records. His daughter Margareta — Madeleine's aunt
and Dagmar Simova's mother — died the following Feb-
ruary, one of many victims of a typhoid epidemic that
swept the newly created ghetto.
The internal administration of the ghetto was the
responsibility of "Jewish elders." They also were required
to select groups of 1,000 people at a time for transporta-
H tion to Auschwitz. An air of menace hung over these
• transports. Most people refused to believe the rumors
about gas chambers, but all the same they seemed to
sense that death was near.
Olga Korbel was on the third-to-last transport from
Terezin to Auschwitz, on Oct. 23, 1944, along with 1,714
other Jews. Olga Korbel's granddaughter and Ms. Simo-
va's younger sister, Milena Deimlova, then 11, was on
the same train, the records show. Most of those aboard
were mothers or grandmothers with young children, ac-
`—, cording to the memoirs of a survivor on that train, Hel-
ga Pollakova. She recalled that the prisoners were herded
into small freight cars like cattle, 50 at a time. The train
left at 5 a.m. and took nearly two days to reach its des-
tination. When it arrived at Auschwitz in the middle of
the night, it was greeted by a terrible barking of dogs
and screaming of orders. The doors were thrown open,
and powerful searchlights shone in their faces.
"Get out, leave everything behind," yelled the guards.
The "selection" took place right there, in the goods
• yard. A total of 200 women and 51 men, who seemed rea-
sonably fit, were loaded onto lorries and driven to the la-
bor camp. Everybody else was taken directly to the gas
j chambers.
"A siren went off," recalls Ms. Pollakova. "There was
a terrible smell."
She saw a pile of crutches, one of the vast piles of cloth-
ing and other objects abandoned by victims prior to en-
tering the gas chambers. "My first thought was that there
were people who needed those crutches."

/-
1

ThensheUNDERSTOOD.

fter the war, the Korbels returned from Britain
to a devastated country. The beautiful but
melancholy city of Prague had been spared
heavy bombardment. But the paving
stones had all been ripped up to build bar-
ricades. There was practically no public transport. Peo-
ple's energies were consumed by a daily battle to find
enough food or by searches for survivors from the camps.
"For six years, I had assumed that I would be going
back to my family," says Ms. Simova, who flew back to
Prague in the bomb bay of a transport plane in July 1945,
together with her cousins, Madeleine and Katherine
• — a flight Ms. Albright also remembers vividly. "But it
turned out that there was no family to go back to."
Now an orphan, the 17-year-old Ms. Simova went to
stay with Mandula and Josef Korbel, who she says was
appointed her official guardian. (Ms. Albright says she
was never aware of this.) The government had given the
Korbels an apartment at Hradcany Square, just around
the corner from the foreign ministry, high above the
Vltava River with a magnificent view over the rooftops
of Prague.
Prague, together with most of Czechoslovakia, had
/-) been liberated from the Nazis from the east, by the Red
Army. The U.S. Army, under Gen. George Patton, had
gotten no farther than Pilzen, 50 miles to the west. This
geopolitical fact gave the Communist Party a large, but

not yet dominant, voice in the new Czech government.
In relatively free elections, in May 1946, the Commu-
nists received 38 percent of the vote, more than any oth-
er political party. The Communist leader, Klement
Gottwald, became prime minister. Eduard Benes, who
had headed the Democratic government-in-exile in Lon-
don, resumed his pre-war post of president. As a trust-
ed associate of Benes, Josef Korbel was in line for a key
post in the new administration.
At some point either during or shortly before the war,
like many Czech Jews, the Korbels apparently embraced
Roman Catholicism. Ms. Albright says she was raised
as a Catholic from earliest memory. According to one of
Josef Korbel's oldest friends, Josef Marek, the conver-
sion probably took place while the Korbels were in Lon-
don, although he is not certain about the exact timing.
Mr. Marek, now 89, does firmly recall that Ms. Albright's
mother, Mandula Korbel, told him after the war: "To
be a Jew is to be constantly threatened by some kind of
danger. That is our history."
A document in the foreign ministry file records Kor-
bel as declaring that he was "without religious confes-
sion," meaning he did not actively practice any faith.
Czech archivists say the document indicates that Kor-
bel made this declaration when he joined the foreign ser-
vice in 1934, but add that it also is conceivable that it
dates from immediately after World War II.
In September 1945, 'corbel was appointed ambassador
to Yugoslavia.
It was an important assignment for the 36-year-old
diplomat. The Yugoslav Communists, led by Marshal
Tito, regarded themselves as second only in stature to
the Soviet Communists, led by Josef Stalin. Benes want-
ed someone he could trust in the post. "Keep your eyes
open," he told Korbel before his departure, as Korbel
wrote in Tito's Communism. "I am greatly interested
in Yugoslavia; she will again play an important role in
European politics." Aware that the Czechoslovak foreign
ministry was subject to Soviet penetration, Benes in-
structed Korbel to report to him orally.
Josef Korbel arranged for his niece, Dagmar,
to stay with a relative, and set off for Belgrade
with his wife and two young daughters. Madeleine
was then 8 years old.
Returning to Belgrade after six years' absence
proved quite a shock. Over 10 percent of Yu-
goslavia's pre-war population of 16 million had been
wiped out by three wars rolled into one: a war of libera-
tion against the Nazis; a civil war among ethnic and ide-
ological factions; and a Communist revolution.
As the Czechoslovak ambassador, Korbel was in a cu-
rious position. The Yugoslav Communists did not know
quite how to deal with Czechoslovakia, which had one
foot in the Soviet camp and the other in the West. The
new ambassador was half friend, half enemy.
When Korbel tried to look up old friends, whom he had
known as press attache prior to the war, he found that
many now shunned him. In the new Yugoslavia, keep-
ing the company of a foreign diplomat could be danger-
ous.
The Korbels had an apartment in the Czechoslovak
Embassy, a huge, luxuriously appointed palace. Since
they did not want Madeleine to be exposed to Commu-
nist propaganda, they hired a governess. Later, they sent
her off to a boarding school in Switzerland. During va-
cations, she would return home to Belgrade, and was
trotted out to greet visiting dignitaries. "You know the
little girl in the national costume who gives flowers at
the airport?" she likes to recount. "I used to do that for a
living."
Belgrade proved an excellent place for Korbel to see

how a Communist Party consolidates its power. During
the immediate post-war years, before the break with
Stalin in 1948, the Yugoslav Communists followed the
Soviet model slavishly. Factories were nationalized. The
press was subject to strict Communist control. Opposi-
tion politicians were thrown into jail. The secret police
was all powerful.
As he shuttled back and forth between Belgrade and
Prague, it seemed to Korbel that the same process might
be repeating itself in Czechoslovakia. On one of these
trips, he expressed his fears to President Benes, who
brushed them aside. In a 1959 book, The Communist
Subversion of Czechoslovakia, Korbel quoted Benes as
telling him: "I shall defend our democracy till the last
breath. They [the Communists] know it, and therefore
there will not be a putsch. ... The army is fully behind
me."
Events in Prague came to a head in February 1948,
shortly after this conversation. Sensing that they might
be on the verge of losing power in an election, the Com-
munists staged a preemptive coup. Weak and sick Benes
finally agreed to Gottwald's demands for the creation of
a new, Communist-dominated government.
Korbel began making plans to flee the country. Ac-
cording to his friend, Josef Marek, then serving as Kor-
bel's press attache, Korbel had an agreement with the
British ambassador to Belgrade to seek refuge with his
family in Britain.
Korbel told Mr. Marek that if he was ordered back to
Prague by his government, "I will not stay in Czecho-
slovakia."
The death knell for Czechoslovak democracy came on
March 10 when the country's foreign minister, Jan
Masaryk, was found dead in the courtyard beneath his
office. The son and spiritual heir of Tomas Masaryk, the
founder of Czechoslovakia, Masaryk was the last hope
of the Democrats. It was unclear whether he had thrown
himself out of the 200-foot-high window or had been
pushed.
Korbel, who idolized Jan Masaryk and kept a portrait
of him in his study, was crushed. He and his wife flew
home for the funeral.

or the second time in his life, Korbel was in se-
rious danger. Fortunately for him and his fam-
ily, an exit presented itself. The Communist
deputy foreign minister, Vladimir Clementis,
offered
offered him the post of Czechoslovakia's repre-
sentative on a United Nations demarcation com-
mission for the disputed Indian territory of Kashmir. He
accepted, knowing the appointment was a ticket to free-
dom.
One problem, however, remained: What to do with
Dagmar Simova. By this time, Ms. Simova was 20, still
Josef Korbers ward, but increasingly independent. There
had been an unpleasant argument the previous sum-
mer, when she visited the Korbels in Belgrade. She says
she had wanted to invite her Czech boyfriend, Vladislav ,
Sima, to stay at the embassy. The ambassador made it
clear that he did not want Vladislav in his house, ac- —
cording to Ms. Simova and Mr. Marek. (Dagmar later cx;
married the boyfriend, taking the name Simova.) c..1
"Uncle Josef was very patriotic, very ambitious, and
<
very intelligent. But he did not really seem to know how cc
to handle someone like me," recalls Ms. Simova. "He
already had three children, so an extra teen-ager must
have been quite a burden."

59