Hadas Kotek » Personal
If you’re wondering how to pronounce my name: in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), my first name is transcribed as [ə.’das] and my last name is [‘ko.tɛk]. The “h” is not really pronounced except in careful speech. Close friends and family might even drop the schwa entirely and only pronounce the second syllable. When in doubt, as long as you get the stress on my first name right, I’ll probably know you’re talking to me. Hadas is a Israeli/Jewish name referring to one of the Four Species, and it is also related to the biblical name Hadassah. I am named after my great aunt, Hadassah Greenfeld (née Wallenstein). Kotek is a Czech name meaning “kitten,” and it has cognates in pretty much every Slavic language I know of.1
Kotek is an assumed/adopted name: my grandfather was born to the Kohn family in the Sudetenland, the German-speaking region of what is now the Czech Republic. As best as I can tell, the name change happened around the late 1930s or early 1940s; the name itself was chosen by my grandfather’s older brother, who was living in England and working as a lawyer at the time. My grandfather was a teenager. The reason for the name change was explained to me as “it could be unhealthy to be a Kohn at that time”2. The reason the name “Kotek” was chosen is lost to the ages, by the time I was asking questions there wasn’t anyone around who could answer them. The reason the name wasn’t changed back is apparently that by the end of the war my grandfather’s brother had an established practice under the name Kotek and he wanted to keep it. I suppose they didn’t feel like they had very much tying them to the old name, as the entire family was murdered by that point.
Here is a research paper I wrote about my grandfather Otto Oscar Kohn/Kotek’s journey during World War II: from Czechoslovakia to Denmark to Sweden to England and back to mainland Europe to fight the Nazis as part of the Czech Brigade of the British army, including in Dunkirk; and after the war: from Slovakia to Austria to France to Israel, smuggling Holocaust survivors who were left stateless and homeless after the camps — including the woman who later became my grandmother (written in Hebrew). I did the research and wrote the prose around the same age my grandfather started on his own journey, around age 16. It is the first major paper I have ever written, it has won several awards in national Holocaust-related competitions, and it still makes me very proud.