Along with their older brother, Leonid, the twins left Kiev with their father shortly after their mother died there. Their maternal grandmother came along to help care for them. The family sold its possessions to survive in Europe while waiting for visas to the United States.

“I think their father felt they would do better in the United States as Jews,” said Ms. Kitman, who recalls spotting the grandmother and the two boys, then known as Sanya — for Alexander — and Genya — for Yevgeny — under the elevated train in Brooklyn. She spoke to the grandmother in Yiddish, she said, and returned the next day, aiming to do a book about their lives.

“Upon arriving in New York City in 1979, my father worked multiple jobs to support us, all the while learning English at night,” Colonel Vindman told House lawmakers on Tuesday. “He stressed to us the importance of fully integrating into our adopted country. For many years, life was quite difficult. In spite of our challenging beginnings, my family worked to build its own American dream.”

Ms. Kitman’s website tells the story in pictures.

“Genya is always the smiling twin. Sanya is serious,” she wrote in the caption accompanying the image of them in their blue ball caps and short pants in 1980, the year after they arrived. A 1985 photograph of them with their grandmother on a boardwalk bench appeared in Mr. Burns’s documentary “The Statue of Liberty.”

“We came from Kiev,” they said almost in unison, in a clip on the filmmaker’s website. “Our mother died, so we went to Italy. Then we came here.”

When they were 13, Ms. Kitman captured the Vindman twins in matching red shirts. When Colonel Vindman married, she photographed him and his bride under a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, at their wedding.

The twins’ father, Semyon Vindman, went on to become an engineer, Ms. Kitman said, and the twins’ older brother entered the Reserve Officers Training Corps in college. She said the younger boys looked up to Leonid and decided to pursue their own military paths.