J

in her direction and smile. But then again, she seemed
to be smiling at everybody.
The journalists in the room knew Ms. Albright as an
articulate spokeswoman for the world's sole remaining
superpower. Her official biography was a classic emigre
story: Czech native flees Communist dictatorship and
enjoys success in the United States as a diplomat. In con-
trast, Ms. Simova knew Ms. Albright as a figure in a far
more intimate and tragic family history.
As the news conference ended, the ambassador made
a hurried exit, and Ms. Simova chased after her, at-
tempting to get close enough to hand over the letter,
which contained family news and her new address and
telephone number in Prague.
A bodyguard blocked her path. She shoved her letter
into his hands, along with a plea to hand it over to Ms.
Albright.
Three years later, Ms. Simova still does not know
whether the letter ever reached her cousin. In a way,
that is not surprising. As seen through Ms. Simova's eyes,
their entire relationship has been a series of wrench-
ing partings and broken connections.
The story of Dagmar Simova and Madeleine Korbel
Albright is a haunting reflection of some of the most .
tumultuous events of the 20th century. It is one strand
of a larger, multigenerational story of a Catholic-Jewish
family decimated by Nazism and torn asunder by com-
munism. The two women owe their lives to the prescience
of their parents, who succeeded in spiriting them out of
Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II. They spent
the war years together in Britain, with Dagmar serving
as a kind of surrogate older sister and babysitter to
Madeleine — when they returned to Prague together hi
1945, Madeleine was 8 years old, Dagmar 17. After the
war, Dagmar discovered she was an orphan and that
much of the extended family had died in Nazi camps.
She says she then became the official ward of Ms. Al-
bright's father. But Dagmar and Madeleine were sepa-
rated in 1948 as a result of a Communist coup d'etat in
Prague.
What is most remarkable about this story is how the
two cousins became aware of the tragedy that had be-
fallen their close relatives, and how they have reacted to
it. For Ms. Simova, memories of the Holocaust have
formed a central part of her life. She spent years trying
to find out exactly what happened to her sister, parents,
grandparents, uncles and aunts, all of whom had per-
ished in the camps, according to the records of Holocaust
researchers and information provided to Ms. Simova by
camp survivors. She gave agonizing thought to how she
would share her knowledge with her own children.
For Ms. Albright, the Holocaust has until now been a
largely peripheral event at a personal level, although it
has influenced her thinking about European history and
U.S. foreign policy. She says she was raised as a Roman
Catholic and was never told by her parents or anyone
else that family members had perished in the Holocaust.
She says she has no independent knowledge of the records
showing the family's Jewish origins; the memories of
family friends that Ms. Albright's parents converted to
Catholicism around the time of World War II; records
and other information indicating that Ms. Albright's rel-
atives were exterminated at Auschwitz and other Nazi
camps. Presented with research undertaken for this ar-
ticle, she says she finds the new information "compelling,"
but adds, "I have to look into this myself. ... It's a very
personal matter."
Ms. Albright says her now-deceased parents did not
discuss with her how her grandparents died. She nev-
er explored the matter, in part because she had never
known her grandparents beyond the age of 2. "My par-

ents simply said they (the grandparents) had died 'in the
course of the war,' " Ms. Albright says.
Like many other first-generation Americans, Ms. Al-
bright's parents apparently turned the page on the pre-
America chapter of their lives when they set foot in the
United States. Ms. Albright does not question their choic-
es. "My parents were fabulous people who did everything
they could for their children and brought us to this amaz-
ing country and were protective, overly so. ... I can't ques-
tion their motivation."
Ms. Albright has talked at length in public about Amer-
ica's generosity in granting her fiercely anti-Communist
father political asylum. "Because of my parents' love of
democracy, we came to America after being driven twice
from our home in Czechoslovakia, first by Hitler and then
by Stalin," she told President Clinton in an Oval Office
ceremony in December, when she was nominated as Sec-
retary of State. She makes clear that her background as
a refugee has played a crucial role in her foreign policy
thinking. "The mind-set of most of my contemporaries
is Vietnam. My mind-set is Munich," she likes to say, re-
ferring to the dismemberment of the first Czech repub-
lic.
At the heart of the story linking Ms. Albright and Ms.
Simova are two separate crossroads, the first in the late
1930s, on the eve of World War II, and the second in 1948,
after the Soviet-sponsored Communist coup.
By escaping from Czechoslovakia only days after the
German army marched into Prague in March 1939, Ms.
Albright's parents were fortunate enough to live through
the war. But all three of her surviving grandparents died
in the concentration camps, according to Nazi records
preserved by the Prague Jewish community, as well as
other research conducted by Ms. Simova, and the ac-
counts of several family friends. Besides Ms. Albright's
grandparents, Ms. Simova's mother and father (Ms. Al-
bright's aunt and uncle), Ms. Simova's sister, and vari-
ous grand-uncles and grand-aunts all died in the
Holocaust, according to these sources.
When the family returned to Prague from London af-
ter World War II and searched for the relatives they left
behind, "it was one shock after another," recalls Ms.
Simova. Madeleine, then only 8, wasn't told at the time,
Ms. Simova says.
When Ms. Albright's family fled Prague for the sec-
ond and final time in 1948, Ms. Simova was the only sur-
viving close relative to remain behind. The reasons are
not fully clear, and her memories of that episode are not
altogether happy. Ms. Simova says she is by no means
jealous about the life she did not have in America, but
she certainly reflects from time to time on how fate shaped
Ms. Albright's life and her own.

1 o 11 understand Madeleine Albright's family ori-
gins,
the place to begin is with her paternal grand-
g
father, Arnost Korbel. A great salesman who
took care of his workmen, Korbel "had a talent for
getting on with other people," says Vera Ruprehctova,
granddaughter of his business partner, Jan Reinelt. "He
was a humanitarian."
The Korbels were one of a dozen or so Jewish families
in Kysperk (now Letohrad), a town of 3,000 close to what
was then the German border, according to two friends
of the family who still live in the town. There was no syn-
agoghe, and the Korbels, like many Czech Jews, were
well assimilated into Catholic-dominated Czech society.
Arnost and Olga Korbel had three children. The old-
est, a daughter named Margareta (Ms. Simova's moth-

er), married a local doctor. A son named Jan followed
Arnost into the building materials business. The youngest
was Josef, Madeleine Albright's father. Born in 1909,
shortly after the Korbels moved to Kysperk, he went
on to become a prominent diplomat and professor of in-
ternational relations.
Josef Korbel's birth certificate, issued by his local Jew-
ish registrar and held today in a foreign ministry file pre-
served by the Institute for Contemporary History in
Prague, identifies Korbel's ancestors, including his par-
ents Arnost and Olga. It describes Josef as "Jewish and
legitimate." The certificate is dated March 1941, a time
when Czechoslovakia's Nazi occupiers required Jewish
authorities to provide records of all past Jewish births.
The most momentous event of Josef Korbel's child-
hood was the end of World War I and the collapse of
the Hapsburg empire. After three centuries of Austrian
rule, the Czechs and Slovaks were finally free to set up
their own state.
The Korbel family moved to Prague in 1928, when
Arnost became the director of a large building materials
company that owned several quarries. Josef studied law,
completing his doctorate in 1933. He joined the Czechoslo-
vak foreign service in November 1934. The following
year, he married his high school sweetheart, Mandula
Spieglova, who was also an assimilated Jew, according
to Josef Marek, who came from the same town as Spieglo-
va and who later worked closely with Josef Korbel.
By the time Madeleine Albright was born on May 15,
1937, Josef Korbel had received his first foreign assign-
ment, as press attache in the Czechoslovak Embassy
to Yugoslavia. By all accounts ; he was a great success.
Energetic and gregarious, Korbel immediately became
a valued member of Belgrade's intellectual and cultur-
al aristocracy.
"Belgrade was like a village in those days. Everybody
knew everybody else. The Korbels' house was always
open," says Jara Ribnikar, the Czech-born wife of the
owner of Politika, Serbia's leading newspaper. "Korbel
had a way of encouraging talented people."
While the Korbels were in Belgrade, war clouds were
gathering over Europe, and particularly over their na-
tive Czechoslovakia. Established in 1918 under a philoso-
pher president, Tomas Masaryk, the country had become
the most liberal and prosperous state in central Europe.
By 1938, it was the focal point for the war of nerves be-
tween Nazi Germany and the Western democracies led
by Britain and France.
- With an unenviable geographic position on Germany's
southern border and a 3-million-strong German minor-
ity living in the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia was an ob-
vious target for Hitler. The Nazi dictator first swallowed
up Austria in March 1938. The six-month trial of strength
over Czechoslovakia culminated at the Munich confer-
ence of Sept. 29-30, when the Western powers accepted
Hitler's demands. The Sudetenland was transferred to
Germany.
The Munich sellout meant the end of Czechoslovakia
as a viable country. It also had menacing implications
for the Korbel family. The government in Prague came
under strong German pressure to purge itself of Jews
and "Democrats." Korbel was subject to suspicion on both
counts, his foreign ministry file shows.
Foreign ministry records show that Korbel was re-
called from Belgrade on Dec. 28, 1938, three months
after Munich. He was given a token post at the ministry's
headquarters. The German armies marched into Prague
at 6 a.m., on March 15, 1939, to complete the job of carv-
ing up Czechoslovakia.
"A full blizzard was blowing," recalled George F. Ken-
nan, who was then a member of the U.S. legation in