starvation, and the typhoid epidemic which started and the hunger and misery,

we were talking about literature. And a young girl was talking to older people

and they were listening, and somehow it was, they thought, the hope that this

will pass, it is a time that will not remain forever. And this kind of hope was

constantly in the life of the ghetto."

By october 1942, when deportions paused, more than 20 youth groups and underground units had coalesced into a united front.

She when disguised as a polish woman to smuggle information, supplies, etc. into the ghetto, she also took information out of the ghetto to other people helping.

Then she met Benjamin Miedzyrzecki (later shortened to meed), whom she recruited to work for the resistance. The two of them fell in love, even among the death and despair around them.

When the nozis restarted deportations from warsaw in janurary 1943, Jewish defiance disrupted German efforts. The resistance received word of a final deportation just before Passover, and on April 19, 1943, some 700 young Jewish fighters fought back at the German troops entering the ghetto.

When the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising started, Vladka was outside the ghetto, still disguised. She managed to get in contact with uprising leaders, and she began working to distribute appeals for help to resistance organizations outside the ghetto. But in the process, she and uprising leader Abraham Blum were arrested. With the help of her polish collaborator, Vladka was able to get away. Abraham Blum was murdered by the Gestapo.

After weeks of hand-to-hand combat, the Germans began burning and leveling buildings. From the balcony of an apartment outside the ghetto walls, Vladka heard the gunfire, saw black smoke, and watched people jumping from windows.

The warsaw Ghetto Uprising was squashed after 27 days. Some 7,000 Jews had been killed, and 42,000 were deported. On May 16, the Nzazis blew up the Great Synagogue of Warsaw, once the largest jewish house of worship in the world. The entire ghetto had been destroyed.

Over the following months, Vladka and Benjamin worked to extricate fighters from underground bunkers in the rubble and those in hiding outside of the ghetto. They helped get money and provisions to Jews in hiding, to partisan units, and to resistance cells in camps and ghettos around poland.

In August 1944, Vladka fought alongside Poles in the Polish Uprising in Warsaw, a two-month bettale between the Polish Home Army and the Germans. Vladka, Ben, and his parents survived disguised as christians for the remaining few months of the war in small village, leaving the ghetto on December 5, 1942.

After the war, Vladka and ben went back to Warsaw to find the few Jews who had survived in hiding, and then moved to Lodz, where Vladka became the director of the Jewish Cultural Department, which was responsible for organizing the Jews who were trickling back in to city to look for lost family members.

Among those survivors in Lodz, Vladka saw the same signs of hope she had seen in the early days of the Warsaw ghetto--survivors still willing to pray, still wanting to live, to love, to sing.

A series of 27 articles Vladka wrote for the Yiddish Daily Forward became one of the earliest chronicles of the holocaust. In 1948. she published a book, On Both Sides of the Wall, which was translated from Yiddish in 1972.

For all the valor Vladka saw among the resistance fighters, in her testimony it was her mother, and other mothers, she wanted to honor.

“She Smuggled Love, Hope, and Dynamite Over the Ghetto Walls.” USC Shoah Foundation, https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2021/06/31356-she-smuggled-love-hope-and-dynamite-over-ghetto-walls Accessed 4 March 2025