 Hava was born on December 25, 1929 in the town of Świerże in Eastern Poland to Yerachmiel Len and Esther Wienograd Len.In early 1940, after the Soviet invasion of Poland and the fall of the Second Polish Republic, Yerachmiel was arrested on charges of political dissent and deported to a gulag in Siberia with the rest of his family.After a year in the gulag, Hava and her family were sent to work on a kolkhoz in order to help feed the proliferous ranks of the Soviet Army.