Mikhail Mirkin was born April 16, 1923, in the shtetl of Chereya, in the Vitebsk province of Belarus. During the war, he was a student of Belarus State University and eventually became a soldier in the Soviet Army. His entire family was executed by a Nazi firing squad on March 6, 1942, in their hometown ghetto. After the war, Mikhail started his own family and lived and worked in the U.S.S.R. He and his family moved to Chicago on January 31, 1983. He passed away on August 1, 2014.