Happy Birthday, Marie Jana Korbelova
The Czech Embassy celebrates one of its own.
WASHINGTON—Marie Jana Korbelova was born in Prague in 1937. Her father, Josef Korbel, was a supporter of a newly independent Czechoslovakia and its nascent democracy. During World War II, like many Jewish families and others who strongly supported the country’s leading democrats, the Korbel family fled to England, where Josef converted from Judaism to Catholicism and worked for Czechoslovakia’s government in exile. The family moved home after the war, but a 1948 Communist coup forced them out again, and Korbel and his family left their native Europe and immigrated to
