Prague Winter; A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948
Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (Author photograph) New York: Harper, 2012. First Edition [Stated], Second Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xii, 467, [1] pages. Guide to Personalities. Time Lines. Notes. Index. Author signed inscription on half-title page that reads: "To Colonel John R. McLean Thank you for your service to our country during World War II. I am among those who is especially grateful for having defeated the Nazis. Best wishes. Madeleine Albright". Madeleine Jana Korbel Albright (born Marie Jana Korbelova; May 15, 1937– March 23, 2022) was an American politician and diplomat. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1957. She is the first woman to become the United States Secretary of State. She was unanimously confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 99-0. She was sworn in on January 23, 1997. Albright served as a professor of International Relations at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. She holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University. In 2012, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama. Secretary Albright served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. She was one of the 'Hidden Children" of Jews placed in Christian homes during WWII as a means of saving them. The Washington Post reported on Albright's Jewish ancestry after she had become Secretary of State in 1997, Albright said the report was a "major surprise". Albright said she did not learn until age 59 that both her parents were born and raised in Jewish families. Many of her relatives in Czechoslovakia—including three of her grandparents—had been murdered in the Holocaust. In 1997, Albright said her parents never told her or her two siblings about their Jewish ancestry and heritage. Drawing on her own memory, her parents' written reflections, interviews with contemporaries, and newly-available documents, former US Secretary of State and New York Times best-selling author Madeleine Albright recounts a tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring. Before she turned twelve, Madeleine Albright's life was shaken by some of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Nazi invasion of her native Prague, the Battle of Britain, the attempted genocide of European Jewry, the allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War. In Prague Winter, Albright reflects on her discovery of her family's Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland's tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation. Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exile leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong. Prague Winter is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind, a journey with universal lessons that is simultaneously a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history. It serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past, as seen through the eyes of one of the international community's most respected and fascinating figures. Albright and her family's experiences provide an intensely human lens through which to view the most political and tumultuous years in modern history. Condition: Very good / Good.
Keywords: Secretary of State, Auschwitz, Eduard Benes, Neville Chamberlain, Klement Gottwald, Reinhard Heydrich, Korbel, Masaryk, Slovakia, Sudeten, Terezin, Prague, Family History, Jews, Anti-Semitism, Czechoslovakia, Hidden Children
ISBN: 9780062030313
[Book #90357]
Price: $125.00