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Chava Livni, née Eva Fürstová, was born on 21 July 1926 into an assimilated, German-speaking Jewish family in Bratislava. In 1941 she joined the Zionist youth movement Makabi Hacair. The movement organised practical retraining courses, where whole groups of youths lived in a communal way and prepared to emigrate to Palestine. The movement later specialised in helping persecuted Jews. Chava participated in the forging of documents. The Bratislava Jews were raided on 29 September 1944, and the whole of the Fürst family was arrested. They were taken to a camp in Sereď and then to Auschwitz. Chava stayed together with her younger sister Agi. Their mother was sent straight into the gas chambers. Chava and her sister were transferred to Freiberg near Dresden, which was part of Flossenbürg concentration camp; they worked in a factory making aircraft parts. In late April 1945 they were taken to Mauthausen concentration camp, where they were liberated. They returned to Bratislava and began working with Jewish war orphans in a villa that was assigned to them. Chava met Max Lieben there; the two married in 1946. They travelled to Haifa in May 1949. At first, they lived in a kibbutz, but they later moved into a house of their own in Kiryat Tivon, where they live to this day.
