Itta Spivak was born in Kakhovka (near Kherson, Ukraine) in 1924. Soon, the family moved to Nikopol, near the city of Dnepropetrovsk (present-day Dnipro). Her father Grigoriy was an ardent communist, who had fought in the Russian Civil War (1918-1923). He worked as the manager of Nikopol’s grain elevator. Itta’s mother, Maria, was a physician. She was well-versed in Jewish customs and traditions, and observed them within the family circle. Thanks to her, Itta learned much about Jewish history and religion. She also had an elder brother named Ury, who was a naval officer serving in the Baltic sea. As a child, Itta quickly mastered reading and writing, and was admitted directly to the 2nd grade of school. She completed her schooling in 1941, at the age of seventeen. Following the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in June that year, Itta, who had just passed her final exams, was sent to a kolkhoz to help with the harvest, and then transferred to the city of Krivoy Rog to dig anti-tank trenches. Upon returning to Nikopol at the end of summer, she found her home empty: Both of her parents had enlisted in the army (her father as a soldier, and her mother as a medical officer). The evacuation from the city was over, as the Nazis were closing in on the area. Nikopol was subjected to daily bombings. Itta decided to joint her aunt in Simferopol (the Crimea), but was unable to get out of the city. By chance, she ran into Dmitry Lapin, a friend of her father's, who was now the commander of a Red Army regiment. To save the Jewish girl from imminent death, he let her join his regiment and gave her a job at the headquarters. On August 17, Lapin's regiment left Nikopol. On the very next day, the city was occupied by the Nazis.
Gradually, Itta Spivak moved from the regimental headquarters to reconnaissance. She would later recall: “I will never forget my first scouting mission. I had to find out if there were Nazis in the village. I volunteered. I was disguised as a village boy, a dirty ragamuffin. I went into the village, found out that there were no Germans there, and came back to the regiment.” In 1942, while on a scouting trip in the Kuban region (in southern Russia), Itta was wounded. At the hospital, she accidentally met her mother, who worked there as a physician.
After recovering, Itta went to Tbilisi (Georgia), where she worked as a nurse at a hospital. Apart from her routine work, she organized a choir and took part in amateur performances. This activity brought her into contact with the famous Chiaurely family, which produced many actors. They helped Itta enroll in the Russian Theater Studio in Tbilisi. After the end of the war, she graduated from it, and went on to work as an actress at the Young Spectator's Theater. She was eventually forced to give up this career because of an illness. Afterward, she worked as an accountant at various institutions.
In 1991, Itta Spivak moved from the Soviet Union to Israel.
