Albright Sees Grandparents Listed Among Holocaust Victims

In an emotional encounter with a heritage she only recently learned is hers, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on Sunday read the names of her grandparents among 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 - 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.

“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.