Resistance activist in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Chawka Folman-Raban was born on April 19, 1924, in Kielce. In the Warsaw Ghetto, she was an activist with Dror, a youth organization associated with the Zionist-socialist party Poale Zion, and a student at the underground gymnasium run by that organization. She lived at Dzielna 43, then Dzielna 34, where Dror was headquartered. As a liaison for the underground, she traveled to many cities in occupied Poland. She was arrested in December 1942 in Krakow following an attack on the Cyganeria café by members of the Jewish Combat Organization. Using false documents under the name Emma Marciniak, after interrogation, she was identified as a Polish woman helping Jews and deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She was then sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was liberated. After the war, she returned to Poland and emigrated to Palestine in 1947. She helped organize Kibbutz Lochamei ha-Geta'ot – the Ghetto Fighters' Kibbutz, where she later lived for many years.
"My name is Chawka. (...) At home, they called me Ewa. (...) I was proud to be a Varsovian. In the underground and on the Aryan side, I had documents under the name Emma Marciniak. (...) Around us, in Warsaw, everything was changing. Our previous world collapsed. We found ourselves in a closed ghetto. Hunger was constantly increasing. The winter of 1940/41 was extremely harsh. Every day, hundreds of people died of hunger and cold. The streets of the ghetto were littered with the corpses of skeletal people who fell asleep covered with newspaper and never woke up again," she described the ghetto in her book "I Didn't Part With Them."
She died on January 9, 2014 in Israel.
