Michael Bialoguski was born to Polish parents in 1917 in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire and now the capital of Ukraine.
In 1941, he travelled across the Soviet Union by train to Vladivostok, on to Japan, departing ostensibly for Curaçao (then part of the Netherlands Antilles in the Caribbean) but using forged papers to come instead to Sydney, where he worked as a violinist and music arranger.