VLADKA MEED’S MEMOIR III
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[Photo: Vladka Meed 2005]
By October 1943, the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto was complete. Pictures of the ghetto after the uprising reflect the destructive force of the German army. The small group of Jewish survivors had to find hiding places on the “Aryan Side.”
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[Photo: Warsaw Ghetto after the war]
Vladka Meed and her fellow members of the Jewish Coordinating Committee got to work to help them secure hiding places and obtain documents. The Committee also provided aid for the children that survived and established contacts with inmates of slave labor camps and Jewish partisans. They even “kept in constant touch with the Polish underground.” (Meed, 182)
Every Jew in Warsaw – those in bunkers, basements, or attics, as well as those like Vladka, who were hiding in plain sight – lived in constant fear. There were so many things to fear. “Fear of the Germans,” Vladka writes, “fear of the Poles, fear of the blackmailers, fear of losing one’s hideout, fear of being left penniless.” (Meed, 194) Those Jews in hiding were always hungry and they feared being kicked out of their hiding place, being informed on, or just being found. Those, like Vladka, with Aryan features, attempted to blend with their Polish neighbors. They had to change names often and It was hard to accurately adopt all Polish customs and religious observances. It seemed to Vladka that the Poles always had a way to sniff out a Jew. The szmalcownik, the blackmailer, always seemed to know! “The eyes were a special danger sign,” Vladka explains. “A careworn face might be transformed by a smile; an accent could be controlled, church customs and prayers could be learned, but the eyes . . . How could one hide the mute melancholy, the haunted look of fear?
’Your eyes give you away,’ our Gentile friends would tell us. ‘Make them look livelier, merrier. You won’t attract so much attention then.’ But our eyes kept constantly watching, searching the shadows ahead, glancing quickly behind, seeing our own misfortune and foreseeing even worse to come. Haunted by fear of betrayal, our eyes betrayed us; and this knowledge only increased our fear.’” (Meed, 194)
Vladka brought food and news of the outside world to Jews in hiding. Some were in the city while others were in the countryside. She described one city bunker built by a gardener. The large, fortified space was built under an expansive garden. Thirty Jews hid there, including one of the most famous Warsaw Jews, Dr. Emmanuel Ringelblum, the historian who is responsible for the Oineg Shabbes collection of documents saved in the ghetto. “It was from this bunker,” Vladka writes, that the “now famous historic report of Jewish cultural activities in the ghetto was issued.” (Meed, 209-210). But then, the gardener and his mistress had an argument. To take revenge, the mistress informed the Germans about the bunker. All the Jews were all murdered.
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[Photo: Emmanuel Ringelblum]
Then there were the hiding places outside of the city. Vladka went one day to Miedzeszyn, a summer resort near Warsaw where she was to visit Clara Falk and her ten-year-old son, Adash. She found the small hiding place. It “was so cluttered with lumber and old pieces of furniture that I could hardly turn around. I strained my eyes in the semi-darkness but saw no one. The landlady pointed to a corner, littered with debris and branches, from which a hand protruded, barely visible. Then I heard a faint, ‘Good morning!’ The same hand began to scrape away the debris. I opened the door a little wider to get more light.
Clara and Adash lay crouched side by side on the bare earthen floor. Pinned under the debris, they could hardly move. They were skin and bones, their faces haggard, their lips chapped, their eyes bulging, their hair disheveled and matted with chaff. They looked like spectres; they no longer seemed human.
They begged me to close the door. The daylight, they said, hurt their eyes. They ate, slept, and spent their waking hours in that crouching position: there was no space for them to stand upright or to lie down full length.
Twice a day the landlady bough them some scraps to eat. She would not allow them to go outside. They had not washed during the past few months. On rare occasions, when Clara’s limbs became numb, she risked venturing outside at night for a few moments. Her right arm felt lifeless, but it gave her excruciating pains.” (Meed, 205)
Vladka and her Committee relocated Clara and Adash to a hiding place in Warsaw, where they could help them. Mother and son both survived the war.
Vladka also describes going outside of Warsaw, to a forest encampment with food and medicine. But she got there too late. The hidden Jews had been found. Many were killed by the Germans; the rest scattered throughout the countryside.
In July of 1944, the Poles revolted against their German occupiers. In response, the Germans demolished the city of Warsaw. The city was in ruins and many of the nooks and crannies where Jews were hiding were bombed and destroyed. Rumors abounded that the Germans planned to take all young, able-bodied Poles to camps in Germany. Vladka lost her home and felt that there was no way to remain safely in Warsaw. So, she and her future husband, Benjamin, left the city and headed out to find a place to hide. They wandered from place to place and survived until Warsaw was liberated by the Red Army.
After liberation, Vladka and Benjamin returned to Warsaw. Vladka’s grief oozes from the page. “The aching eyes devour the scene,” Vladka wrote. “[E]very stone, every heap of rubble is a reminder of the Holocaust. Here a protruding length of pipe, there a bent iron rail, there a charred sapling – these are what is left of our devastated world. My eyes fall upon the remains of a torn, soiled prayer book, on a rusty, dented pot, and I see my home again – my father and mother. . ..” (Meed, 262)
Vladka walked to the Jewish cemetery to try to find her father’s grave, where she might find a physical marker to mourn her loss. She remembered exactly where the grave was: “Row no. 105, the seventh grave from the left.” (Meed, 262)
Vladka slowly walked through the devastated cemetery. “Wherever I turned,” she writes, “there was nothing but overturned tombstones, desecrated graves and scattered skulls, their dark sockets burning deep into me, their shattered jaws demanding, ‘Why? Why has this befallen us?’
Why, then, the guilt that tinged my revulsion and rage; why the shame-my shame-that persecution followed my people even into their graves? Carefully, so as not to trample the skulls or fall into an open grave, we made our way through this place of eternal rest to the spot where my father’s bones had lain. Though I knew the location, I could not find his grave. The whole area had been desolated, the soil pitted and strewn with crushed skulls and broken grave markers.
Was one of these desecrated skulls that of my own father? How would I ever know?
Nothing. Nothing was left me of my past, of my life in the ghetto, not even my father’s grave.” (Meed, 262-263)
These are the last painful words of Vladka Meed’s 1948 reflections. There is an Epilogue that tells of her visit to Warsaw 33 years later. But it has a different tone, a different color. I find this 1948 memoir to be one of the most powerful I have read. The immediacy of the grief, the fear, the pain and sadness come through each page, each word.
I learned so much from Vladka’s memoir. Sharing parts of her story with you has helped me to process her grief and my sorrow.
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Source: Meed, Vladka, On Both Sides of the Wall, Originally published in Yiddish in 1948 by the Educational Committee of the Workmen’s Circle New York, Reprinted in English by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., 1972, 1993.
