Albright Faces Personal Pain of Nazi Holocaust

In an emotional encounter with a heritage she only recently learned is hers, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Sunday read the names of her grandparents among those of Holocaust victims painted on a synagogue wall here, an experience she said gave Nazi genocide “an even more personal meaning for me.”

With her voice seeming to crack, Albright also paid tribute to her parents, who she said saved her from “certain death” by converting to Christianity and fleeing Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia.

“I will always love and honor my parents and will always respect their decision, for that most painful of choices gave me life for a second time,” she said.

Albright was in Prague--the city of her birth in 1937--for the first time since learning earlier this year that she was born Jewish. Less than an hour after landing here, Albright visited the city’s 550-year-old Jewish cemetery, which includes the Pinkas synagogue on whose walls the names of 77,297 Czech Holocaust victims are inscribed.

She spent about 80 minutes in the cemetery, the synagogue and a nearby Jewish community center. At the center she found a card documenting that her paternal grandfather, Arnost Korbel, died July 30, 1942, in the “model” ghetto that the Czechs called Terezin and the Germans knew as Theresienstadt, and that his wife, Olga, died Oct. 23, 1944, at Auschwitz--the day she arrived at the death camp.

Albright now believes that her mother’s mother, Anna Spieglova, also died in the Holocaust, although there is no documentation of that in Prague. Her mother’s father died of natural causes before the war.

“Now that I am aware of my own Jewish background--and the fact that my grandparents died in concentration camps--the evil of the Holocaust has an even more personal meaning for me and I feel an even greater determination to ensure that it will never be forgotten,” she said.

Albright was accompanied by Tomas Kraus, executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Czech Republic, and Leo Pavlat, director of the Czech Jewish Museum in Prague. Although a small pool of journalists was allowed to watch her visit from a distance, none was permitted to follow her.

At the end of the visit, Albright, dressed in a stark black suit, emerged from the red community center--which had served as the town hall for Prague’s Jewish community before the war--and read a carefully crafted statement.

Then she folded her glasses and walked away alone as summer twilight faded into darkness.

James Rubin, a longtime Albright aide, said the secretary wrote the statement herself early Sunday morning. The day began in the Russian city of St. Petersburg and included a meeting with the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius.

Rubin said Albright was able to write the highly personal statement before entering the monument because her brother and sister, who visited it earlier, had described it to her. She also had been in the synagogue a year ago when she accompanied First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton on a visit to the Czech Republic.

*

She said that at the time of her earlier visit, “I was deeply moved by the thousands of names carved on the wall. But because I did not know my own family story then, it didn’t occur to me to look for the names of my grandparents or other family members.

“Tonight, I knew to look for those names--and their image will forever be seared into my heart,” she said.

There has been a lively debate in the U.S. Jewish community over whether Albright tried to conceal her background or had simply been ignorant of it.

Bernard Frier, a Slovak refugee of the Holocaust who now lives in New York and was visiting Prague, said he is convinced by Albright’s statement that she did not know.

“I have to believe she didn’t know; you could see her emotion,” Frier said. “It’s terribly emotional learning the circumstances of how grandparents perished.”

“Identity is a complex compilation of influences and experiences--past and present,” Albright said. “I have always felt that my life has been strengthened and enriched by my heritage and my past. And I have always felt that my life story is also the story of the evil of totalitarianism and the turbulence of 20th century Europe.

“To the many values and facets that make up who I am, I now add the knowledge that my grandparents and members of my family perished in the worst catastrophe in human history,” she said. “So I leave here tonight with the certainty that this new part of my identity adds something stronger, sadder and richer to my life.”

Albright’s father, Josef Korbel, a prewar Czech diplomat, converted to Roman Catholicism early in the war. Albright later joined the Episcopal Church. The Albrights fled to England during World War II and then returned briefly to Prague, only to flee again after the Communist takeover.