Trude Krakauer (later Dothan) was born in Vienna. She immigrated with her parents to Mandatory Palestine at the age of one. In Jerusalem, they joined the local community of intellectuals and artists, many of them German speakers. Her father, Leopold Krakauer (1890–1954), was an artist and architect who designed several Bauhaus-style buildings for Jerusalem's "garden city" of Rehavia; her mother Grete (née Wolf, 1890–1970) was a painter.
