Yakov Zeldovich was born into a Belarusian Jewish family in his grandfather's house in Minsk. However, in mid-1914, the Zeldovich family moved to Saint Petersburg. They resided there until August 1941, when the family was evacuated together with the faculty of the Institute of Chemical Physics to Kazan to avoid the Axis Invasion of the Soviet Union. They remained in Kazan until the summer of 1943, when Zeldovich moved to Moscow.