Vladka meed

Nationality: American originally Polish: immigrated to the United States , Born: Fajga Peltel, Warsaw, Family: Married Benjamin Meed. Since founder and executive director, teachers' training program on Holocaust and Jewish resistance.

Abba kovner

Contributor to Forverts magazine, ca. She was the only member of the family to have survived the Holocaust. She was 17 when the German army entered Warsaw and was a member of the Jewish underground resistance from the first days of the occupation. She took the name Vladka when she was smuggled into the "Aryan" side of Warsaw under the name Wladyslawa Kowalska, a false identity obtained from an old Polish passport.

Activism was central to the girl's life from a very early age. Her father, a salesman, was a member of the Jewish Labor Bund, a mass organization in czarist Russia and interwar Poland that sought to transform the lives of the Jewish working poor through socialist organizing and secular Yiddish culture. The bund played a key role in the resistance; many members of the Zydowska Organazcja Bojowa Jewish Fighting Organization were from its ranks.

She attended the primary school of the Jewish Labor Bund starting at the age of six. Although her family spoke Yiddish in their home, the girl spoke fluent Polish, which she learned in the bundist school. Her command of Polish was a key factor in her survival and her ability to "pass" on the Aryan side. Vladka married Benjamin Meed, born Miedzyrzecki, who was one of four children of an observant Jewish family.

He had been her closest friend on the Aryan side and was also active in the resistance.