Anna Aronov was born in Ukraine, the daughter of peasant farmers. Her family had lost several members to death, so her father sent her to live and work in what was at that time the biggest agricultural development program in the Ukraine. The young Anna was separated from her family and grew up in the countryside, which was then a part of the Soviet Union. There she met and fell in love with a local boy named Lev Anton.
After several months of their courtship, the two were married in order to avoid facing the death penalty. It was Anna’s dream to become a doctor; however, her father had other plans for her. He told her to return home and to find a job as a nanny for his young son. She failed to return, and now these two were torn apart. Falling in love with another man, she decided to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a nurse.
However, when the revolution happened and the directors of the first factory started shooting randomly, Anna was spared from the shooting since she was working in a sanatorium as a nurse. She decided to pursue her dream and enter a profession in which people don’t have any chance to survive. Thus, in 1932 she started her first real profession which was the construction of bridges. Her great talent and resilience paid off: in less than three years she was already earning enough to support her husband and two children. At the age of twenty-one she went to Paris and within two months she was working on the famous Le Louvre.