Tania was born in Kiev on August 29, 1929 to a Christian father and Jewish mother, Paul and Hannah. She was raised Greek Orthodox Evangelical.  The children attended school and one day Tania's brother, Afanasii, was talking about God and he was told to stay after school that day and was never seen again.  It was suspected that the teacher turned him into the Gestapo and they killed him.  She had two sisters who died very young from measles.  Tania attended school until the sixth grade when Hitler came in.  They knew that along with the Jews they had to leave Kiev because of the mass killings the Germans were doing.  Tania witnessed the killings at Babi Yar on September 29-30, 1941.  She remembers the mass killing and the piles of dead bodies everywhere.  This went on for two days.  At the end of the two days, the survivors were put into boxcars and this when she was separated from her family.  Tania had no idea if they survived or what happened to them.  She was taken to Meldorf Concentration Camp.  It was a three week journey on the boxcars, standing the whole time as they cars were so crowded.  Many people died on the way.  Tania thought about committing suicide but knew that her father would not approve.  They arrived at Meldorf in the middle of the night, told to strip off their clothes and taken to the showers.  There was straw on the floor of the barracks to sleep on, no clothing and very little food.  Lice was everywhere.  She was at Meldorf from 1942 through 1945.  At one point Tania was taken to St. Petersburg where there was a resort for wounded German soldiers and she worked there for awhile.  She had to dig trenches for graves while in camp.  She was liberated by the American Army in 1945.  The experience of Babi Yar has stayed with her and she will never forget how horrible that was. 

Tania married her husband in Russia in 1949 and had a daughter.  They came to the United States in May 1950.  They had two more children but after that, her husband began having problems and they divorced.  She remarried Roy Kauppila in 1959 and had three more children.  Tania wrote a book about her experiences and speaks to groups across the country.  She goes to prisons and military bases to tell her incredible story.  In 1991, she met someone who said she thought her brother was alive in Kiev.  This woman went to Kiev to look for Tania's brother and found him.  She was reunited with him in 1991, 50 years after the war.  She found out her parents had also survived and lived with the brother and his wife and children until they died.   Tania went to Kiev twice to visit her brother and his family.