L'affaire Madeleine Our columnist argues that Madeleine Albright's parents were right to shield her from her past and to emphasize her new American identity
McCarthy, Abigail
L'AFFAIRE MADELEINE ABIGAIL MCCARTHY Her parents did right FOR many Americans it was the "Old World," and our forebears had left it behind to begin again in the "New." Those who came freely...
...There was a cook, a maid, and a blond Austrian nanny for her...
...His parents disappeared soon afterwards...
...In this country the reaction of many assimilated Jews to the Holo-caust was a reaffirmation of their Jewish heritage...
...They were taken over the border to Italy with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a little money...
...One can only imagine the corrosive suffer-ing...
...In other words, the world would be very different if Hitler had been stopped earlier...
...Her next memory was of being in a cold-water flat in New York and walk-ing down five flights hoping to play with the children she saw from the window, only to be driven back by their bullying jeers because she was "different...
...Those who came freely seldom looked back...
...Her personal loyalty is to the parents who made her American...
...He and his wife converted to Catholicism around the time of World War II and were practicing Catholics throughout Madeleine's childhood...
...The knowledge that one was "a child of the Holocaust" could be a terrible burden...
...How could it be oth-erwise...
...One Sunday afternoon when we were visiting he began describing his experience...
...We are glad to deal with Madam Secretary Albright," he added, "as long as she understands the realities...
...I can't question their motivation...
...Albright's parents were not unique in abandoning the syna-gogue...
...He was saved and brought to America by some prominent Jewish families who had bartered with the Reich: a convoy of trucks in exchange for the lives of chil-dren...
...She remembers the sudden change in atmosphere when she could no longer go to the park with her nanny...
...The implication was surely that the religion of her grandparents was relevant to her qualifications for the office of secretary of state-that her approach to matters concerning Israel, for exam-ple, might be compromised by her per-sonal history...
...For over twenty years he had borne the burden in silence...
...Another "child of the Holocaust," a popular college professor in his forties when I came to know him, had come home from school in Berlin one day when he was a teen-ager to find his fa-ther, who was also a banker, scrubbing the street under the threatening super-vision of a storm trooper who had been the janitor fn their building...
...Her family eventually went to Argentina where her father recouped a modest fortune...
...Her father was an official of the Central Bank in Vienna...
...A Gauleiter, for whom her father had done a favor, had seen their names on the deportation list for that day and had arranged their es-cape...
...We became part of a new people...
...Why was such a personal matter headlined on the front page of the Washington Post (January 12,1997), whose reporters evidently uncovered the facts...
...I don't know how else to put it" (Washington Post Maga-zine...
...Madeleine Albright, thanks to her parents' strategy, was spared the knowl-edge of her connection to the Holocaust as a child...
...It was as if the oceans that sep-arated us from our places of origin-the Atlantic and now the Pacific as well- also separated us from the ties and the limitations imposed by history and cus-tom in those places...
...My parents were fabulous people who did everything they could for their children and brought us to this amaz-ing country and were protective, over-ly so in terms of worrying about us and all kinds of things...
...At the time he joined the foreign service he declared he was "without religious confession," meaning he did not practice any faith...
...They returned to this country where she was educated and married the son of a prominent and wealthy Jewish family...
...That being true of most of us, it is something of a puzzle that the revela-tion that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's Czechoslovakian grandpar-ents were Jewish has become such a cause celebre...
...Many may now find Albright's tentative acceptance of her family's past and her proud defense of her parents' decision difficult to accept...
...A concern with human rights and international justice is to her a quintessentially Amer-ican concern, as Albright made clear when interviewed on "60 Minutes...
...She bears her connection with it now as a fully mature human being...
...The family lived in a spacious apartment...
...And why was it made the lead story of the Post's magazine (February 9,1997), complete with a scarcely flat-tering cover picture of the secretary...
...Inter-estingly enough, there was no specula-tion that her having been brought up Catholic might affect her attitudes on for-eign policy...
...In the past, those who published the news of Albright's grandparents would surely have held that Jewishness was not a matter of blood but of religion...
...Americans looked to the future, not the past...
...We will not ask about her faith, but about her position...
...We never look to the religion of any official or envoy," said Ambassador Walid al-Moalem...
...His wife, astounded, drew me aside-he had never discussed it before, she said...
...I can't...
...One was a child of five when the Nazis invaded Austria...
...We look at his position...
...One suspects that the real concern is that somehow Albright's parents, by their conversion and their silence about the past, betrayed the victims of the Holocaust...
...My mindset is Munich...
...This pre-supposes an activist foreign policy in support of human rights and interna-tional justice, a policy adopted before she knew of her Jewish heritage...
...It is interesting and ironic that the ambassador of Israel's most im-placable enemy, Syria, was quick to scotch that idea...
...Secularized and assimilated Jews held high positions in most European countries, as did Albright's father, a Czechoslovakian diplomat...
...A happy ending-except that in her thirties she was overcome with the often occurring "survivor's guilt" and suffered a complete breakdown from which she was years recovering...
...Albright's ignorance of her past may simply stem from the fact that, like many other first-generation Americans, her parents put the past behind them...
...Then one night her father had a phone call and her parents hurried her out to the street where all three were hustled into a car which sped up and whisked them away...
...Or, what is more likely, she like many other "children of the Holocaust," as the di-rector of Washington's Holocaust Mu-seum calls them, was protected from the knowledge of a heritage that too often proved lethal...
...It will not change the mindset of which she has often spoken: "The mindset of most of my contemporaries is Vietnam...
...I think of two among those I have known...
Vol. 124 • March 1997 • No. 5
