Georgii Borzakovskii was born in 1920 in Taganrog, southern Russia, as Gershom Borzakovskii. His father, the railway engineer Piotr (Peisakh) Borzakovskii, was killed as a Jew by Petliurists, men of the Ukrainian separatist army, in 1919, during the Civil War in Ukraine. Thus, Gershom was born already an orphan. In 1920, Gershom's mother moved with him to Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, where she registered her son as Georgii (being still under the impact of the murder of her husband). The mother was not religiously observant, but, one summer, he was sent to visit his relatives in Taganrog, where his grandfather taught him some Jewish traditions, and even told him that they were descendants of refugees from Spain. It was the grandfather who introduced him to the Jewish religion. When Georgii was an 8th-grade student, he was transferred to an artillery school, where he was to complete his ordinary schooling, as well as receive military training. In 1940, upon finishing the school, he was supposed to be transferred to a more advanced artillery school in Leningrad, but was rejected because of poor health. Georgii then enrolled in the Kharkiv Agricultural Institute (the present-day V. Dokuchaev Kharkiv National Agrarian University).
In June 1941, the Soviet-German War broke out, and in the fall of that year Georgii was supposed to evacuate with his Institute, but he failed to do so, having fallen ill with pneumonia. His Ukrainian friend Maria hid him and his mother in her apartment. In order to feed them, Maria sold off their possessions – the high-quality utensils, clothes, etc. – at the local market. In 1942, she helped him find a job as a tractor driver at a nearby sovkhoz (state farm). Georgii witnessed the resettlement of the Jews of Kharkiv to the "ghetto" at the tractor plant in winter 1941. While he did not see the mass murder at Drobitskii Yar, he did hear eyewitness accounts of that massacre, and he silently swore that he would avenge all these atrocities. In February 1943, Kharkov was temporarily retaken by the Red Army, and Georgii was drafted into the 2nd Bridge-Reconstruction Unit, which was commanded by Isaak Barenboim. In winter 1943-44, Georgii was wounded in a German bombing raid on his work site, during the construction of the new Darnitsa railway bridge across the Dnieper River.
After the war, Borzakovskii resumed his studies at the Agricultural Institute, and worked for a short time as an agronomist. He later returned to Kharkiv and worked at the Kharkiv Agricultural Institute, but was fired in the early 1950s, ostensibly for being religiously observant, and thus unfit to work in the sphere of education. He continued to hold minor administrative posts.
Borzakovskii married in the 1950s, and he had two children, a daughter named Geula and a son named Isaak. He lived in Horlivka, Ukraine.
