Mark was born on September 12, 1933 in Dnipropetrovsk, Soviet Ukraine (present day Dnipro, Ukraine) to Grigory and Eve (née Litvinskaya) Khazanov. Grigory and Eve married in 1925 and Eve gave birth to their first son, Simon, in 1926. Mark had a large number of extended family members who lived nearby, as Grigory had three sisters and one brother, while Eve had five sisters and three brothers. Mark had a close relationship with his maternal grandparents, David and Dora Litvinsky, who regularly hosted Mark at their house and taught him Ukrainian and Yiddish folk songs.
Mark was born during a particularly difficult time for Ukrainians known as the Holodomor. This was the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine during which the Soviet regime starved millions of Ukrainians and others to death in the early 1930s. Despite enduring these dire conditions, Grigory and Eve managed to provide for their two sons. Grigory worked in a department store, and Eve spent most of her time at home raising Mark and Simon.
In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and German military and civilian occupation policies significantly impacted the lives of Soviet citizens, including Mark and his family. At first, Dnipropetrovsk was far from the frontlines. But, Mark recalls the sounds of bombing raids that occurred almost every morning throughout a two-month period in the summer of 1941. Not long after Germany’s invasion, Grigory was drafted into the army, leaving Eve to care for their two sons by herself. As the German military approached the city, the Soviet government encouraged citizens to dig trenches and evacuate their residencies.
In August 1941, Eve, Mark, and Simon left Dnipropetrovsk for the nearby city of Novomoskovsk, where they stayed with a Ukrainian family. Soviet forces hoped to halt the German advance, so Mark and his family expected to return home to Dnipropetrovsk soon. This changed when German forces occupied Dnipropetrovsk in late August 1941. German forces arrived in Novomoskovsk about a month later and all Jews in the city were required to register and wear white armbands with a blue Star of David.
The Ukrainian host family helped Eve, Mark, and Simon escape by escorting them to a train station where they boarded a train to Makhachkala, a port city on the west coast of the Caspian Sea. Just a day after Mark and his family left, Nazi forces created an open ghetto in Novomoskovsk. Germans and their collaborators murdered all of the Jews from this ghetto in a mass shooting operation in March 1942.
Once they arrived in Makhachkala, Eve, Mark, and Simon encountered thousands of Romanian and Moldovan refugees with their belongings wrapped in rags. Makhachkala was an important port city for refugees, as many refugees, including the Khazhanov family, boarded oil tankers that transported them across the Caspian Sea to safety. Shortly after their arrival in Makhachkala, Eve, Mark, and Simon boarded an oil tanker that sailed overnight to Krasnovodsk (present day Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan).
After arriving in Krasnovodsk, Eve, Mark, and Simon, along with other refugees, boarded an east-bound freight train headed towards Shu, Kazakhstan. The family settled in their small, designated living quarters in Shu, and Mark attended school. Eve, Mark, and Simon relocated once more when they boarded a train towards the Sverdlovsk Oblast near the Ural Mountains.
In fall 1943, the family’s home city of Dnipropetrovsk was liberated by the Soviet army, so the family returned to Dnipropetrovsk shortly afterwards. The German occupation had decimated Dnipropetrovsk and its Jewish occupants. The Germans had murdered at least 10,000 Jews in a massacre in October 1941.
The family settled in a newly assigned apartment, as their former apartment building was destroyed during the war. Not long after their return to Dnipropetrovsk, Mark’s immediate family broke apart. Simon moved away to attend university, Eve became ill and died from a heart attack in December 1944, and Grigory remained in the army until 1946.
With his father away, 11 year old Mark was orphaned during this time, receiving occasional help from his apartment neighbor. In February 1946, Sonia, one of Eve’s sisters, located Mark at the apartment and eventually adopted him. Mark settled with Sonia in Moscow and attended school there. Around this time, Grigory learned that Mark was living in Moscow and reunited with him in 1946. Grigory and Sonia, both being widowed, married in 1947, and Mark lived with his blended family in Moscow.
Mark lived in Moscow after the war. He married his wife, Marina, in 1973, and the couple had their son, Ilya, in 1974. The family immigrated to the United States in 1981. Five years later, Mark became a U.S. citizen and found work as both a mechanical engineer and a physicist at the NASA Goddard Space Center. Notable projects he worked on were the Hubble Space Telescope, Servicing Mission 1 (SM1) and the Combined Release and Radiation Effects Satellite (CRRES). After retiring, Mark began volunteering at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.