Evgeniia Fizdel was born in 1923 in Odessa, then Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (today Odesa, Ukraine). She lived with her parents in Odessa when in August 1937 her father, Adol’f Fizdel, was arrested as a “German spy” and sent to a Soviet concentration camp. In 1940, he was released from the camp. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Evgeniia evacuated to Ufa, a city in the Urals, where she continued her medical training. In 1944, she was drafted into the Soviet army and as a military doctor and participated in the liberation of Poland and Germany.