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Frank Blakhmen

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Read about the experiences of a Jewish partisan fighting against the Germans in Poland during World War II.

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Frank Blaichman in Polish partisan uniform, 1945

Photographed by Mitch Braff in January of 2003

Frank Blaichman was born in the small town of Kamionka, Poland on December 11, 1922. Frank was sixteen years old when the German Army invaded his country in 1939. Following the invasion, German officials issued regulations intended to isolate the Jews and deprive them of their livelihoods.

Frank took great risks to help his parents and family survive these hardships. He rode his bicycle from the neighboring farms to nearby cities, buying and selling goods at each destination. He refused to wear the Star of David armband and traveled without the required permits, but his courage and fluent Polish ensured his safety. When word spread that the Jews of Kamionka were to be resettled in a nearby ghetto, Frank hid in a wooded area outside of town. He stayed with a friendly Polish farmer and before joining other Jews hiding in a nearby forest. The threat of being discovered was constant in the forest, and Polish hoodlums beat any women that left the encampment. Frank encouraged the men to organize a defense unit. He obtained firearms by posing as a Polish policeman, using an overcoat he had found.

After a German attack on the partisans' encampment killed eighty Jews, the survivors left the forest to hide with sympathetic farmers. Always on the move, they killed German collaborators, destroyed telephone lines, damaged dairy factories, and ambushed German patrols.

Frank's squad joined a larger all-Jewish unit with strong ties to the Polish underground and Soviet Army. They were responsible for protecting 200 Jews living in a forest encampment. At only 21, he was the youngest platoon commander in the unit and escorted the future prime minister of Poland to a secret meeting with the Soviet high command.

"I'm very proud of what I did all those years," he said. "The reality was we had nothing to lose, and our way to survive was to fight."

Frank's memoir, Rather Die Fighting, was published in 2009 by Arcade Publishing. Frank Blaichman passed away on December 27, 2018, at the age of 96.

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Frank Blaichman in Polish partisan uniform, 1945 Photographed by Mitch Braff in January of 2003 Frank Blaichman was born in the small town of Kamionka, Poland on December 11, 1922. Frank was sixteen years old when the German Army invaded his country in 1939.

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Czech, D. Auschwitz Chronicle, 1939-1945. London/New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1990.

Gutman, Israel. "Introduction." In Anashim ve-Efer: Sefer Auschwitz-Birkenau, edited by Israel Gutman in conjunction with a group of prisoner-comrades (Hebrew). Merhavia: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1957.

Gutman, Israel, and M. Berenbaum, ed. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington, IN/Washington, DC: Indiana University Press, 1994, 1998.

Kagan, Raya. Women in the Chamber of Hell (Auschwitz Chapters) (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1947.

Marek, B. Scroll of Auschwitz (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1978.

Weinstein, M. "Memoirs from the Auschwitz Revolt" (Hebrew). Yediot Yad Vashem 34 (April 1965).

Zabludowicz, Noah. "A Visit with Roza in the Bunker." In Anashim ve-Efer: Sefer Auschwitz-Birkenau, edited by Israel Gutman in conjunction with a group of prisoner-comrades (Hebrew). Merhavia: Sifriyat Po'alim, 1957.

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A member of the Jewish underground in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, Roza Robota was one of the organizers of an operation to smuggle explosives for use by members of the Sonderkommando (Jewish forced-labor unit of concentration camp prisoners) in the October 7, 1944 revolt at the camp.

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German Resistance Memorial Center - Biographie

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Vladka Meed, whose given name was Feigele Peltel, served the Jewish underground in the Warsaw Ghetto by passing as a Christian outside its walls. Fluent in Polish and possessing a typical "Aryan" appearance, Meed became a successful underground courier, smuggling weapons across the wall to the Jewish Fighting Organization. Meed came to New York immediately following the war and in 1948 she published a memoir about her experiences, On Both Sides of the Wall, in Yiddish. She lectured widely about the Holocaust and was extremely active in Holocaust education and memorialization. As vice president of the Jewish Labor Committee, she ran the Yiddish Cultural and Welfare Department for many years. She received numerous awards, including the 1993 Hadassah Henrietta Szold Award and the 1995 Elie Wiesel Remembrance Award.

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Vladka Meed was an underground courier who smuggled weapons to the Jewish Fighting Organization inside the Warsaw Ghetto while passing as a Christian outside its walls. In 1948 she published a memoir about her experiences, On Both Sides of the Wall. Meed received many awards for her work in Holocaust education and memorialization.

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We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.

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Thank you for supporting our work We would like to thank Crown Family Philanthropies and the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation for supporting the ongoing work to create content and resources for the Holocaust Encyclopedia. View the list of all donors.

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Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

Vladka Meed in 1973 at the Warsaw Ghetto Exhibit she put together. Credit... Jack Manning/The New York Times

Vladka Meed, who with her flawless Polish and Aryan good looks was able to smuggle pistols, gasoline for firebombs and even dynamite to the Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto, and who after the war became an impassioned leader in the national effort to educate children about the Holocaust, died Wednesday in Phoenix. She was 90.

She died after a steady decline from Alzheimer's disease, said her son, Dr. Steven Meed.

With her husband, Benjamin, and a handful of other survivors, Mrs. Meed took a leading role in efforts to get the world to acknowledge what the Nazis had done to the Jews of Europe. It was a difficult proposition, given the impulse of so many people after World War II to put the slaughter behind them.

The Meeds helped start the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization in 1962 and then the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which, beginning in 1981, rallied thousands to reunions in Jerusalem and in several American cities. These events sometimes featured American presidents, and the resulting attention inspired films, books and courses and contributed to the creation of museums in Washington and New York.

Mrs. Meed's resistance work started with the deportation of 265,000 Jews from Warsaw to the Treblinka death camp and continued after the uprising by the ghetto's besieged remnants. She told her story in Yiddish in her 1948 book, "On Both Sides of the Wall," one of the first published eyewitness accounts. It was translated into English, German and at least three other languages, is still in print, and was a central source of the 2001 television movie "Uprising."

When the Germans walled off a portion of Warsaw, she was still a teenager. Working as a machine operator sewing Nazi uniforms, she grew increasingly dejected watching the deportations in 1942 that included her mother, a 13-year-old brother and a married sister. But she responded resourcefully to a call for armed resistance.

With her brownish hair and prominent cheekbones, she could pose as a gentile, so the Jewish underground asked her to live on the Christian side of the wall and become a courier. Born Feigele Peltel on Dec. 29, 1921, she took the Polish nickname Vladka.

Women were often preferred as couriers, she said in a 1983 interview. "If a man in the underground went on a mission, he could be recognized as a Jew by his circumcision," she said. "A woman's body might be searched, but it could not give that information."

The false identity card of Vladka Meed. Credit... US Holocaust Memorial Museum

She was soon buying bullets, pistols, even dynamite, and carrying them, as well as money and essential information, to the Jewish side of the wall. Sometimes she became part of a Polish ghetto work detail, sometimes she bribed her way across and sometimes she clambered over the wall. With death all but certain, she once recalled, "there was very little left to fear."

Several times, she smuggled Jewish children out of the ghetto and into the homes of sympathetic Christian families. According to Michael Berenbaum, a leading Holocaust scholar, she helped pass on to the Polish underground the startling news about Treblinka - that trains filled with Jews were returning empty, that no food was being shipped and that there was an omnipresent stench of corpses.

The ghetto uprising, in which lightly armed young fighters took on the Nazis by firing from hide-outs in buildings and sewers, began in January 1943 and continued for four months, though Mrs. Meed did not take part in the final battle in April. She had been ordered to remain outside the walls for future missions, and as the rebellion ended she saw the smoke billowing from the ghetto while pretending to enjoy a carousel ride.

"Aryan Warsaw hardly lifted a finger to help" the Jews, she wrote in her memoir.

After the uprising, she continued to work for the underground, carrying provisions and money hidden in her shoes and bra to Jews in hiding. In 1944, she married Mr. Meed, another courier. He died in 2006. In addition to her son, Mrs. Meed, who lived in Manhattan, is survived by a daughter, Dr. Anna Scherzer of Phoenix, and five grandchildren.

The Meeds were on one of the first boats carrying survivors to reach New York, and she was invited to lecture about her experience and about the Eastern European Yiddish culture that the Nazis virtually destroyed.

As her husband prospered in an export-import business, they were able to start organizations that brought the survivors - often feeling isolated, even within the Jewish community - together and gave them a potent identity.

In the mid-1980s, with the Holocaust beginning to become part of the American curriculum, Mrs. Meed arranged with the American Federation of Teachers and other groups to train teachers in Holocaust education. Every year a few dozen teachers would take a three-and-a-half-week program in Israel and Poland on teaching the Holocaust, including visits to the death camps and to the Warsaw that Mrs. Meed knew so intimately.

The program continues, and Steven Meed estimates that 750 teachers have been through it.

In a 1988 interview, Mrs. Meed explained her motivation.

"Our ranks are getting thinner and thinner," she said, "and we were thinking how and who will continue to tell the story, but to tell the story in the right way."

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Vladka Meed, Who Infiltrated Warsaw Ghetto, Dies at 90 (Published 2012)

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Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share. Vladka Meed, who with her flawless Polish and Aryan good looks was able to smuggle pistols, gasoline for firebombs and even dynamite to the Jewish fighters inside the Warsaw Ghetto, and who after the war became an impassioned leader in the national effort to educate children about the Holocaust, died Wednesday in Phoenix.

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Vladka Meed's False Identification Papers

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Roza Robota

She was a hero who managed to smuggle dynamite and explosive powder for the creation of many bombs, which would go down as one of the bravest things a Jewish woman had done during the holocaust.

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Frank Blakhmen

He was a polish Jewish leader who was a member of the communist armed organization during world war ||. He would survive the holocaust to tell his story of having a huge impact on the Jewish community during the holocaust. His destruction of railroads and communication between the Germans would soon be taught as monumental.

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Vladka Meed;

Even after all she did during the holocaust and survived, she still spent the first couple years after the war helping surviving Jews search for their lost family members. She had managed to give many Jews hope and she will forever be a historical hero. “She smuggled love, hope, and dynamite over the Ghetto Walls.”

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He had managed to escape before the Germans took the Jews into camps which led to him and 12 Jewish men dressing as Polish officers and getting weapons from a Farmer named Lemenchek. They had managed to collect a total of 6 guns. They then captured calibrators and used the information they managed to gain to blow up railroads and bridges to disrupt German communication.

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Arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp in 1944. She helped plan a revolt to escape the camp. Rosa had a woman who worked in a factory at the camp carry explosive powder out the factory by keeping it under her fingernails. They then gave the powder to a russian prisoner who was named Borodin so that he may construct a bomb to help with their escape.  Germans soon found out about their plans which led to panic bombs being set off in the crematoriums. 600 Jews managed to escape but they were soon either killed or recaptured. Rosa and the other three young women were publicly hanged in the end.

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Convinced now-Jews that she was not Jewish. She ended up smuggling weapons and Jews across the ghetto walls by using false identification papers.
: Vladka Meed

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Jan. 30 1933- May. 8, 1945.

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12 Years That Shook the World explores stories of real people, the choices they made, and specific moments in Holocaust history from 1933-1945. Listen below or on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Send us your feedback with this quick survey or via email to podcast@ushmm.org.

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12 Years That Shook the World explores stories of real people, the choices they made, and specific moments in Holocaust history from 1933-1945. Listen below or on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Send us your feedback with this quick survey or via email to podcast@ushmm.org.

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The Jewish Teens Who Fought Back Against Hitler

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These resistance fighters attacked Nazi troops, sabotaged infrastructure, and blew up trains and bridges.

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Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust

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“Those Who Were There” is a Holocaust history podcast that brings firsthand testimony of Holocaust survivors, liberators, and witnesses out of the archives.

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Those Who Were There Podcast Series

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“We are here-eyewitnesses of the Nazi inferno; witnesses to a pulsating Jewish culture that existed, and then was cut down. It was a tradition of splendor. A life full of creativity, of learning, of faith in the rights of the human being and in the righteousness of the world. A tradition cut down but never destroyed. In this land where we live today, the spirit of freedom for all was inscribed on the great Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The same spirit was also close to us in the world from which we came. Its sound was heard in the idealistic Jewish youth from political ranks who became the core of the resistance fighters in the ghettos, in the forests, in the camps. They drew their idealism and their strength from the wellspring of our cultural treasures, which gave meaning and exaltation to their lives.”
- Vladka Meed

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“I entered Roza’s cell. On the cold cement lay a figure like a heap of rags. At the sound of the door opening, she turned her face to me…Then she spoke her last words. She told me that she had not betrayed [anyone]. She wished to tell her comrades that they had nothing to fear. We must carry on. It was easier for her to die knowing that our actions would continue. It was a pity to lose one’s life and have to leave this world, but she did not regret her actions. She was not sorry that it was her lot to die. I received from her a note for the comrades outside. It was signed with the exhortation: Hazak ve-amatz (be strong and of good courage)! The time came to leave, and I left the bunker. This was the last time I saw Roza face to face, but I will never forget her.”
(Gutman 1957, 214).
- Roza Robota

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"I'm very proud of what I did all those years," he said. "The reality was we had nothing to lose, and our way to survive was to fight."
- Frank Blakhmen