Schiller de Kohn, Vera

Abstract

Vera Schiller de Kohn was born in former Czechoslovakia. Her father was a lawyer, and she had a sister and a brother. She began psychology studies, which never ended, at the Carolina University in Prague. She married in 1934, with the architect and painter Karl Kohn (1894–1979) (El país de la mitad, 2018), an Orthodox Jew, and they had two daughters: Tanya, born in 1935 in Prague, and Katya in 1942 in Quito, both artists. With the invasion of the Germans into Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Kohns and their families escaped from Prague in 1939 (El Universo, 2006), heading to England, from where they left for South America. Initially, the destination was Argentina, but they ended up in Ecuador; Karl Kohn did not want to get away from one of his brothers who had decided to stay in Quito. One of the possible reasons for Czech emigrants to choose Ecuador was that the country owed money to Czechoslovakia for the purchase of weapons for their conflict with Peru; accepting migrants was a way of compensation.