Flees Nazis to England

Korbelova flees to England with her family after the Nazis occupy Czechoslovakia. Though Albright long believed they had fled for political reasons, she learned as an adult that her family was Jewish and that three of her grandparents had died in Nazi concentration camps.

And I think as a lot of people now know, and I didn’t know, but I was of Jewish background, so there is a pretty good chance that I might have died in a concentration camp if my parents had not been brave enough to bring us out of that. My parents had in fact made very clear to me that the suffering of other people, under great evil, was something that could not be tolerated.

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak Catholic. My parents were of the generation who thought they were the children of a free Czechoslovakia, the only democracy in central Europe. This was their pride [and] that is what I grew up with.