Kama Ginkas lived with his mother Manya and his father, Miron Ginkas, a physician, in Kaunas.
He was still a baby when in August 1941 the family had to move into the ghetto. Over the next two years, many relatives and friends of the Ginkas family were murdered, so Kama Ginkas’s parents decided to escape from the ghetto. Hidden in a potato sack, the boy was smuggled out of the ghetto in November 1943. The translator Sofija Binkienė initially took in the two-year-old and his parents. Then, for reasons of security, the family hid at various different places around Kaunas, at times separated from each other. Antanina Skačkauskaitė-Vaičiūnienė, a pediatric nurse, cared for Kama Ginkas until liberation.
After the war, Kama Ginkas stayed in contact with his helpers. He studied in Leningrad (today St. Petersburg) and became an internationally acclaimed theater director.