Did She Know?
By Franklin
Foer
The Washington Post
reported Feb. 4 that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's parents were
Jewish converts to Catholicism and that her grandparents died in the Holocaust.
Albright declared, "This was obviously a major surprise to me. I have never
been told this." Many people find that hard to believe. No one criticizes
Albright and her parents, refugees twice-over (first from Nazism, then from
Communism), for how they chose to put their lives back together. But there is
lively debate over Albright's insistence that her Jewish roots are "a major
surprise."
Doubters point, first, to
circumstantial evidence . How could someone as intelligent and
well-versed in European history as Albright (her Ph.D. work focused on
contemporary Central European politics) not have deduced her family's ancestry
from what we know she knew?
Albright's father, Josef
Korbel , was a foreign-service officer in the liberal interwar
Czechoslovakian government. Just after she was born in 1937, he was posted to
the Czech embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. But he was recalled two years later,
when the Munich Pact essentially made Czechoslovakia a German province. Instead
of going home, Korbel moved his family to London to join the Czech
government-in-exile.
After the
war, the family returned to Prague and learned, Albright says, that her three
living grandparents had died. Korbel was briefly the postwar government's
ambassador to Yugoslavia, but when Communists ousted the government in 1948,
the family fled to the United States .
Albright knew all this. What she did not know until 1997,
she says, is that her parents grew up Jewish and converted to
Catholicism only sometime around the outbreak of the war. And her
grandparents, along with almost all her other relatives, died in German death
camps.
Should Albright have intuited
these omissions? The skeptics say her parents' story begs obvious
questions :
Why did a midlevel Czech
diplomat harbor enough fear of Nazi persecution to uproot his family to
England? Korbel was a liberal, but not necessarily prominent or active enough
to worry--for that reason alone--about getting singled out.
Why did three of Albright's
grandparents and most of her family die during the war? It's not clear Albright
ever received an explanation. The Korbel family's casualties were especially
incongruous because gentiles generally suffered less during Nazi occupation in
Czechoslovakia than in other Central and Eastern European countries.
There's
also Albright's relationship with her Jewish first cousin , who still
lives in Prague. The cousin, Dagmar Simova, has been the media's main source of
information about Albright's wartime experience. A teen-ager during the war,
Simova survived in London, living with the Korbels. Simova doesn't strongly
identify as a Jew, but has never been under any misapprehension about her
ethnic identity. Also, Simova discovered the truth about the wartime atrocities
almost immediately afterward, including her own parents' deaths in
Auschwitz.
The Korbels and Simova continued to correspond
after the war, and Simova met Albright briefly in Prague just after the Velvet
Revolution in 1989. For reasons unknown, Albright has rejected Simova's
attempts to set up more meetings, though Simova is her only surviving Czech
relative. Did Simova never mention that the family was Jewish, when living with
the Korbels or during subsequent sporadic communications? Did Albright not
wonder why this cousin was living with them in London, or what had happened to
her parents?
Albright says her parents
expressed vivid recollections of childhood Easter and Christmas
celebrations . These recollections may well have been true. The elder
Korbels came from a small town near the Czech/German border where Jews were
almost entirely assimilated into secular life, hardly practicing, and lacking
any communal institutions, including a synagogue.
A second reason some
skeptics doubt that Albright could have been blindsided by her own life story
is that since she has risen to prominence , the suggestion that she is
Jewish has been raised repeatedly. Rumors of Albright's Jewish background have
been circulated ever since she was appointed United Nations ambassador in 1993.
A December 1996 article in al-Hayat , an Arab newspaper published in
London, asserted that Albright, as a Jew, would be a dangerously pro-Israel
secretary of state. But less tendentious media outlets have also reported on
Albright's ethnic background. Multiple stories about it have appeared, for
example, in major Czech newspapers.
The mayor
of Letohrad, the town where Josef Korbel grew up, says he sent Albright three
letters in recent years. The letters included recollections of her family and
the clippings from Czech newspapers alleging her Jewish heritage. Albright says
that she received several other similar letters as well. But she says they
contained too many factual errors and inconsistencies for her to take them
seriously.
Over the years, other people have come across the facts
about Albright's background that she says she never knew. An Israeli official
told the Post that Czech immigrants to Israel told the government in
1994 that Albright's parents had been Jewish. Western reporters in Belgrade say
they have encountered people who recall reading press reports from the late
'40s about Albright's family. Apparently, Josef Korbel was a minor celebrity
during his stints there, and his conversion to Catholicism and his parents'
deaths in the Holocaust were reported in the city's papers.
According to the New York
Times , Albright told White House officials preparing for her confirmation
hearings in December that she suspected her grandparents had been
Jewish. That was a month before the Washington Post story ran.
