WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright chose the opening session of a three-day conference on Holocaust-era assets to talk emotionally Tuesday about her Jewish roots and the loss of family members she never knew.
Noting that she had "not yet found, and may never find, exactly the right words" to talk about roots that she has said she did not learn about until last year, Albright evoked her grandparents and other relatives who died in Nazi concentration camps.
"When I was young," she said, "I didn't often think about grandparents. I just knew I didn't have any. Now I, too, have become a grandparent, and I look at my children's children, and the love and pride literally overflows."
"I think of the blood that is in my family's veins," said Albright, who was born in Czechoslovakia and whose family fled to London just before the outbreak of World War II. "Does it matter what kind of blood it is? It shouldn't. But it mattered to Hitler. And that matters to us all, because that is why 6 million Jews died. That is why this obscenity of suffering was visited on so many innocent and irreplaceable people."
Less than two years ago, when The Washington Post disclosed her Jewish identity, Albright was reluctant to discuss the issue and said through a former spokesman, Nicholas Burns, that it was a personal matter and "not a foreign policy issue, and it's not going to have an impact on the way she does her job."
But as she addressed delegates from 44 countries and 13 Jewish and Romani organizations in a wood-paneled auditorium at the State Department, Albright made of her family's history a public reminder that differences in culture, language, history and choice of worship make life interesting.
"But as the Holocaust cries out to us," she told the gathering, "we must never allow these distinctions to obscure the common humanity that binds all people."
"Remembering that lesson is what this effort at research and restitution of Holocaust-era assets is all about."
Albright finished by urging delegates to "do everything within our power to replace darkness with light, injustice with fairness, contention with consensus and falsehood with truth."
They responded with a standing ovation.
Jamie Rubin, a spokesman for the State Department, said Albright has spoken many times about genocide. But the fact that this was her first address about the Holocaust since she learned of her heritage influenced her decision to speak personally, he said.
The speech was only one weight on the consciences of conference attendees to find ways to make restitution to families who lost property to the Nazis. In the opening ceremony on Monday night, they heard speeches by Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate; Miles Lerman, a Holocaust survivor who is chairman of the Holocaust museum in Washington; and Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat, the conference organizer.
Wiesel said he wanted to ask a few questions before delegates began "three days of introspection." Among them were, "Why so late?" and, "Why only now?"
As delegates began grappling with restitution issues Tuesday, it was immediately clear that gold -- the subject of a conference in London a year ago that established a fund to aid survivors -- was one thing, but that contested art would be a far more difficult problem to solve. Insurance, communal property once owned by Jewish and other religious groups and Holocaust education issues are also on the agenda.
With the emotionally charged issue of looted art, no global settlement appears possible, as gold and insurance seem to allow. On Thursday, Eizenstat plans to present a dozen principles to guide claimants and current owners of contested works, which he hopes the conference will adopt. They ask countries to search the art holdings in public and private museums to identify and publicize examples of Nazi-confiscated art. Countries would be asked to open their archives to researchers, to establish a central database and to allow for unavoidable data gaps about a work's provenance.
Eizenstat's proposal, however, skirts more contentious issues. It barely mentions, for example, one of the main barriers blocking restitution in Europe. Unlike the United States, where the purchaser of a stolen work of art never gets clear title to it, European countries give clear title to good-faith purchasers after a period as short as three years from the original theft.
Holocaust-claim advocates are hoping European countries would agree to exemptions for wartime booty.
"The international art market must be open, stable and free of uncertainty that it might be trading in works that are tainted by Nazi looting," Eizenstat said.