Warsaw ghetto escaper who spent the rest of his life helping other Holocaust survivors
Benjamin Meed saved 200,000 Holocaust survivors from oblivion. He himself survived the Warsaw Ghetto starvation, revolt and final slaughter. At the end of it all he was searching for a new purpose in life and found it among his fellow survivors.
For more than three decades many had felt ignored and forgotten. Meed believed they had a role as living witnesses to a shameful chapter of history and also felt that the fate they shared forged a powerful potential bond between them. But it was not until 36 years after the war, by which time he and most of his fellow survivors had made new lives for themselves, that he felt the time was ripe to organise them. He summoned a World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust survivors, to meet in Israel. He was overwhelmed by the response — 10,000 flocked to the meeting. A gathering in Washington two years later pulled in 20,000. That conference started a worldwide register of Holocaust survivors, which at the last count contained just under 200,000 names. It rapidly became the principal source of help for those still searching for missing relatives. Hundreds were reunited by the register.
The Washington conference also set up the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, which gave the survivors a formal identity. Meed was the president of the organisation until he died.
He also helped to create institutions to remember the millions who did not survive, playing a key role in setting up the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. It opened in Washington in l993. Four years later came the Museum of Jewish Heritage — a living memorial to the Holocaust in New York. But the first institution he created was the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organisation in l966. Its aim was to rebut the recurring claim that the Jews of Warsaw had been passive victims.
Meed was born Benjamin Miedzyrzecki in Warsaw, one of four children in a practising Jewish family. He was 21 and in the early stages of business studies when the German Army and the SS storm troops who came in their wake herded the Warsaw Jews into a ghetto. Meed was recruited by the Nazis as a forced labourer, gathering bricks from bombed buildings and getting them on railway transports to Germany for reuse. The work took him regularly and officially outside the ghetto and with his genius for disguises, he smuggled out his parents and sister through unguarded sewers and found them a hiding place. His other sister and brother could not join the escape party and were murdered in the Treblinka death camp.
Meed joined the Polish underground resistance where one of his comrades was a young Jewish woman called Vladka. He smuggled her through the sewers out of the ghetto and they stayed in contact throughout their clandestine assignments. As soon as the Nazis were driven out of Poland by the advancing Soviet Army, they were married.
They wanted to start a new life away from reminders of the wartime horrors and arrived in New York in l946 with just $8. Meed started an export/import business, which prospered and also helped him to finance his Holocaust remembrance work.
He is survived by Vladka, and by a son and daughter.
Benjamin Meed, organiser of Holocaust survivors, was born on February 19, 1918. He died on October 22, 2006, aged 88.
