Famous People

Marie Jana Koerbelová took an unlikely path to becoming one of the most powerful women in the world. Born in Prague in 1937, she first learned about the horrors of politics gone wrong at an early age when in 1938 her diplomat father, Josef Koerbel, fled with the family to London as Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.

After the war, the family moved to Belgrade, where Josef was appointed Czechoslovak ambassador to Yugoslavia (he also served as a delegate at the founding of the United Nations). Maria was sent to boarding school in Switzerland, where she learned to speak French. Prague's 1948 Communist coup turned the family into refugees again, for Josef feared that his pro-democracy credentials meant that he'd be singled out in the impending totalitarian purges. Eventually the family received asylum in the United States. At age 11, Marie Jana Koerbelová, renamed Madeleine Korbel for American ears, began a new life in Colorado, where her father took a teaching position at the University of Denver.

Her father's fierce devotion to democracy and his interest in world politics influenced Madeleine tremendously, by her own account. After her marriage to New York newspaper scion Joseph Albright (whom she later divorced), Madeleine Albright began to study and forge a career in foreign policy while raising three daughters. Her writings and teachings often focused on the land of her birth and the horrors it had suffered.

After becoming an immensely popular professor at Georgetown University and advising former Czech president Havel following the Velvet Revolution, she was picked by then-U.S. President Clinton as ambassador to the United Nations.

On her first official visit to Prague as ambassador in 1994, she walked into the palatial foreign ministry where her father had once worked. "This is a really emotional moment for me," she said to journalists as she entered Cernín Palace, fighting back tears. She has since played tour guide for the Clintons in Prague and has dazzled Czechs in her native language, albeit frozen in a girlish tone and vocabulary.

In early 1997, Ambassador Albright became Secretary of State Albright, the first woman ever to serve in such a high government post. "Nothing compares to the feeling of coming to my original home, Prague, as Secretary of State of the United States, for the purpose of saying to you, ?Welcome home,'" she said in both languages in an emotional 1997 speech celebrating the country's invitation to join NATO.

Raised a Catholic, she said she discovered only in early 1997 that her parents hid their Jewish heritage during the war and never told their children of their true background. During that 1997 trip, Albright visited the Pinkas Synagogue, where the names of her paternal grandparents are inscribed on the wall, alongside the names of thousands of Czech Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Albright's remaining link to Prague is the house U labutí ("At the Swans"), tucked in the corner at Hradcanské nám. 11 adjacent to the castle, where she lived as a small girl.

Just before his 1977 death, Albright's father had foreshadowed 1989's revolutionary events when he wrote this as the last paragraph of his final book, Twentieth Century Czechoslovakia: "The spark is still there. One cannot doubt that it will flicker one day again into flame, and freedom will return to this land that is so essentially humane."

You can find out more about Albright's feelings regarding her original homeland in her book titled Madam Secretary.