Albright recalls her family's Holocaust victims at Terezín

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Terezín yesterday in order to have a cast made of her palm for the Crystal Touch gallery there. Speaking during the casting of her hand, she recalled the 24 members of her family who perished in various concentration camps. The visit to Terezín was her third.

“I am leaving behind not just my hand here, but also my heart,” Albright said as the cast of her palm was taken. She recalled the history of her Czech family, whose Jewish roots she has learned of only recently. Her Jewish grandparents fell victim to the Holocaust.

“I would like to create a plaque with the names of those who died,” Albright said. The plaque would hang in the columbarium at Terezín.

The owners of the Crystal Touch gallery are a father and son team, Alexandr and Jan Huňát of Bohušovice nad Ohří. They have made crystal impressions of the palms of former Czech President Václav Havel, the author Arnošt Lustig, Sir Nicholas Winton, who saved Jewish children during the Holocaust, and hockey player Jaromír Jágr.

Jan Huňát said the former US diplomat was the greatest female personality his gallery could hope to include. “This is brilliant, it combines the age-old Czech tradition of glass art with castings of palm prints, which they say tell you everything you need to know about a person,” said Czech Defense Minister Alexandr Vondra, who accompanied Albright on her visit to Terezín.

Albright and Vondra also laid wreaths together at the Terezín Memorial National Cemetery. As many as 155 000 Jewish people from the Czech lands and other European countries passed through the Jewish ghetto at Terezín, 118 000 of whom perished.

Albright was US Secretary of State from 1997-2001. She was born Marie Jana Körbelová, the first of three children in the Czech-Jewish family of the diplomat Josef Korbel. The family removed the umlaut from the spelling of its surname after the outbreak of WWII. After the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was declared, they emigrated to Britain, where they converted to Catholicism.

Albright did not learn of her Jewish origins until the second half of the 1990s. Journalists discovered that her Jewish grandparents and many other relatives had fallen victim to the Holocaust. She had previously stated that her parents, by then deceased, had never discussed the death of her grandparents with her. She herself had never asked about it or researched it, in part because she lost contact with them at the age of two.