Condi: The Condoleezza Rice Story by Antonia Felix

2001. “The great thing about music is that you can love it all of your life,” Condi said, “you can pick it up at different phases.”
    Condoleezza has often remarked that Josef Korbel is the reason she entered international politics. Few matched his stature in the field, and his experiences in Europe before, during, and after World War II made him a fascinating mentor to young people eager to understand international relations. He was an Old World figure who had always attracted artistic types to his inner circle. “Korbel had a way of encouraging talented people,” said one long-time friend of the family, “He was not an artist, but he attracted artists to him.” A student like Condi—multi-lingual, classically trained musician, and extremely bright, poised, and selfreliant—was precisely the type to gravitate to him and to gain his admiration. Korbel immediately took Condi under his wing.
    Josef Korbel was born in Czechoslovakia in 1909 and studied in Paris before receiving his law degree from Charles University in Prague. His first position in the Czech government was with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1937 he became the press attaché at the Czech Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He learned to speak Serbian, and made close friends with Yugoslav journalists, contacts who would become very important to him and his family when Hitler entered Czechoslovakia. Nazi troops enter Prague in March 1939, and Korbel, a Jew, was on a list of those to be arrested. Like several other Jewish families in Czechoslovakia, the Korbels had abandoned their ancestral ties. Whenever Josef had to fill out documents that asked for his religious affiliation, he wrote, “None.” “Korbel was one of the very, very few Jews who succeeded in getting into the Foreign Ministry before the war,” said one of his Czech colleagues in Michael Dobbs’ biography of Madeleine Albright. “He did so by not giving any signs of his Jewishness.” For weeks, Josef had been working on an escape plan to get his family to Yugoslavia, and thanks to official letters from two Belgrade newspapers who hired him as a foreign press correspondent, he obtained exit visas for himself, his wife, and their two-year-old daughter, Madeleine. They spent a few weeks in Belgrade, then moved to London where the leaders of the Czech government were living in exile.
    Korbel worked as a personal secretary to the Czech foreign minister, Jan Masaryk, then became the chief of the Czech broadcasting service. During the family’s stay in London, Hitler’s blitzkrieg pounded their neighborhood, and back at home, more than twenty members of their family were killed in the Holocaust. Three of Madeleine’s grandparents, two aunts, one uncle, a first cousin, and nineteen others died at Auschwitz or Terezín, the concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.
    After the war the Korbels returned to Prague, and Josef remained a top official in the Czech government. Madeleine was eight years old, and the family lived in a luxurious apartment near the presidential palace. Korbel was part of the Czech delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1946 where the new world order was established. Following the conference, at age thirty-six, he was appointed Czech ambassador to Yugoslavia. He traveled back and forth between Prague and Belgrade, where Madeleine lived a pampered existence in the ambassador’s residence. The Korbels hired private tutors for Madeleine so that she would not be exposed to communist propaganda at the local schools, and when she was ten, they sent her to a private boarding school in Switzerland. The growing tension between the communists and democrats in Czechoslovakia hung over the family like a dark cloud, and when the communists seized control of the Czech government in 1948, the family fled to the United States. Before leaving Prague, Korbel had been appointed to a United Nations Commission on India and Pakistan and began serving in that post at UN headquarters