Madeleine K Albright, who came to the US as an 11-year-old political refugee from Czechoslovakia and decades later was an ardent and effective advocate against mass atrocities in Eastern Europe while serving as ambassador to the United Nations and the first woman secretary of state, has died aged 84.
Before Albright, the inner sanctum of US foreign policymaking had been an almost exclusively male domain. In many ways, her politically fraught early life – enduring Nazi and communist repression – impelled her rise to the highest levels of international politics. Her family, which was Jewish, narrowly avoided extermination at the hands of the Nazis; they fled to England shortly after Hitler’s tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1939.
