Tatiana Marinina is the sister of Sofia Palatnikova. She was born in 1921 in Teplyk. Her father was a butcher.In the 1930s, she moved to the Lunacharskii collective farm in Crimea. She completed three grades at a Yiddish school in Crimea, and then attended a Russian-language school in Simferopol. After finishing pedagogical training,she worked for two years in an ethnic German village. She survived the war in the Bershad and Raygorod camps. After the war, she worked procuring livestock and later as a German teacher at an evening school. She has a daughter and a son, who lives in Germany.