Elena Zavadskaiia was born in 1925 in Mogilev-Podol’skii, then USSR (today Mohyliv-Podil’skii, Ukraine). Her parents, Evgenii and Konstantsiia Zavadskiii, were ethnic Poles, and because of their nationality in 1937 they became potential targets of order #00447. On November 1, 1937, her father was arrested. Soon after, her mother, Konstantsiia, was told that Evgenii had been sentenced to “ten years of corrective labor camps without the right of correspondence”—a Soviet euphemism for a sentence of execution by shooting.