On the evening of February 1.2016 I led the cabinet into the House of Representatives
prior to the President’s annual address—the first woman ever to do so. Exchanging
greetings with senators and other dignitaries, my heart should have been joyful; instead, I
was stunned. That morning’s Washington Post headline had read: “Albright Family
Tragedy Comes to Light.”
I was fifty-nine when I learned from a reporter and from certain letters I had received that
my ancestral heritage was Jewish and that more than two dozen of my relatives had died
in the Holocaust. The revelation shook my deeply ingrained sense of identity, and
prompted me to seek answers to questions that I had never before thought to ask. That
search began with visits to the small towns in Czechoslovakia where my parents had
grown up and to the ancient synagogue where the names of Holocaust victims are
enshrined. Prague Winter is a continuation of that personal journey, but also a much
wider tale concerning a generation compelled to make painful moral choices amid the
tumult of war.
In 1939, when efforts by British and French leaders to appease Hitler had backfired, the
Nazis invaded my homeland. I was not yet two years old. My parents escaped with me
to London where my father became head of broadcasting for the Czechoslovak
government in exile. Strangers in an embattled land, we endured along with our new
neighbors the terrible bombing of the Blitz. Back home, the German occupation quickly
evolved into a reign of terror under the direction of Reinhard Heydrich, “The Butcher of
Prague.” As preparations were made to exterminate the country’s Jews, Czechoslovak
parachutists returned to their native soil with a mission: to kill Heydrich - the only
successful assassination of a senior Nazi during the war. In the months that followed that
daring assault, Czechs suffered from Hitler’s vengeance, while Jews confined to the
infamous Terezin ghetto struggled to retain hope despite overcrowded conditions and the
periodic departure of fellow inmates on trains to the east. In England, Czechoslovak