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Prague Winter Audiobook Summary

“A riveting tale of her family’s experience in Europe during World War II [and] a well-wrought political history of the region, told with great authority. . . . More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action, a chronicle of a war in progress from a partisan faithful to the idea of Czechoslovakian democracy.” — Los Angeles Times

Drawn from her own memory, her parents’ written reflections, and interviews with contemporaries, the former US Secretary of State and New York Times bestselling author Madeleine Albright’s tale that is by turns harrowing and inspiring

Before she turned twelve, Madeleine Albright’s life was shaken by some of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century: the Nazi invasion of her native Prague, the Battle of Britain, the attempted genocide of European Jewry, the allied victory in World War II, the rise of communism, and the onset of the Cold War.

In Prague Winter, Albright reflects on her discovery of her family’s Jewish heritage many decades after the war, on her Czech homeland’s tangled history, and on the stark moral choices faced by her parents and their generation. Often relying on eyewitness descriptions, she tells the story of how millions of ordinary citizens were ripped from familiar surroundings and forced into new roles as exile leaders and freedom fighters, resistance organizers and collaborators, victims and killers. These events of enormous complexity are shaped by concepts familiar to any growing child: fear, trust, adaptation, the search for identity, the pressure to conform, the quest for independence, and the difference between right and wrong.

Prague Winter is an exploration of the past with timeless dilemmas in mind, a journey with universal lessons that is simultaneously a deeply personal memoir and an incisive work of history. It serves as a guide to the future through the lessons of the past, as seen through the eyes of one of the international community’s most respected and fascinating figures in history. Albright and her family’s experiences provide an intensely human lens through which to view the most political and tumultuous years in modern history.

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Prague Winter Audiobook Narrator

Madeleine Albright is the narrator of Prague Winter audiobook that was written by Madeleine Albright

Madeleine Albright served as America’s sixty-fourth secretary of state from 1997 to 2001. Her distinguished career also included positions at the White House, on Capitol Hill, and as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She was a resident of Washington D.C., and Virginia.

About the Author(s) of Prague Winter

Madeleine Albright is the author of Prague Winter

Prague Winter Full Details

Narrator Madeleine Albright
Length 15 hours 23 minutes
Author Madeleine Albright
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date April 24, 2012
ISBN 9780062124616

Subjects

The publisher of the Prague Winter is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is 20th Century, History, Modern

Additional info

The publisher of the Prague Winter is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062124616.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

KOMET

May 02, 2013

Madeleine Albright has written a very fascinating and compelling book, shedding light on her native Czechoslovakia and its history, her parents and the challenges faced by their generation, her extended family, and her formative years (up to age 10). Prior to 1918, Czechoslovakia existed only as a dream in the minds of a number of dedicated, hard-working, intelligent and astute Czechs and Slovaks. Of their number, there was one man who stood out head and shoulders above the rest: Tomas Masaryk (1850-1937). According to Albright, "Masaryk saw a world in which the settled verities of religious conviction, political order, and economic status were under attack. Moderization was essential but also dangerous because it could leave people without a way to anchor themselves either intellectually or emotionally. The solution, in his eyes, was to embrace religion without the straitjacket of the Church, social revolution without the excesses of Bolshevism, and national pride without bigotry. He believed in democracy and the capacity of people to learn and to grow. His dream was to build a Czech society that could take its place alongside the Western countries he admired."With the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and through the efforts of Masaryk to interest the West during WWI in his cause for an independent Czech nation, Czechoslovakia came into being before the end of 1918. (Subsequently, the nation's borders were firmly defined at the Paris Peace Conference the following year.) Albright shows how well, considering its growing pains and challenges, Czechoslovakia developed and prospered under Masaryk's beknighted leadership. He was one of those rare political leaders of great will, charisma, and intellect who truly lived up to the democratic ideals he espoused. Upon Masaryk's death in 1937 (the year Albright was born), leadership of the country passed to his close associate Edvard Benes. Benes, while not of the stature of Tomas Masayrk, was a principled man with some measure of political acumen. He led his nation through the Munich Crisis of 1938 (which resulted in the West's abandonment of Czechoslovakia following the ceding of the Sudetenland region to Hitler's Germany), the dissolution of the rest of the Czech nation when Hitler marched his forces into Prague in March 1939, and Benes' own subsequent departure to Britain, where he led a Czechoslovak government-in-exile through the Second World War. At the same time these momentous events were played out on the European stage, Albright's family (her father was a diplomat in the Czech Foreign Ministry) was forced to flee to Britain, too. In reading this book, I learned a lot about Czechoslovakia, which filled me with admiration for Tomas G. Masaryk, his son Jan (a truly remarkable and humane man), and Albright's parents (Josef and Marie Korbel). What made for sad, sobering reading was learning that most of Albright's remaining family and relatives in Czechoslovakia were killed in the Holocaust. (Albright, who was baptized Catholic as a very young child in Britain, had no idea of her Jewish heritage til decades later, through a Washington Post news story during her tenure as Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration.)Anyone who enjoys history in the form of a good, compelling story should read this book. You'll be glad you did.

Moonkiszt

May 25, 2022

Madeleine Albright is one of my favorite humans, so I didn't expect her book to be a difficult read. And it was. Not because the writing wasn't great - it is. But the deep dive, and transparency with which she wrote her story - observing WWII as a 12-year old from within the eye of the story - Prague, the halls of her family's own homes. Her parents and extended family members were trying to make things be as "normal" as possible for their kids, but still make deals with the devils they had to on a grownup level.She doesn't keep her readers at a distance from any part of her story, including her later discoveries about her direct connections to the people she was seeing persecuted, connections that weren't clearly understood until much later in her life and career. I was astounded at the desperate efforts entire generations of people in Europe, Czechoslovakia, Prague, her households expended just to make sure some of them made it out BEFORE it all went to chaos, and the power keeping actual identity secret played. Had it all been known, would she have been?I so admire her, am sad for her passing, and hope for more like her to rise up and be heard.

Judie

July 23, 2012

Had I known in advance exactly what this book was about, I would have left it on the library shelf and had denied myself an excellent read.Madeleine Albright tells the story of Czechoslovakia before, during, and after World War II in a compelling, easy to follow narrative. The experiences of her family provide a thread since her father was an ambassador so she personally met many of the politicos involved, even though she was a young child. She relies on her father's papers and personal interviews for much of the material.Czechoslovakia had a history of democracy. After the Nazi invasion, some of the government officials wanted to retain that democracy even in exile. The actions of the USSR, Great Britain, and The United States all played major roles on the future of the country and how it ended up under Russian domination.As a resident of Cleveland, Ohio, I was well aware of the case of John Demjanjuk, a former Nazi guard who had come here and was identified as a war terrorist. He always claimed he was innocent saying that he was a prisoner in Trawinki. In the book, Secretary Albright wrote, "Trawniki was used by the Nazis to teach Soviet and Ukranian prisoners of war how to become concentration camp guards; as part of their education, the students were required to shoot other captives." Reading that was a mind-blowing experience as I had never heard about that before and it made sense of what he claimed and what he omitted to say.As a result of her research, she was able to find out what happened to most of her relatives who were murdered in the Shoah.At the end of the book, she includes a listing of the main characters in the story as well as a time line to help readers.It's an excellent read.

Caren

May 19, 2012

I picked up this book because I love the Czechs, those intelligent, gracious people. This is a well-told story of one Czech who later became a very influential American. If it is a curse to have been born in interesting times, Dr. Albright was certainly well and truly cursed. But, as in the best fairy tales, the curse was balanced by having been blessed with wonderfully prescient parents who stayed one step ahead of events and kept their little daughter safe. The nation of their birth, Czechoslovakia, did not fare as well during the twentieth century. The author has woven a nuanced tale of her own childhood place within the story of the fate of her homeland from 1937 to 1948. Her father's career as a diplomat gave the family some agility which others in those years probably lacked. Thus, the family spent the years of World War II with the exiled Czech government in London. After the war, with her father assigned to to the Czech embassy in Yugoslavia, they were once again able to keep a step ahead of the communist takeover in Czechoslovakia and seek asylum in the USA. By such roundabout paths is a future secretary of state made! This book is rich with detail and, because of the personal aspects of the story, a feel of "you were there" history. I found the book to be extremely well-written. I see by the title page that is was written "with Bill Woodward"; the collaboration of the two is quite successful. I think most people are familiar with the outline of the history of World War II, but there are many accounts of the heroism of ordinary people here, and I imagine most readers will come away learning of some incidents from those years about which they had not previously heard. There are stories of the famous and of the unsung, and I was struck yet again at the absolute horror of those years. Dr. Albright says it so much better than I ever could in some of the concluding remarks to her book: "Given the events described in this book, we cannot help but acknowledge the capacity within us for unspeakable cruelty or--to give the virtuous their due--at least some degree of moral cowardice. There is a piece of the traitor within most of us, a slice of the collaborator, an aptitude for appeasement, a touch of the unfeeling prison guard. Who among us has not dehumanized others, if not by word or action, then at least in thought? From the maternity ward to the deathbed, all that goes on within our breasts is not sweetness and light." (p. 413-414) She then goes on to quote Vaclav Havel's perception of this human quandary:"...Amid the repression of those [Cold War] years, he discerned two varieties of hope. The first he compared to the longing for 'some kind of salvation from the outside.'...'On the other end of the spectrum', said Havel, there are those who insist on 'speaking the truth simply because it [is] the right thing to do....' " (p. 414) She then closes her book with these powerful lines: "I have spent a lifetime looking for remedies to all manner of life's problems--personal, social, political, global. I am deeply suspicious of those who offer simple solutions and statements of absolute certainty or who claim full possession of the truth. Yet I have grown equally skeptical of those who suggest that all is too nuanced and complex for us to learn any lessons, that there are so many sides to everything that we can pursue knowledge every day of our lives and still know nothing for sure. I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not at first and not without ever relenting in our efforts to learn more. This is because the goal we seek, and the good we hope for, comes not as some final reward but as the hidden companion to our quest. It is not what we find, but the reason we cannot stop looking and striving, that tells us why we are here." ( 415-416)This is so well said, and is the reason I love reading. How else could I ever learn the thoughts of this wise, experienced woman? Through books such as this, our journey is enhanced, our life experience enlarged, as we all seek after our purpose on this earth.

Jaylia3

March 15, 2012

Written by former US secretary of state and UN ambassador Madeleine Albright, Prague Winter is a seamlessly woven amalgam: part family memoir, part political and cultural history, and part discerning examination of how people make difficult, sometimes world-altering, moral choices. It covers the turbulent first half of twentieth century Europe and is focused most closely on Czechoslovakia, a distinctive and fascinating country this book made me want to visit. As a naturalized American citizen and government official who was born into a diplomatic Czechoslovakian family just before the onset of WWII, Albright has unique perspectives and insights. The catalyst for this book is that, raised a Catholic, Albright didn’t know about her family’s Jewish heritage until 1997 when a Washington Post investigation uncovered the information. Albright’s parents were dead by then so she couldn’t ask them about their reasons; instead she began to research on her own. What she found and conveys in her writing is a much more complicated history of her native land than the one she had been brought up to believe in. Eastern Europe lost and gained its freedom twice in Albright’s lifetime. Albright examines both the psychological and historical reasons that Hitler and Stalin were able to fool the world about their intentions, and the grim philosophical and ethical dilemmas world leaders and ordinary citizens, including her parents, faced in consequence. For instance, are grand acts of resistance, like the assassination of Czechoslovakia’s top German Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich, worth the harsh reprisals they cause? Heydrich’s slaying, an episode Albright recounts in thrilling detail, increased national pride, raised badly depleted moral, helped reinvigorate the opposition and established Czechoslovakia as a key player in the war, a necessary step toward it regaining its independence when the fighting was over. But many innocent people were tortured and killed in consequence. An entire town, mistakenly thought to be complicit, was burned and razed to the ground. The men were shot, the children deemed young and blond enough were taken away to be adopted by German families, the remaining children were murdered in gas chambers and the women were sent to concentration camps. There are no easy answers to the questions Albright considers, and while she usually comes down on one side or another she doesn’t oversimplify the issues involved. It’s a mesmerizing and moving book.

Andrea

December 04, 2019

I don't even remember why I picked up this book. The author served in an administration with which I have little in common, but I knew little about her work or life so I came into this book kind of blind. I must say I was fascinated by it. The subtitle, "A Personal Story of Remembrance and War" really fits the tone and content of this book and it's why I'm willing to give it five stars. The author talks a lot about her family's history and her own personal opinions about what happened from 1937-1948 in and around Czechoslovakia. It's obvious that her perspective is biased, but she doesn't try to hide it and, since I don't know enough about these accounts to contradict her, I just tried to learn from and enjoy the book for what is claims to be: a "personal" perspective. Even with that caveat, I feel like I really learned a lot about the progression of WWII, along with what lead up to it and what followed it in Eastern Europe. I guess I'm kind of embarrassed about how little of this I knew about. This book provides a decently fast paced overview of the decisions and maneuvers of the powers at that time, what their influences were and the repercussions that followed. It has helped to fill in a lot of what was missing in my conception of how Hitler came to power and then how Stalin came to power. I've always been interested in WWII, but this story was told from a unique perspective focused on Czechoslovakia's involvement and that was super interesting and new for me. The writing was very easy to follow and is mixed with anecdotes about the author's life and family that help maintain that "personal" feel. It was interesting to read about the author's father's roles and to see how that influenced the author in her work. Of course, there are some heartbreaking depictions of violence and cruelty portrayed, but that is really inevitable when discussing this period of history. I thought the author struck a good balance with what she choose to write about and it ends on a hopeful note. Overall, I really enjoyed reading this and though I'm sure that the author doesn't enjoy any sort of consensus with her views, I thought it was valuable to read about this time in history from her perspective. At the very least, it's another voice that cries out as a witness of the atrocities committed against the Jews and many others that we must remember. In the last chapter, which is sort of a reflection on all that has happened and where we might be headed, the author quotes Vaclav Havel (who served as the last President of Czechoslovakia and then as the first President of the Czech Republic) about truth. He said, contrary to those who would wait for salvation to come from the outside and do nothing, people on the other side of the spectrum insist on "speaking the truth simply because it [is] the right thing to do, without speculating whether it [will] lead somewhere tomorrow, or the day after, or ever," whether it is "appreciated, or victorious, or repressed for the hundredth time." When I read about post-war trials and how the people struggled to bring justice (while both resisting and succumbing to the desire for revenge) it really challenged me to think about what the responsibility was of the average citizen of these countries. What should Germans living in Czechoslovakia have done (in most cases if they couldn't prove active resistance to the Nazis they were deported after the war). Havel's quote about the truth points in the the right direction. Speak the truth (in word and deed) without speculation of where it will lead. Many gave their lives to do that very thing. We owe them much and should follow their example.

Margaret

July 05, 2012

I so admire Ms. Albright, and I appreciate that with all she's accomplished she has elected to write "books for the rest of us" that are accessible and intelligent at the same time - no compromises either way. This is her third book and it focuses on the history of Czechoslovakia (the country of her birth and ancestry), primarily the events leading up to and during WWII, as intertwined with stories and memories of her family's history in the first half of the 20th C. Simply put, it's all fascinating, and especially so to me given how much I admire her writing style and voice. The latter "voice" is also literal in that she reads this unabridged audio version herself (as she's done with her two previous books) - what a class act. I like the sound of her voice while I also appreciate her tone: smart, ironic, clear-eyed, plus she pulls no punches. Not only does she relate the narrative of events, but she gives her own assessments, sounding like the good professor she now is. Anyone with an interest in not just WWII but also (or separately) an interest in statesmanship will enjoy this book.

Robin

July 11, 2015

One of the most readable histories of the Czech Republic and Europe from the Middle Ages through the Prague Spring and ultimate freedom from the USSR.As a child, Madeline Albright's father was a Czech ambassador. She was present during the Nazi takeover in WWII, and went with her family to exile in Britain, where her father gave radio addresses to Czechs still at home.When she found out as an adult that her family were hidden Jews, she sought out the history and fate of her family members. She describes what happened to Czech Jews, including her family. The title refers to that period when Czechoslovakia lost its liberty to the Nazis, only to fall under the influence of Russian Communists at the end of WWII. Prague Spring, in 1968, was the attempt of the Czechs to maintain a sense of freedom under Russian influence, and was, as you remember, heavily put down with tanks, bullets and prison.She returned to visit Vaclav Havel when Czechoslovakia became independent after the fall of the old Soviet system in Russia.Great pictures, and quite memorable writing. Very readable. Highly recommended.

Ryan

January 25, 2017

8.5/10Who knew that Madeleine Albright could write like this? The book focuses a lot on Czechoslovakia just prior to and during the second World War. Albright was born just before the commencement of World War II and her dad served as a fairly prominent Czech politician during that time. While some of the book reads a bit like a history of her family, a majority is a well told description of the war from the point of view of the Czechs. As deep as all that may seem, the book is extremely easy to follow while taking into consideration multiple points of view. While I felt like I had a pretty good grasp of a lot of what took place in Europe during the war, I certainly took away a lot from "Prague Winter."

Rebecca

March 20, 2015

A wonderful book of Ms. Albright's early life after finding out as an adult that her past was not what she had thought. Regardless of your politics, this is a good read.

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