By Andrew Rawnsley
Madeleine
Albright has both made and lived a lot of history. When she talks about
a resurgence of fascism, she says it as someone who was born into the
age of dictators. She was a small girl when her family fled
Czechoslovakia after the Nazis consumed the country in 1939. After 10
days in hiding, her parents escaped Prague for Britain and found refuge
in Notting Hill Gate, “before it was fancy”, in an apartment which
backed on to Portobello Road. Her first memories of life in London are
of disorientation. “I didn’t have a clue. My parents were very
continental European and I didn’t have siblings early on. I felt
isolated.” As Hitler unleashed the blitz, “every night we went down to
the cellar where everybody was sleeping.”
She has since been back to the redbrick block in Notting Hill. “I
rang the doorbell of the person who lived in the apartment – it was a
lot smaller than I remember it. I asked a stupid question: whether the
cellar still existed. They said: ‘Of course the cellar exists.’ So they
took me down and I had this moment – the green paint was exactly the
same. I remember the green paint.”
It was decades later that she discovered that, though she was raised a
Catholic, her parentage was Jewish and many of her family had been
murdered in the Holocaust, including three grandparents.
From Notting Hill, the family moved out of central London to
Walton-on-Thames, where they shared a house “with some other Czechs”.
The bombs fell there too, but she enjoyed “every minute” of this part of
her childhood. “I went to school and we spent a lot of time in air raid
shelters singing A Hundred Green Bottles Hanging on the Wall.” It was
less terrifying than it might have been because “my parents had a
capacity of making the abnormal seem normal”.
She became “a movie star”. The Red Cross wanted to do a film about a
refugee child. “So I was the refugee child, and they gave me a pink
rabbit as my pay.”
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Source: The Guardian
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