Albright’s parents had raised her as a Roman Catholic growing up she never knew that her parents had converted from Judaism or that dozens of her relatives had perished in Nazi camps. This intermingling of the familial and political gives Prague Winter unusual force as Albright discovers the true extent of her family’s suffering. Albright portrays Korbel’s colleagues, especially Czechoslovak foreign minister and future president Eduard Beneš, in a detailed historical setting that feels as personal as a family photograph. Korbel and his contemporaries were not merely serving a historical state - they were building a home for their children. This perspective allows Albright to infuse old political debates with the warmth of conversation at the family dinner table. Like her contemporary, the future Czech president Václav Havel, Albright was too young to understand the larger forces undoing her country.įor contemporary reflections on the Republic’s fate, Albright turns to the letters, journals, and articles of her parents’ generation, especially those of her extraordinary father, Josef Korbel. Not much of this account is truly autobiographical: Albright was born only in the last years of the Republic’s existence and spent much of her childhood either in exile in London or with her diplomat father in postwar Yugoslavia. In Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937–1948, Albright may well have written the most poignant account we have in English of the tragic destruction of the so-called First Republic - the Czechoslovakia of interwar Europe - at the hands of Hitler and Stalin. But her latest book reveals just how deep her commitment to resisting wicked regimes runs. When Serb leader Slobodan Miloševic´refused, Albright had NATO bombers ready to force his troops out.Īt the time, Albright seemed to be responding to the chaos of the post–Cold War period. In 1999, she insisted that the Serbian military withdraw from Kosovo, even though the province was still internationally recognized as a part of a sovereign Serbia. As US ambassador to the United Nations and later as secretary of state, Albright ’68SIPA, ’76GSAS, ’95HON pushed hard for intervention against human-rights abusers, especially the Serbs. “What are you saving this superb military for, Colin,” Albright asked in exasperation, “if we can’t use it?”Īlbright’s frustration was a response to the bloody ethnic violence that descended on the Balkans and also Rwanda in the early 1990s. Madeleine Albright once famously asked General Colin Powell why he would not support sending US forces into the former Yugoslavia to halt Serbian atrocities.
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