CZECH HOMETOWN OF ALBRIGHT'S DAD SENT LETTERS FOR YEARS ON HER HISTORY.

Byline: Roger Cohen The New York Times

On Feb. 25, 1994, the mayor of Letohrad wrote to Madeleine Albright to tell her that her Jewish father hailed from this small Bohemian town and that her grandparents and other close relatives had died in Nazi camps.

The letter, full of deference for the woman who became secretary of state Dec. 5, 1996, introduces an article just published in the local paper that describes how records of Albright's father have been found in the ``birth register of the Jewish community'' and how her paternal grandparents ``died in the gas chambers.''

In effect, the letter and accompanying article, sent three years ago, summarized events in Albright's family history that she described this week as ``a major surprise'' after they were reported in The Washington Post. The secretary of state, who was raised as a Catholic, has said she knew nothing of her Jewish past.

The mayor, Petr Silar, said Thursday that he never received a reply from Albright to the letter or to three subsequent ones, sent Aug. 26, 1994, Aug. 29, 1994, and Dec. 6, 1996. The letters, all written in Czech, recalled her family's past in Letohrad, an eastern Bohemian town that was called Kysperk until 1950.

The first letter was sent through the mail, the second and third through the American Embassy in Prague, and the fourth through the Czech Foreign Ministry, he said. Copies of the letters were made available to The New York Times.

James Rubin, Albright's spokesman, said Thursday that Albright had ``a lot of mail, some obviously not true and some interesting,'' while she was the American representative at the United Nations, the job she held when Silar's first letter was sent. ``She does not specifically remember this piece of mail.''

The secretary of state said this week that ``there was nothing that systematically made sense'' in the letters she received about her family's past in Central Europe.

In her hectic post at the United Nations, Albright did not have much time to sift the material in the letters, Rubin said.

Other officials said that with hundreds of letters arriving a day, many of them from abroad and written in a foreign language, not all mail was answered or even read.

But they added that in the period immediately before Albright's appointment as secretary of state, letters about her Jewish origin seemed more persistent and credible. As a result, during the White House vetting process, Albright volunteered the information that she might be of Jewish descent.

Albright's parents, Josef and Mandula Korbel, believers in a democratic Czechoslovakia, went to the United States in 1948, fleeing the communist takeover.

They took with them three young children, including the 11-year-old Madeleine Albright, for whom they apparently created a fictional Catholic background in the interests of protecting them from the persecution Jews had suffered in Europe.

Silar wrote in his first letter of three years ago that he had enclosed material about Albright's family in the hope ``that you might want to add some of your own memories, which we would like to publish, with your permission.''

The enclosed material, he said Thursday, combined research by Ludmila Stejskalova, a town official, with the recollections of local people - including Josef Koloc and Vera Rusprehctova - who had known Albright's family.

``We went through the birth register books,'' the material sent to Albright in February 1994 says. ``An entry on the birth of Josef Korbel, born in Kysperk 305, was discovered in the National Central Archives in Prague, where the birth register of the Jewish community of Zamberk is kept.''

The number 305 refers to the large ocher house opposite the railroad station occupied by Arnost and Olga Korbel at the time of their son Josef's birth in 1909; the town of Zamberk is the closest large settlement to Letohrad.

Other extensive details of Albright's family are then related by Silar and other people in the town, including how Josef Korbel and his brother Jan later studied in Prague; how Josef Korbel's sister married a man named Rudolf Deml; how the Demls then had a daughter named Dagmar - Madeleine Albright's first cousin - who went to England ``before the Nazi occupation''.

If she ever received and read this material, the details about her cousin Dagmar must have been particularly compelling. Albright's father, a diplomat, settled in London just before World War II broke out, and Dagmar went to live with the family. As a young girl - she was born in 1937 - Albright knew Dagmar very well in London.

The article sent with the letter in 1994 says, ``Mrs. Deml and her parents Arnost Korbel and his wife, Olga, died in the gas chambers'' - a clear statement of the fact that Albright's aunt and her grandparents were killed by the Nazis.