A fresh trans­la­tion of Vlad­ka Meed’s On Both Sides of the Wall brings read­ers into the War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing and the heart of the Jew­ish resis­tance to Nazism dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. Pri­or to the war, Feigele Pel­tel (she adopt­ed ​“Vlad­ka” as a nom de guerre upon leav­ing the ghet­to) lived with her low­er-mid­dle-class fam­i­ly in a War­saw sub­urb; how­ev­er, her mem­oir begins in media res dur­ing the Great Action, a series of depor­ta­tions that brought over two hun­dred thou­sand Jews from the War­saw Ghet­to to their deaths in Tre­blin­ka in 1942. Meed’s tex­tured telling of the Great Action con­veys the ter­ror and dread of that hor­ri­ble sum­mer, as the des­per­ate, starv­ing inhab­i­tants of the over­crowd­ed ghet­to spilled into its streets in search of either a work per­mit that might spare them from the rolling depor­ta­tions or a hid­ing place (meli­na) that might save them or their chil­dren. Through a com­bi­na­tion of inge­nu­ity and luck, Meed avoid­ed depor­ta­tion; her moth­er and sib­lings did not.

That Decem­ber, the twen­ty-one-year-old Meed — blessed with beau­ty, unac­cent­ed Pol­ish, and ​“Aryan” fea­tures — escaped the ghet­to and began work­ing as a couri­er for the Jew­ish Com­bat Orga­ni­za­tion (ZOB). Life in Aryan War­saw was no less per­ilous than life in the ghet­to as Meed had to avoid black­mail­ers, anti­se­mit­ic Poles, and Ger­man offi­cers. She helped smug­gle firearms and dyna­mite into the ghet­to and chil­dren out of the ghet­to, and she watched in pride and hor­ror from the Aryan side as the fight­ers launched the War­saw Ghet­to Upris­ing and as the Ger­mans ruth­less­ly destroyed the ghet­to. This upris­ing was the largest act of Jew­ish armed resis­tance against the Nazis, but Meed’s post-upris­ing exploits reveal less well-known but equal­ly thrilling dimen­sions of Jew­ish resis­tance and self-help dur­ing the Holo­caust. She con­tin­ued her work as a couri­er, fun­nel­ing moral, mate­r­i­al, and finan­cial sup­port to hid­den Jews out­side of War­saw. Along the way she met her future hus­band, Ben­jamin, a fel­low resister. After the war, the two immi­grat­ed to the Unit­ed States, where they were active in Holo­caust edu­ca­tion and com­mem­o­ra­tion until their deaths.

The mem­oir thrills with its depic­tion of Meed’s exploits, impress­es with its recount­ing of the resisters’ hero­ism, and infu­ri­ates with its por­tray­al of Pol­ish Chris­tians’ antipa­thy towards their Jew­ish neigh­bors but remains ground­ed in an unre­lent­ing sor­row over the fate of Warsaw’s Jews. Beyond its nar­ra­tive, Meed’s mem­oir is impor­tant for schol­ars of the Holo­caust in sev­er­al ways. Ini­tial­ly pub­lished in install­ments in Yid­dish in The Jew­ish Dai­ly For­ward imme­di­ate­ly after the end of the war, Meed’s account was an unusu­al­ly ear­ly and vivid Holo­caust tes­ti­mo­ny. An espe­cial­ly strik­ing piece of con­tent is Meed’s pre­war asso­ci­a­tion with the Bund, a Jew­ish and Yid­dish social­ist polit­i­cal par­ty. Meed’s Bundist affil­i­a­tion struc­tured much of her life dur­ing the war, pro­vid­ing her with com­mu­ni­ty and intro­duc­ing her to the ZOB; this demon­strates the remark­able con­ti­nu­ity of pre­war polit­i­cal and social bonds and orga­ni­za­tions dur­ing the Holocaust.

Oth­er tes­ti­monies giv­en by Meed over the course of her life enhance On Both Sides of the Wall, which was trans­lat­ed from Yid­dish by her son. Volu­mi­nous front mat­ter and oth­er sup­ple­men­tal mate­ri­als by Elie Wiesel, Judy Batal­ion, and Samuel D. Kas­sow, among oth­ers, fur­ther enrich the main narrative.