Taťána Kohoutová

* 1938

  • “Look, Stalin died. Stalin did not interest me. They were all anti-Semites. I hadn’t been at school for three days. Us Jews were getting beaten… I just can’t recall that, please don’t ask me about it. I found it difficult as a Jewish girl. Us kids got beaten because we were Jewish and they said that all the Jews killed Stalin.” – “Did they say this in Russia?” – “I don’t want to talk about it.” – “What did you think about Stalin?” – “I knew nothing but what we were taught at school: ‘Our dear Stalin, I will send you an apple as a gift.’ Such poems they taught us. We knew nothing else. They did not know any better. When Stalin died, the Jews – those five Jewish classmates – all stayed at home. So did I.”

  • “How was it at school?” – “At school… I remember an anti-Semitic teacher. I recall that in the third or fourth grade she told me… I liked the Russian writer Někrasov. I was supposed to present a poem. U Podjezda it was called, I think. I said two paragraphs but I was only supposed to say one. She gave me a C for that. I began to cry and said: ‘Why did you give me a C? I said more than you ordered us to learn.’ Other children said one paragraph and got a better grade. ‘Šlakman,’ she replied, ‘you should know better. You are Jewish. That is why you got a worse grade.’”

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    Praha Hagibor, 19.03.2014

    (audio)
    délka: 51:17
    nahrávka pořízena v rámci projektu Memory of nations (in co-production with Czech television)
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„Three days after Stalin‘s death we were afraid to go to school.“

Kohoutová Taťána, 2014
Kohoutová Taťána, 2014
zdroj: Eye Direct

Taťána Kohoutová, née Šlakman, was born in 1938 into a Jewish family in Moscow. Her father worked as a film director, her mother as a show artist, later doing some small-scale business. After Germany‘s invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, her grandma took Taťána and her older brother by a train to Kazaň, the capital of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic where Taťána had spent all of the war. Following the end of the war, they returned to Moscow. She graduated from a ten-year-long school. During her school times, she had ran into all kinds of trouble because of her Jewish descent. In 1957, in Moscow, she had met a Czech man Jaroslav Kohout who arrived for a visit as one of the leading representatives of the Czechoslovak Youth Union. For two years, they had a long distance relationship. In May 1959, they got married in Moscow and in September of that year, Taťána moved to Czechoslovakia. She lived with her husband in Dubenec near Příbram, later in Příbram and after a divorce she moved to Carlsbad and eventually to Prague. During the August 1968 Warsaw Pact armies invasion of Czechoslovakia, she met the Soviet troops. She worked as an educator in after-school childcare and later as a teacher. At present, she is retired and lives in Prague.