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- [00:01]
Samuel Kassow
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [00:05]
Alex Weiser
Welcome to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Alex Weiser. I'm the Public Programs Director of yivo. We're so pleased to have you here with us today for a discussion of a new translation of Vladka Mead's On Both Sides of the A Resistance Fighter's Firsthand Account of the Warsaw Ghetto. We're joined by translator Stephen D. Mead and scholar Samuel Cassowa. And we're really pleased to be bringing this event in partnership with the Gross Family center for the Study of Antisemitism and the Holocaust. So thank you to the Gross Family center for co sponsoring this with us. And I want to say that for those interested in this book, you can pre order it through YIVO's online store and we'll put a link in the chat for that right now. And because it's Cyber Monday, it's 15% off. So if you want a good deal as you get ready to read this book, which is coming out very soon, the YIVO Store is a great place to get it. So again, 15% off today. So we're really pleased with this discussion of this new translation of the 1948 Yiddish memoir of Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighter Vlad Gamid. This new translation has been done by Stephen D. Mead. Stephen is a retired internist and rheumatologist who earned his medical degree from New York University, where he also later served as an Assistant professor of medicine. A founder of the Second Generation Group in New York City, he has spoken widely on his parents experience in the Warsaw Ghetto. And as I mentioned, we're really pleased to have Professor Samuel Kassow interviewing Stephen about this book. Samuel Kassow, Charles H. Northam, professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Jewish research. From 2006 until 2013, he was the lead historian for two galleries of the Pauline Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Professor Kassow is the author of who Will Write Our History, Emmanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive and the translator of Warsaw Testament by Rahul Auerbach, which received a National Jewish Book Award. Congratulations, Sam. A child of Holocaust survivors, Professor Kassow was born in a displaced persons camp in Germany. So thank you both so much for joining us for this conversation. I'll hand it over to you.
- [02:14]
Samuel Kassow
Okay, well, thanks Alex, for that very nice introduction. Thanks to the YIVO for organizing this event and it's a real pleasure to have a chance to talk to Steven Nead about His remarkable mother. And about the amazing memoir that she wrote. I had the privilege of knowing Flat Gamid. She would ask me to hold lectures for high school teachers. She was very much interested in Holocaust education. And I always remember that wherever she was, she filled the room. She was the key person in whatever room she was in. She had an amazing presence. She was very, very formidable and at the same time very, very warm. She had a real combination of unique qualities. And I miss her very much. And one of my most cherished possessions is a long thank you note in Yiddish that she sent me in the mid-90s after a lecture that I had for her. And so I'm very happy, happy to have a chance to talk about this new edition of a book that originally appeared many years ago. And I want to start our discussion by asking Stephen Mead, who was Flat Gamid and why is she important historically?
- [04:03]
Stephen D. Mead
Just as you said that, I was thinking it's relevant because she had to, at many levels, invent herself. Basically, she was just another young woman, I think 17, 18 when the war broke out. About three years older than that during the most active period. And there was no guidebook there. There was no way of learning how to do what she was doing, about to do, which was to every day, in some way or another, put her own life on the line. Finding arms and getting them into the ghetto, taking some child who was still in the ghetto and managing to help smuggle that child into Warsaw, the non Jewish part of Warsaw, and then following up and keeping that person. Okay. Or taking care of an elderly Jew who didn't have any other means of being taken care of and making sure that they were provided for or traveling to other cities. And it's a whole myriad of things. And the common denominator is she did it. Whether she did it perfectly or made mistakes. Every morning she got up again and she did whatever appeared to be the necessity of the moment of taking care of people and staying alive.
- [05:38]
Samuel Kassow
How, how exactly did she manage to survive? I know that she had many, many close calls, but can you just very briefly kind of share with the audience how she was? I mean, I remember, you know, the statistics were that of the Warsaw Jews who were under German occupation. The overall survival rate was under 2%. So how did she manage to do it?
- [06:07]
Stephen D. Mead
She had a combination of a really sharp mind with an almost photogenic, but whatever, a photographic memory. She was able to hold a huge amount of information in her brain, not take notes and act on it. And although we are trying to be polite, she had balls of steel. She was impermeable to pain. Not to pain. She was impermeable to showing fear. She had it, but she somehow managed to compartmentalize it. And she had had a background of being part of the young, the young next generation of leaders of the Bund. Her area was. She was raised as a member of Bund Youth. That was the majority of people who were in Warsaw in her generation, what they were doing, but not the majority of people who stayed and were in the ghetto at the time of the. Of the uprising. The. And more importantly, she was part of a group that most of them did get killed. And so there were so few left of them. They did not stay in Warsaw, since nobody stayed in Warsaw, but wherever they did go, they formed a community among themselves. And that was their chevre. That was their. It was the glue that kept them all together.
- [07:54]
Samuel Kassow
Yeah, I was very struck by the importance of that Bund family, especially during and after the liquidation of the ghetto. It really was like a second family, especially after she lost her entire first family, who were deported to Treblinka in the summer of 1942. But she talks about Abrasha Blum, she talks about Marek Edelman, about Micha Kleptisch, about Salman Friedrich, about many others. And I'm just wondering if you could say a little bit more about what those people meant to her.
- [08:44]
Stephen D. Mead
Well, certainly they were her second family, but they were also almost entirely a couple years ahead of her in age. And they formed a model of what you were supposed to do to help others. And she was extremely taken by them, and they were taken by her because she was so sharp, so eager, so ready to do any task and then able to do it and then to do it again and again, that she really stood out. She wasn't unique. There were many other young women who became careers as well, but there was something special about Vladka. And anybody who's ever dealt with my mother knows this is somebody who is not to be stiped, to be trifled with.
- [09:37]
Samuel Kassow
One of the things that I still can't quite figure out about your mother, because I know quite a bit about Poland. I've been there many, many times, and I worked on the Poland Museum. But your mother grew up in a Jewish milieu. She didn't grow up in that milieu of Polish Jews who were really assimilated to Polish culture, who had had a lot of Polish friends who really saw themselves as Poles. I mean, she talks about growing up in a home which, although there was a lot of sympathy for the bung. There was the observance of Friday night. Her mother tried to keep, in some ways, a traditional Jewish home For most Jews who grew up in a Jewish milieu in Poland, even if they spoke Polish very well, there were many, many giveaways where Poles could intuit that that person was not Polish, but Jewish. One of the things that amazed me is how your mother was able to pull it off, how she was able to really speak like a Pole, to act like a Pole, to pass like a Polish woman. And that really is remarkable. I'm not sure one has to answer that question, but it's a talent that people have to appreciate because it was very, very tough for Jews trying to pass as polls to really pull it off. It took a special gift. I'm wondering if you could say something about how her book, which the first edition appeared in Yiddish after the war. When she came to America in 1946, she was interviewed by the Jewish Daily Forward. She serialized her memoirs in the foreword. She went on a speaking tour, and then the Yiddish edition of the book was published, I think in what, 48, 48, 9. And then the English edition appeared in
- [12:05]
Stephen D. Mead
it's 20 some odd years later. It appears in 1971. First time around.
- [12:12]
Samuel Kassow
Right. So how was the book initially received and what was the impact of that reception on your mother? How did she. How did she react to the reception of her book?
- [12:27]
Stephen D. Mead
There's a piece of this which, because at around this age, I'm three, two years old, I really didn't understand. I always perceived that Vladka was. She could be comfortable in any situation and she had some kind of gift that made people, even on first meeting her, accept her and trust her and believe that she has seen something and can then transmit that vision to other people in a way that a lot of other people couldn't. I was just going to go back to one other thing, which is I had one observation about my mother and Polish versus Yiddish. Most people, when they get elderly and if their memory starts to fail, they start to do more and more in whatever was their original mameloshen, their original language. But it turned out that for Blodka, no matter what was going on at home, she had developed her Polish even more so than her Yiddish. So she was gifted and very eloquent in both. But as she started to deteriorate, what was striking was what a big portion of her vocabulary and her speech and what she was talking about was being expressed in Polish.
- [14:03]
Samuel Kassow
That's a very, very striking fact, especially for A Yiddishist? Yeah. I wouldn't. I would not have thought that. So what impelled you? I mean, so since there was a translation of the book, why did you decide to do a second one?
- [14:22]
Stephen D. Mead
When the book was originally published, I was about 19 or 20, depending on where. And I was not really a translator. I was working with my mother. And we put together whatever seemed to be reasonable and appropriate. But I always felt that the book had lost so much of its original power in being translated into Yiddish. I mean, being translated from Yiddish into English. And there were four or five other foreign languages that also it was translated into. And I have no idea how accurately or passionately the translations work. But for 40 years, that was the translation that was out there. But I always had, as a bucket list plan. I said, when I grow up, I'm going to go back to this book and fix it up. Because I thought that the writing, in terms of. Not the passion, but in terms of the grammar was really not doing justice to the. To my mother's gifts of language. And so when Covid started and I had to stop working, I took that on as just a project. I didn't know, because I had never translated a book from scratch before, if I could. But I was very surprised to see that I had somehow absorbed enough of the original language and intent that I could write. And I also felt that this was. Now we're talking about 80 years more. More than 80 years since the first book was published. And the world had changed. And most of the people in the audience, the people who would read the book, are not people who have any solid sense by themselves of what was the Warsaw Ghetto, of what was the uprising, of what was the reason to go back to the classic line of why did they go like lambs to the slaughter? Because everybody sort of has that in the background of their understanding, it seems. And I. I wanted to try to, in a slight way, take the facts as they were printed out in 1948 and make the record straight again, that there was a lot of heroism, there was a lot of resistance, there was a lot that was going on. But it didn't look like a John Wayne movie. It was much more subtle, with the emphasis throughout the time of the ghetto being your job was to stay alive and to keep your own family alive. And to do anything that was possible to avoid there being pain and suffering in a situation where everyone's going to go through pain and suffering.
- [17:30]
Samuel Kassow
I think, in fact, that one of the most important lessons from your mother's book is to remind us to take a larger and a more empathetic feeling few of resistance, that very, very, very few people had access to firearms. And your mother really points out that the real story of resistance was this struggle on the part of ordinary Jews to keep it together and to keep their dignity and to resist the German attempts to dehumanize them. And I was very, very impressed by her account of how before the deportations, she would be asked by the Bundest youth organization to lecture to ordinary Jews after curfew about parrots about Yiddish culture. And she described the degree to which those people who were hungry and who were fearful, they listened to her with rapt attention. This idea of cultural resistance, spiritual resistance, was very important. And unfortunately, after the war, in certain circles, there was a kind of a tendency, for various reasons, to make an invidious comparison between the, quote, unquote, heroic fighters who saved the honor of the Jewish people, so to speak, by fighting, and then the masses of Jews who simply went to their deaths, the implication being that the fighters were somehow better. And one saw this especially in Israel in the early years, where there was this tendency to latch onto the Warsaw Ghetto uprising as the act that saved the honor of the Jewish people, as if ordinary Jews were. Were not in any way concerned with saving national honor. And I think one of the great lessons of your mother's book is to remind us to really show a lot of empathy for the struggle that ordinary Jews waged in the face of overwhelming odds. And she really brings that out very, very well. Your mother, as we know, was a Bundist before the war. The Bund, as we all know, was anti Zionist. We know that after the war, Bunda survivors changed. Their attitude toward the state of Israel became more accepting. I'm wondering, could you talk a bit about how your mom's attitude towards Israel evolved over the years? Because I remember spending time with her in Israel where I was asked to give lectures. So could you say something about that?
- [20:34]
Stephen D. Mead
Well, in the simple phrase, she softened. She started off being a true believer of Bund. She believed in the concept of Duikkeit, that you do your service towards, your service towards humanity where you are, you don't go to another place. And so she had been raised in a world where the lesson was that whatever you're going to do for the Jewish people needs to be done where there are Jewish people. And in this case, it would have been in Poland or in some of the surrounding places. She didn't ever object to Zionism. It's just that it didn't speak to her the same way now, after 25 or 30 years of going regularly to L' Hama get' to train their staff about the things that happened in the ghetto and to speak to audiences in Israel about what had happened and what was lost and what the fights were about. She developed a broader philosophy, shall we say. She didn't like a lot of things that had evolved in terms of the politics in Israel, but it was her people and it was her family. And after a while, she was quite the supporter. If you take that up to the present. She would have been very kind of two minds about how to view the current Israeli situation, because there was a part of her that said, this is not a fight that should be had. And there was another part that said, but this is what you must do to keep the Jewish people going. And she held both thoughts in her head,
- [22:38]
Samuel Kassow
speaking about this very tough situation that Jews find themselves in now, especially after October 7, in this time of increased antisemitism. What would you like readers, what would be the takeaway that you'd like readers to take away from this new edition? What would you like them to learn?
- [23:03]
Stephen D. Mead
I would like to transmit, somehow, without being too pedantic about it, a sense of how complicated was the situation for the typical Jew, that here you were in. In a world that, for all of its terrors and everything, had left most Jews, at least alone enough to be able to survive, to be alive. And you were now being confronted by something unexpected at all, which was the idea that no matter what you do, you and your family and your people are going to be wiped out. And it wouldn't make much of a difference if you are rich or poor or anything. Everybody was going to be suffering. And that kind of dichotomy that you couldn't run away from it because there was no place to run. You couldn't have weapons that you could use. My mother used to say, you know, Jews for thousands of years had learned that there were many Amaleks, there were many people who disliked the Jews or despised them or who wanted to kill them. But our history had been the basic. They came, they tried, they hurt some of us, but we survived and we went on. And so there was no reason in her circles for people to expect that this one, even with more technology, was going to be at some core level. It was not going to be different than the line of history through the previous 2,000 years. It was very hard to learn to do something else. So what most people were concentrating on was, is providing for their Families providing for their children. Finding a place to. With a job when having a job. And a. I am forgetting the word for in used in German for having a labor card. But whatever it was, people were just trying to do what could easily give them and their children and their parents and whatever else. People were trying to just keep them going with dignity. It really was only in the last two, three months of the ghetto as a ghetto. Which would have been the first couple months of 1943. That number one, all, almost everybody who was not able to work in a factory had already been evicted. The people who were left and who formed into the zob, the Job, the Jewish Fighting Organization. They were a very, very small number. A fraction of what had been the ghetto. They had to kind of switch their thinking about what you had to do if you were going to go on. At the point that there was no hope for anybody. Yes, people did understand that they would have to stand and just. Well, let's just stand and stand. But she always understood that you have to eke your dignity. You have to keep your humanity. You have to remember that you have an obligation in a larger world. And you cannot be selfish just about yourself. Even when that's the only thing you have available.
- [26:59]
Samuel Kassow
When I read the book for the first time I read the original Yiddish edition. One of the things that I learned from that book. Or that I really remember learning from the book. Is that it explained what seemed to be a rather surprising fact. Which is that the Warsaw Ghetto uprising happened at all. When you think of it, why should there have been an uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto? I mean, if you look at the Vilna Ghetto and the Bialystok Ghetto, just to give you two examples there, the fighters were actually better armed. You might say they were better organized. But they were rejected by the ghetto population. When the fighters in the Vilna ghetto called for. For support from the Jews in the rest of the ghetto, they rejected them. They supported Jacob Gens, the head of the Judenrat in the Bialystok ghetto. The Jews supported Froy and Barash. They didn't support the fighters. And I asked myself, why was Warsaw different? And your mother helps provide an answer to that question. That is that whereas in Bialystok and in Vilna the ghettos functioned. There were leaders who could provide some hope. That is, let's work hard. Let's work in German factories. We'll buy time. We'll wait for a miracle. But in the meantime, there was barely enough food. But there was food. There was Jewish leadership. And if I were a young person in the Vilna ghetto, and I said, let's fight for the honor of the Jewish people, because they're going to kill us anyway. But I'm sharing a room with a family and the father's a tailor working in a shop which has just gotten four months of order, orders to make German uniforms. Is this tailor, are these non fighters going to want to commit suicide just so these young kids could fight for Jewish honor? And in most ghettos, as long as there was hope, the answer was no. But what your mother brings out is the fact that because the Judenrat in Warsaw basically disappeared, because Adam Chernyakov committed suicide, because over the course of seven weeks, the Jewish police, to the great shame of the Jewish people, acted like bloodhounds, catching Jews and handing them over. The sense of anger, the sense of shame was so great that when the pause began in September, when people had a chance to recover from their paralysis and their confusion, they said, next time we're going to fight back. Now what's very important to remember. The Israeli scholar Javi Dreyfus points this out in her very important book that came out a couple years ago. Without the so called civilians in the Warsaw Ghetto, without the non fighters, the Ghetto uprising could never have happened. Why do I say that? Because the Jews who were not in the fighting organization built 750 bunkers. 750 bunkers. Without those bunkers, the fighters could not have hidden out. The fighters could not have maneuvered. It took the Germans a whole month to clear the ghetto. So the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was a real union between the fighters, both those of the Jewish fighting organization and the revisionists on one hand, and ordinary Jews on the other. Mordechai Anilevich and the command staff found refuge in the bunker on Mila 18, which was built by Jewish smugglers. So this is just an example. And this is one of the most valuable contributions that your mother's book makes. I was also very struck by how she describes the Poles. The book I translated Rachel Oyerbakh's memoirs. Rachel Oyerbakh has a more charitable description of Polish behavior, in part because she knew a section of the Polish population, the liberal, progressive intelligentsia, that your mother was too young to know. But your mother's description of Polish behavior, which accords with that of most survivors, is somewhat negative, to put it mildly. But also I detect a deep note of disappointment. That is, she pays tribute to Polish courage. She pays tribute to. To the patriotism, to the selfless self sacrifice that the Poles show during the Polish uprising. She points out the sacrifice that Poles undertook to help Polish children who were driven out of their homes. And then she keeps asking, why didn't they show that same care about us? Why did they treat us as total strangers and not as fellow citizens? And I'm wondering if you could comment about that.
- [33:02]
Stephen D. Mead
A couple comments, although you've highlighted a lot of what she writes. My mother was still an idealistic person. She had come onto the scene to do good in the world. And it was a huge disappointment to her and to all of her colleagues to see how little everybody else in the world cared about what would happen to the Jews in any situation. The expectation was that there would be at least military aid. There was hardly any. There would be bombings, like the discussions later about the bombing of Auschwitz. And those didn't happen. And it was clear that they had nobody in the world who was listening. Even when they could get a short wave radio up and broadcasting, nobody would be listening to. And that really, first of all, if you start off being idealistic, it's devastating to know that everybody has died and the world is not a nice place. And that was over and over again, her experience. But she had continuously, she always looked for, even though she kept on identifying the crabbiness, the lack of concern of most of the people, whether they were Poles or Lithuanians or the most notorious people at that time were, of course, the soldiers from Ukraine. That was sort of like the definition of a cruel peasant, that that's what you were surrounded with. But against that, what she took pride in and what she mentions over and over again in her book is the small acts of compassion that the Jews did for each other because nobody else was helping. That allowed people to, to some degree, get through the day, get through the week, get through the month, and left some small number of them still around by March and April of 1943 for the actual Warsaw Ghetto uprising.
- [35:36]
Samuel Kassow
One of my favorite parts of the book are the personal moments. How she meets your father, how they get closer. Can you say a little about that? And I'd rather read it.
- [35:52]
Stephen D. Mead
Yeah. I had chosen. This is one of the regalies I had chosen in case I need it, something to be an example that gives the flavor of it. And here I'll take some credit in that my mother toned down her own sense of humor in this. So I take credit for bringing back in a little bit of lightness to this. And this is at a point that my mother has just been recruited to become a courier, maybe the first Maybe the third of all of the couriers. And he has been assigned to go to the Aryan side by going there with a work team of slave labor coming out of the ghetto. And the person who is to lead her to this person, to lead her to it is, as it turns out, my father, that they had not met before then. And he meets him for the first time. Let me, let me. Let me just give one second on this. Hey. So she's given an address of a young comrade within the ghetto who will place her into one of these labor teams. And these are groups of Jews who go outside the ghetto gates during the day and then have to return to the ghetto. She is told to find somebody named Czeslav Jindizevsky. He's my father. He goes to the house, knocks on the door. A woman eyes me suspiciously when I ask, does Czeslav Mjizevsky live here? She looks back into the apartment and says, he's still sleeping. Do you need to wake him right now? Typical of Latke, yes, I do. And I stand in the doorway, waiting. The old lady looks at me, then turns, hobbles back into a dark corner. And then I hear a hushed conversation, the creak of a bed. And out of the darkness appears a young red haired man with deep, clear blue eyes. And certainly he's been sleeping. He stands just in his bedclothes, his curly hair sticking out in every direction. He's not looking his best. He seems startled for a moment, but then he smiles and offers his hand. Sheslak Nyndizeki. Can I help you? It is not great drama, and it's not a massive battle, but it is the fact that even in that situation, she can see the irony of the person who is going to be involved with her. And they do remain together pretty much from that day until they passed in the 21st century.
- [38:57]
Samuel Kassow
Well, that's a lovely. That's a wonderful way to close our discussion. And thank you very much. And I'm sure that the audience has some questions that they'd like to ask. So why don't we open it up to questions?
- [39:15]
Alex Weiser
Thank you both so much. We have lots of questions from the audience.
- [39:19]
Stephen D. Mead
Well, where to begin?
- [39:20]
Alex Weiser
Let's see. One question is, is there any new material in this that was left out of the original English version? Or is it really a matter of refining the prosecution, can you tell us a little more about the relationship between the two versions?
- [39:36]
Stephen D. Mead
Pretty much every word that was in the 1948 book translated is here, but filling in the space around it are all the gaps that my mother didn't want to talk about because she wasn't really talking so much about her experience and her being a hero or anything like that. She was speaking about the heroism of the others, the ones who passed, but who had done the job of maintaining the dignity of the Jewish people. But there was humor. There is a wonderful two page piece that turned up in one of the oral records, video records, about how my mother is on a mission that takes her through a Polish train station in the middle of the night when there is nobody around, but there's no other place to stay and wait. So she's there and she gets not accosted. She gets one of the Nazi soldiers who's also sitting at that train station starts to try to pick her up. And my mother's main piece of defense was that she has a bag which has money in it and some documents and all that, but sitting on top is a bag of chickens, of baby chicks that are chirping, chirping. And so this conversation is taking place surrounding these, these chirping birds. And she has to be at least attractive enough to not let the chickens interfere and yet have the chickens be enough of a deterrent so that nobody checks her bags. And I guess she wrote it better as a story than I just described, but it gives you an idea of the kinds of extra things there's also. My mother starts her story originally on the first day of deportations. In other words, the first four years in the ghetto are not part of her original story. But there were good again testimonies from a variety of movie sources that we then or I took them and fashioned them into an extra chapter, making very clear that this is not latke writing, but this is things that she said directly. And then there's things at the end which we added because of all the work and all the speaking that she had done through the next 40 years of her life, 50 years, 60 years of her life. And that included going to Poland, to Warsaw, in, in 1973, I think it was. It was right after, and I forget if I got the date wrong on it, but it was like Poland had just barely squeaked open the door to coming back to the country. Very few people were there. And what was left in Poland at that time was only about 4 or 5,000 living Jews and nothing more. And she's coming back now after 30 years or so of being away with my father, with Ben, and just seeing the loss, the total loss and denial of a Jewish life in Poland. It has gotten Better since then. But she saw it at a very bad moment and then stayed around for the next 25 years to help build the Jewish life.
- [43:31]
Alex Weiser
Fascinating. So this new version, it's not merely the original Yiddish book, but it's expanded with sources. And as you say, you make that clear in the edition? Yeah. Wonderful. So we have other viewers who are curious to know a little bit more about the mechanics of smuggling in the ghetto, of life on the other side of, you know, on the Aryan side, so to speak. Can you tell us a little bit more about, you know, what. What that looked like and how. How it worked?
- [43:59]
Stephen D. Mead
A whole bunch of answers. So hold on a second while I just focus down. I can't do it easily enough. So the number one thing is that you are pretending every minute of the day that you're somebody else. And you are doing that in a hostile environment. Because there were very few Coles who had any. Any feeling that they wanted things to be better for the remaining Jews. And the incentive from the Germans was that there was a price on the head of any Jew who could be found in hiding and brought back to the Germans. The Jew would be killed. But there's an extra side of it which is if it was known that a. A Polish family was sheltering a Jew, the threat and often carried out was that that family, the Polish family, would be also summarily killed. And so you had to find that very narrow band of people that you could reveal something to and still look totally innocent to everybody else around. And it was a continuous struggle. My mother, who, again, because she was fast thinking, good looking and spoke Polish perfectly, that's a lot of stuff that you can say about her. She managed, and she managed throughout these years to not lose. She was only once in jail in all of this time, but she was at that time acting as if she was an Aryan smuggler, that she wasn't Jewish. And she could maintain that image for all the previously mentioned reasons. And because you can't do this with guys, guys have some telltale signs that they're Jewish, which made them not be able to function in the open the way a woman would.
- [46:11]
Alex Weiser
We have a question about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the way that groups across the ideological spectrum came together, although perhaps not all the groups and the viewers asking about some of the specifics and maybe, Sam, you could jump in on this as well. I wonder if you could speak a little bit about, you know, the way that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was kind of across political lines and also whether or not this comes up in the book at all?
- [46:37]
Stephen D. Mead
Well, the sort of getting a group of people together and trusting each one, you know, trusting the other members of the group who were not your particular subset is always a challenge. And it took a very long time to recruit all of these groups into one group. And in the end there were still basically two organizations. One were the people who were the Young Zionists and the Young Bundes who finally got together and worked together. And then separately there were the. My mother always described them as the right wing, so I'm kind of stuck on that name. But that's not the name Indigenous. Yeah, the JWW or something like that. Bcw, yeah. So there. And, and these were, it would be like these weren't the, the stand, the standard Jews. But there was a group that had military experience because there were, there had been Jews in the Polish army certainly at the time of the, of the First World War. And they were part of the fight. And they kind of took some areas and they defended them, and the COB took other areas and defended them. And the real tragedy was there was no mechanism for the people of the right wing to get out of the ghetto and to get to some kind of, of safety. So what happened afterwards, after the fighting died down, is that whoever was still around mostly got picked off by the Germans, the Poles, the Polish patriotic underground. There were lots of people that were just hunting for Jews to kill them, but they all at some level function together.
- [48:47]
Alex Weiser
Tim's worthy, like the adder up note
- [48:49]
Stephen D. Mead
or anything you want to add, Sam?
- [48:53]
Samuel Kassow
Well, yeah, it was not easy to organize the fighting organization because it was very difficult to get the Zionists and the Bundas and the Communists into one organization. The Bund had good reasons for not wanting to work with the Zionists, even though personal relations were good. The Bund knew that no uprising could happen without some support from the Polish side. And the Bund also knew that there were Communists and very left wing Zionists within the Jewish fighting organization, and if the Poles knew about that, they would cut off all aid. So eventually you did have two organizations. The polls were very reluctant to give aid until after January 43, when they gave some aid, but not enough. The second organization, the Revisionists, actually were better armed than the Zobi, and they were led by people who had real military experience, but they didn't want to take orders from people that they regarded as kids. So nobody could agree and they couldn't fight together as one single organization.
- [50:22]
Stephen D. Mead
And that dispute even carried over to the survivors, certainly in New York, about who should be doing the commemorations for the Warsaw Ghetto from year to year.
- [50:38]
Samuel Kassow
Yeah.
- [50:38]
Stephen D. Mead
And the revisionists had their small group, the Bundes had a small group, and then there were more. But I guess that's the way all such battles end up being fought.
- [50:50]
Samuel Kassow
Yeah. By 1944, there was. The conflicts had already broken out about who should get the major credit. In Communist Poland, Bearmark said it was the communists. And in Israel they said it was the Zionist left wing youth organizations. Marek Edelman wrote a book where people thought the Bund was claiming the credit. And then of course, in 1977, when Menachem begin was first elected prime minister of Israel, who. Revisionists like Moshe Aaron said that there had been a conspiracy on the part of the labor movement to deny the credit that the revisionists deserve for the ghetto uprising. Part of that, of course, was that nobody really survived from the revisionist fighters, so they couldn't really tell their story.
- [51:45]
Alex Weiser
There are so many more questions and I see we're approaching the hour here, so I'm going to try to just summarize with two combination questions. One is about the personal dimension of this project. No, it's such fascinating history and it's really important. But we have some viewers that are curious if you could speak about what it was like growing up in the home of Vladka and Benjamin Mead and what is it like to revisit this story. As her son, I was in a
- [52:17]
Stephen D. Mead
privileged position in that my parents did not feel like they had been defeated or had anything to apologize for. And that put them in a very different place than the way that most people experienced coming to America and announcing to their friends and whoever they met that they had been in the war, they had been in a concentration camp. So the pride of part of it was just sort of built into the family. And that made my life easier. The irony is my mother and father talked a lot about the war and about the various things after the war, but they didn't talk to their children about it. It wasn't a secret. You couldn't avoid it. But I did not hear constantly about this heroic event or that terrible thing didn't happen. But being in a Yiddish speaking home had its own rationale and we did that. It's true that most of the people that we hung out with as a family were equally Bundists or socialists. So it worked.
- [53:37]
Alex Weiser
So this actually touches on what some of these next questions I was going to ask are about. But maybe you can go a little bit further. People are asking about how your mother related to life after the war, what post war trauma looked like for her. And also about her work on Holocaust memory beyond just this book, the work that she did with teachers and so on and so forth. Could you speak a little bit more about that?
- [54:05]
Stephen D. Mead
So my mother spent pretty much all of her active life one working within the Jewish Labor Committee, the workman's circle. She for a while, somewhere in there worked directly for Yivo or was a commentator on the radio for such. She always was doing something that was for this larger cause. She never just went down to just living with her own family. We got used to the idea that a no matter where we went in the world, there would be people who knew my parents and would adopt us too. We also were used to the idea that they traveled a great deal. By the end of they had made like six trips to eight continents giving talks about the experiences there. They were in New Zealand, in South Africa, and they have a number of places that you wouldn't have thought that they would get to going the other way for me. So I took it for granted this is just what families were like. I didn't know that there was a different way of being fascinating.
- [55:28]
Alex Weiser
Well, there's so many more questions. I wish we had time to get to all of them. But for those that are curious, I can definitely recommend pre ordering the book. As I mentioned at the beginning of the program, it's 15% off for cyber Monday from Yivo's shop. So I just put the link in the chat and yeah, lots, lots more to explore. Thank you so much, Steven. Thank you so much, Sam.
- [55:50]
Stephen D. Mead
Thank you. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Sam.