Ida Zhukovitskaya was born in 1920. Her large family lived in the town/city of Ekaterinoslav (present-day Dnipro, Ukraine), where she grew up and finished school. For a time, she worked as a railroad telegraph operator.
At the very beginning of the Soviet-German War, in June 1941, Ida managed to flee from Moldavia, where she was at the time, before the occupation of that territory by German and Romanian troops. After a long period of "wandering" around the country, she arrived in Saratov, where her older sister Meri was working at an aircraft plant.
In January 1942, the legendary pilot Marina Raskova arrived in Saratov, seeking young female recruits for her women's air force regiment. Ida's sister had experience in aviation, having been an airplane technician at the Dnepropetrovsk aero club. Although Ida had no such experience, the Zhkovitsky sisters convinced Raskova to accept them both. Meri was taken as an aviation technician, while Ida became a folder of parachutes. Thus, the sisters joined the famous 588th Night Bombers Regiment, which was staffed exclusively by young women aged 15 to 27. Throughout the Soviet Union, these aviators were nicknamed "Dunka's regiment", after its famous commander, the pilot Evdokia [the diminutive form of which is Dunka] Bershanskaya. They were also referred to, by the Germans, as "the Night Witches", since these female pilots flew mostly at night. In the prewar period, qualifying as an aviator would require a minimum of three years of study. However, in wartime conditions the course was shortened and concentrated, involving 12 hours of study per day. After such rigorous training, Ida qualified as a gunner and radio operator.
Ida Zhukovitskaya was killed in September 1942 during a training flight, when her plane caught fire. She was buried at the cemetery of the military school in the town of Frunze, Saratov Region.
