Vladka Meed | Resistance courier, 90

Vladka Meed, 90, a courier and weapons smuggler for the Jewish resistance in Poland during World War II who published a harrowing early chronicle of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, died Nov. 21 at her daughter's home in Paradise Valley, Ariz.

The death was confirmed by her son, Steven Meed. The cause was Alzheimer's disease.

Mrs. Meed was born Feigel Peltel in Warsaw on Dec. 29, 1921. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, she and hundreds of thousands of other Jews were systematically rounded up and forced into a squalid Warsaw ghetto of one-square mile.

Mrs. Meed was largely on her own after 1942. Her father, a garment worker, died of pneumonia in the ghetto, and her mother and two siblings perished at the Treblinka death camp after a period of mass deportations from the ghetto.

She joined the Jewish Fighting Organization, known by its Polish initials ZOB. With her Aryan looks and fluency in Polish, she passed as a gentile, using forged identification papers, and lived for extended periods amid the ethnic Polish population. Her code name was Vladka, a name she kept.

She worked on both sides of the ghetto walls to obtain weapons and ammunition on the black market and find hiding places for children and adults. She also acted as a courier for the Jewish underground, hiding documents in her shoe.

Mrs. Meed smuggled weapons and ammunition in preparation for the uprising that launched on April 19, 1943. Fighting lasted 27 days and ended with the ghetto annihilated.

Afterward, she helped arrange for hiding places for the survivors. She stayed in Poland until the Russians liberated the country toward the end of the war.

In 1945, she married Benjamin Miedzyrzeck, another resistance member, and they made their way to American lines. The next year, they came to the United States on a boat of displaced persons through the aid of the Jewish Labor Committee. They officially changed their names to Benjamin and Vladka Meed in the 1950s.

Ben Meed died in 2006 at 88. Survivors include two children, Anna Scherzer and Steven Meed, and five grandchildren. - Washington Post