On January 10, 2014, a most dedicated Jewish heroine was laid to rest. From her early childhood until the day of her passing, three months short of her 90th birthday, Chavka Folman was involved in activities for the sake of her people, among them unimaginable heroic deeds.
Chavka was born in 1924 in Kielce, Poland, the daughter of Rosalie and Abraham-Benjamin Folman and the younger sister of Wolf and Mordechai. The family moved to Warsaw during Chavka’s early childhood into a building that faced the headquarters of the HeChalutz youth movement, a most propitious coincidence. After the Germans occupied Poland, the building became the center of the developing underground movement where the clandestine “Gymnasia of the Dror” movement, a higher educational institute, was established. Chavka was among the graduates of the Gymnasium’s first seminar; its faculty included the historian Dr. Emmanuel Ringleblum and the poet Yitzhak Katznelson.
“I still hear his strong, deep voice reading from the Prophets,” Chavka recalled Katznelson with emotion. “Through his words he conveyed a meaning we had not previously known and which we didn’t find in the books of the Bible.”
The environment of the “Gymnasia” inspired Chavka to join the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa, (ZOB), the Jewish Fighting Organization, and volunteer for a most precarious, critical task. Because she looked Polish, she was able to use false Polish papers and serve as a liaison between the ghetto and the outside world, bringing weapons, food and secret information into the ghetto.
In late December 1942, she accompanied Antek Zuckerman, one of the fighters in ZOB, to Krakow. On the day of their arrival, the Jewish Fighting Organization conducted a raid on the café “Zingaria,” a known recreational spot for German soldiers. In the clash with the Germans, Zuckerman was wounded but managed to return to Warsaw. Chavka, however, was caught and sent to Auschwitz as a political prisoner. Intuitively, she did not reveal her Jewish identity. Towards the end of the war she was transferred with other prisoners to Ravensbrueck and then through a prisoner exchange was sent to Sweden.
There she learned that her two brothers had been killed fighting the Germans in Warsaw. She already knew that her father had been murdered in Treblinka. She returned to Poland to find her mother alive and stayed there for the rest of the war, resuming her role as a ZOB fighter.
In 1947 Chavka immigrated to Israel and became one of the founders of Kibbutz Lohamei Ha’Getaot, joining a number of her fellow ZOB fighters, such as Zivia Lubetkin, Antek Zuckerman and Haskel (Ezekiel) Raban.
Chavka married Haskel Raban and together they had three children and twelve grandchildren. She joined the education department at the Ghetto Fighters House, and continued the fight for fellow Jews, now in a spiritual sense. She became a teacher and injected young and old with her passionate love of Israel and Zionist devotion.