Review: The Girl Who Fought Back: Vladka Meed and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
The Girl Who Fought Back: Vladka Meed and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising
by Joshua M. Greene
Scholastic Focus, 2024
Category: Middle Grade
Reviewer: Jeanette Brod
Buy at Bookshop.org
The Girl Who Fought Back is an insider's account of the historic Warsaw Ghetto uprising that ironically finds our heroine stranded outside the ghetto walls on the day the revolt begins. But Vladka Meed’s story does not start there. It begins, as do many Holocaust stories, with the shocking downward spiral that afflicts Jewish families who were citizens of European cities.
What sets this story apart is the portrait of despair in the life of a young woman who loses first family members, then friends, and finally fellow Resistance fighters. Survivor guilt permeates Vladka’s choices and actions with the recurring refrain, “Why am I still alive?” This telling is not for the faint-hearted. The internal dialogue is as honest as it is brutal. What balances the storytelling is the humanity and courage of a young woman who decides that if she must die, she will die fighting.
As a teen who passed as non-Jewish in the early phases of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Vladka thought that perhaps her looks and Polish language fluency could help her family and later, the Resistance. The Girl Who Fought Back is not just a personal story, but a portrait of a network of people committed to giving meaning to their lives in a final grandiose gesture of revolt and rebellion. There was no question they would die. But remarkably, they held off the German army for four weeks. The book is a tribute to all those who fought. We meet many of them in the story’s pages.
The Girl Who Fought Back is an insider's account of the historic Warsaw Ghetto uprising that ironically finds our heroine stranded outside the ghetto walls on the day the revolt begins. But Vladka Meed’s story does not start there. It begins, as do many Holocaust stories, with the shocking downward spiral that afflicts Jewish families who were citizens of European cities.
What sets this story apart is the portrait of despair in the life of a young woman who loses first family members, then friends, and finally fellow Resistance fighters. Survivor guilt permeates Vladka’s choices and actions with the recurring refrain, “Why am I still alive?” This telling is not for the faint-hearted. The internal dialogue is as honest as it is brutal. What balances the storytelling is the humanity and courage of a young woman who decides that if she must die, she will die fighting.
As a teen who passed as non-Jewish in the early phases of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, Vladka thought that perhaps her looks and Polish language fluency could help her family and later, the Resistance. The Girl Who Fought Back is not just a personal story, but a portrait of a network of people committed to giving meaning to their lives in a final grandiose gesture of revolt and rebellion. There was no question they would die. But remarkably, they held off the German army for four weeks. The book is a tribute to all those who fought. We meet many of them in the story’s pages.
Vladka is asked by the Underground to create a new identity on the outside. The seamstress skills that kept her employed with a valid work permit inside the Ghetto serve her well again. The Underground tasks her with finding homes for Jewish children with local Polish families. The task is two-fold: ask a parent inside the Ghetto to give up their child; and find a couple willing to risk taking them. Some months later, Vladka is promoted to gunrunner. There again the task is two-fold: buy arms; and smuggle them into the Ghetto.
After the Ghetto revolt, the storytelling takes a gentler turn. On a farm where she is sent to rest, Vladka spends time with Ben Meed. They marry and immigrate to New York. Vladka spends the rest of her days as a Holocaust educator. She and her husband were instrumental in the founding of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and the survivor database that is housed there.
The Girl Who Fought Back: Vladka Meed and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising interweaves the story of Vladka and her compatriots with chapters that provide historical context and contain black and white photos. The book also includes a glossary. It is well worth reading for its window into a world usually unseen despite the myriad of books about the Holocaust.
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