opinion
BY STUART E. EIZENSTAT
“H ow long have you known me, Stu?” Madeleine
Albright asked me that question with a sense
of urgency I had not heard from her before.

It was mid-January 1996, and I was in my hotel
room in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic
Forum. She called me through a secure line from
her office in the State Department during the
transition following Bill Clinton’s 1996 reelection,
before she was confirmed by the Senate as the
first female secretary of state in American history. I
was about to be nominated by the president to the
position she offered me as her under secretary of
state for economic, business and economic affairs.

“Well,” I replied, “20 years, since you and I
worked together in the West Wing of the Carter
White House, you as congressional liaison for the
National Security Council under Zbig Brzezinski,
and me as President Carter’s chief domestic policy
adviser.” The next question was even more odd: “What
religion am I?”
“Madeleine, of course, you are a Czech Catholic.

What’s this all about?”
She explained that a Washington Post reporter,
Michael Dobbs, was doing an investigative article
on her background as she awaited Senate con-
firmation, and shockingly determined that she
was Jewish, not Catholic. She had known that her
parents twice fled Czechoslovakia: first to London
as Hitler and the Nazis were going to take over,
and then again in 1948, this time to the United
States, after her father, a Czech diplomat who
returned after the war, was confronted by Stalin
and the Communists. She did not know that both
of her parents were born Jewish and converted
to Catholicism during the war, raising her and her
siblings as Catholics.

“What must I do?” she asked. She told me she
feared the American Jewish community would
oppose her nomination, believing that she was
embarrassed by and covered up her Jewish past,
and this might sink her confirmation. Moreover,
she said, “What am I supposed to say to my three
girls? Am I to tell them they should now convert to
Judaism?” My instant advice was to tell the truth, which was
that she never knew about her parents’ conversion;
to embrace her newly discovered Jewish past
with pride; and that of course, neither she nor her
three children should feel they needed to convert
to Judaism. I also explained that given my work
on Holocaust justice in the Clinton administration,
18 MARCH 31, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Then-U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
looks on as Stuart E. Eizenstat, then-under secretary
of state for economic, business and agricultural
affairs, speaks during the opening plenary session of
the Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets
at the State Department in Washington, D.C., on Dec.

1, 1998.

and frequent interaction with Holocaust survivors,
that the Jewish community understood that during
World War II all sorts of methods were used to
protect Jewish children, including placing them
in Catholic convents or in Christian households
where they were raised by righteous gentiles.

I told her that several of the Jewish friends I had
made in Belgium when I was U.S. ambassador to
the European Union had been saved in just that way.

Tomas Kraus, the head of the Federation of Czech
Jewish Communities, later confirmed that “[i]t is com-
mon for Jews from this part of the world to be ignorant
of their Jewish roots.”
By being candid, I was certain there would be no
blowback either from the Jewish community or the
Senate. Besides, I reminded her, as U.N. ambas-
sador during Clinton’s first four years in office, she
had established herself as a strong, fervent sup-
porter of Israel against Arab attacks.

She followed my advice and was confirmed
with a remarkable 99-0 vote. On her first foreign
trip as secretary of state, as I was in her office for
a last-minute briefing, she looked at her suitcase
and, with her characteristic wit, said, “Well, with my
newly discovered Jewish background, I suppose I
should say I am going to schlep my suitcase!” We
all burst into laughter.

But Madeleine Albright went beyond my fond-
est hopes in identifying with her Jewish past.

As Secretary of State, in her maiden trip to her
Prague birthplace in July 1997, she went straight
to the Pinkas Synagogue to look for her grandpar-
ents’ names among the more than 77,000 Czech
and Slovak Holocaust victims lovingly inscribed
by Czech survivors on the wall of the synagogue.

She found the names of her paternal grandparents,
Arnost and Olga Korbel, who had perished in the
Nazi death camps — Arnost in Theresienstadt in
1942 and her grandmother in Auschwitz in 1944. At
the synagogue she said publicly, “Tonight … their
image will be forever seared into my heart.”
Later during her tour to welcome her native
Czech Republic and two other former Soviet bloc
countries into NATO — a burning issue today with
the Russian invasion of Ukraine — she toured other
Jewish sites in Prague, and movingly confronted
her past: “The evil of the Holocaust” has taken on
“even greater personal meaning” since she learned
the fate of her grandparents. “To the many values
and many facets that make up who I am, I now add
the knowledge that my grandparents and members
of my family perished in the worst catastrophe in
human history. So I leave here tonight with the cer-
tainty that this new part of my identity adds some-
thing stronger, sadder and richer to my life.”
She went a step further and on a later trip went to
the small villages where her fraternal and maternal
grandparents had lived, to try to relive their history.

As her under secretary, I saw up-close how her
background as a refugee from fascism shaped her
foreign policy views and her greatest triumphs in
the two Balkan Wars, in Bosnia and Kosovo. As
U.N. ambassador, she joined with National Security
Adviser Tony Lake to successfully urge President
Clinton, over Pentagon and State Department
opposition, to take aggressive U.S. leadership of
NATO and direct military strikes against Bosnian
Serbs following the brutality against Bosnian
Muslims encouraged by Serbian strongman
President Slobodan Milosević.

The July 1995 massacre of more than 7,000
Bosnian men and boys at Srebrenica, dumped into
a mass grave, evoked for her the Holocaust her
parents had escaped. She confronted Joint Chiefs
of Staff Chairman General Colin Powell, stating,
“What’s the point of having this superb military
that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”
That military action paved the way for the Dayton
Accords negotiated by Richard Holbrooke, the
peace agreement that ended the war.

In January 1999, following another Serb massa-
cre of Kosovo Albanians at the small Kosovo village
of Racak, Secretary of State Albright brilliantly com-
bined diplomacy with NATO military force, again
over Defense Department opposition, to secure a
PHOTO COURTESY OF GERSHON BLORITZKY
The Advice I Gave Madeleine Albright
When She found Out She Was Jewish