory alive for the next generation and the generation after that. But they didn’t speak about their personal feelings about it; it was just too painful. They spoke about historical facts,” Meed said.

It is impossible to come away from “On Both Sides of the Wall” not thinking that Vladka Meed was a hero, regardless of whether she saw herself that way. However, she did consider herself an avenger of her family, friends, and the millions of other Jews slaughtered by the Nazis.

With nothing left to lose, she was willing to take whatever risks were asked of her — and more. She knew she would likely be killed, but she was not deterred.

Meed wrote that the night following the clandestine November 1942 ghetto meeting in which the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) asked her to join the resistance, she stayed awake for hours.

“Resistance? Yes! But I have never held a gun or even faced one aimed at me… I cannot sleep. I go back over every detail of the evening, every minute, every comrade, every word… I try to imagine the events that are to happen, but in truth, I have no idea of what is to come,” she wrote.

“But there is a task that must be done, and [I have been] asked… to be among those to do it. I am committed, heart and soul!”

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Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

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