Arkadi Verkhovski was born in Rovnoye, a small village in Soviet Ukraine, in 1925. One of the village's two streets was completely Jewish, while the other was Ukrainian. Arkadi's father, and the rest of the family, made their living from the wool trade: They bought wool, processed it, and sold it on. In 1931, Arkadi’s father learned that the family was slated to undergo dekulakization, and decided to escape. The family moved to Kharkov, where Arkadi finished a nine-year school.
Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in June 1941, rumors of the mistreatment of Jews by the Nazis reached Kharkov. As German troops approached the city in 1942, most Jewish families from the Verkhovskis' neighborhood evacuated. Around the same time, all the local high school students were called up for labor duty. Arkadi was sent to work at a railway warehouse, where he was part of a team loading cargo onto the evacuation trains. He and his family were then dispatched out of the city on one of these trains. They first arrived in Chelyabinsk (in the Urals), and then moved to a village in Kirgizia. There, he was hired by a smithy; his father found employment at a horse stable, while his sister began to work at the village school. Life in Kirgizia was difficult; they could not procure enough food, and endured a very harsh winter. One of the other employees at the smithy was extremely antisemitic. One day, this fellow began to insult Arkadi in the filthiest terms, and refused to let up. Eventually, Arkadi couldn't take it anymore, and hit the guy. Being a very strong young man, Arkadi feared that he may have killed his coworker (in fact, the latter survived), and decided to escape as soon as possible. He went to the stable where his father worked, and asked him for a horse. In this way, he reached Frunze, the capital of Kirgizia; headed straight for the recruitment office, and volunteered to enlist in the Red Army. However, as Arkadi was only seventeen at the time, his commanders were reluctant to send him to the frontlines. Instead, he was ordered to go into the mountains and gather firewood for the local military school. He did this job for several months, and then studied at that school for a time. In 1943, after turning eighteen, he was sent to Ukraine and attached to the 66th Tank Brigade of a rifle division, in the rank of junior sergeant. During his frontline service, his greatest fear was being taken prisoner by the Nazis, since he was well-aware of the fate that awaited any Jew who fell into their hands.
In the autumn of 1943, Verkhovski was wounded in battle in the vicinity of Kiev, and had to be hospitalized for three months. He was then sent back to the front, to the region of Iași (Romania). There, he was wounded for a second time, much more seriously: He was shell-shocked, and a shell fragment remained lodged in his leg; he underwent surgery without anesthesia, but the surgeons were unable to remove the fragment. In 1944, after a lengthy hospitalization, Arkadi Verkhovski was sent to the Technical College in Dushanbe (Tajikistan), and he graduated from it after the end of the war, in 1946. As a seriously disabled frontline fighter, he was discharged from the Red Army in the rank of Senior Lieutenant. He then went to Kharkov, to work at an aviation workshop that specialized in repairing broken military aircraft. Over the years, he underwent several leg surgeries, yet none of them were successful.
In 1945, when Arkadi's family returned to Kharkov from the Soviet interior, they found their old apartment occupied by strangers. In its stead, they were allocated a single room for five people in a communal apartment. Verkhovski enrolled in the Institute of Mechanization of Agriculture, but was unable to physically attend classes because of his disability. In the end, he graduated from the Institute by correspondence. Afterward, he began to work as a design engineer at the Research Institute of Mechanical Engineering for the Food Industry, first as head of the technological department, then as chief engineer. Soon, Arkadi married, and went on to have a son and a daughter.
In the 1990s, Arkadi's grown-up children emigrated from Russia: His daughter moved to the USA, while his son relocated to Israel. Arkadi soon decided to follow in their footsteps: After spending some time in the USA, he settled in Israel, and lived out his life there.
