by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
It is unlikely that many Czechoslovak racegoers were aware of all these details – or of a comparable back-story involving SA-Sturmführer Helmuth von der Gröben, who was riding Wiese’s other horse, Elfe. Sporting biographies were thinner then, and travelled slowly. Yet even without this knowledge, there were good reasons to regard the German visitors with suspicion. These riders represented a nasty, dangerous regime that used horse racing for its own glorification. They would fight on its behalf, should the need arise; and, if it did, it already seemed likely that Czechoslovakia would be on the receiving end. It was a matter of simple patriotism to hope that, at least on this occasion, the invaders would be sent back empty-handed.
All three German horses had a good chance. Harzburgerin, owned by Count Emich Solms and ridden by F. Hoffmann (about whom little information survives), had started out as a hunter and was a particularly strong jumper. Elfe, ridden by Gröben, was a big, experienced mare whose main weakness was having only one eye, which led her to approach each jump at an angle. And then there was Wahne, Wiese’s horse, double winner of the Von der Goltz-Querfeldein steeplechase and so accomplished a racer that, despite being officially a warmblood, she was handicapped as if she were a thoroughbred. Owned as well as ridden by Wiese, Wahne was a dark bay mare, originally from the Schernbeck stud in Saxony, and Pardubice’s punters were impressed by reports of her speed, stamina and jumping ability. Wahne started as 2:1 favourite, just ahead of Norma, Neva and Harzburgerin on 6:1, with Čigýr and Elfe on 8:1. Ra had assigned Neva and Čigýr to two French officers, Lieutenant P. de Cavaillé and Lieutenant J. de Granel. Padova, at 20:1, was a less serious contender, and Ra – somewhat undermining the narrative that this was a fight to the death between two competing nationalities – had given the ride to his German friend Poldi von Fugger. Nationalists would probably have claimed a win by Padova as a Czechoslovak rather than a German victory; but the question was unlikely to arise. Lata once again rode Norma, and the odds suggested that locals saw her as their best hope for a Czechoslovak win.
19.
Taking sides
They set off fast. Fugger set off fastest. It had been a dry autumn – the water jumps were mostly empty – and the ground was less treacherous than usual. Poldi was still leading at Taxis, which Padova leapt without difficulty. The other eleven runners jumped close behind. Elfe and Rag were the only fallers. (Both remounted but gave up at the next, the Irish Bank.) Padova tired soon afterwards, and the lead changed hands repeatedly. Norma, Neklan, Upman, Harzburgerin and Wahne: each hit the front at some point, but none seemed keen to force the pace. Unusually, this was shaping up to be a proper tactical race rather than a mere test of durability and luck.
From about halfway, quality began to tell. Madeira dropped out; so did Padova, following a refusal and a fall. Neva, Neklan, Clematis and Čigýr slipped further and further behind, leaving only Upman, Harzburgerin, Norma and Wahne in serious contention. Yet again, victory for Lata was a plausible prospect.
They cleared the fourth from last: the willow jump at the Popkovice turn. Wahne accelerated. Upman and Harzburgerin were too tired to respond, but Norma was still strong. Lata drove her into the lead, the excitement clouding her judgement. The main stand was in sight now, with the winning post somewhere in front of it. Wiese resisted the temptation to react too quickly. Instead, he kept Wahne within a length. Lata made Norma surge again and Wiese once again kept his cool. There was still little to separate them, but by the time they reached the last Norma was tiring. Wahne jumped slightly ahead, and was fresh enough to sprint away, winning by three lengths. The other finishers were far behind.
Second. On the face of it, it was Lata’s best performance so far. Yet it was also arguably her worst: she had made her bid for victory a long way from home, and the gamble hadn’t paid off. Could a cannier jockey have won the race?
The answer was almost certainly no. Wahne was a superb horse in superb form, with greater natural speed than Norma. Yet the question hung in the air, and it was not just Lata who asked it. Could she have done better? What she needed was another chance – but there was no guarantee that Ra would allow her one.
Lata got on with her life. In the weeks following the Velká Pardubická, she watched Hubertus race for the first time at Velká Chuchle, over six furlongs. He was unplaced. She also found time to go to an agricultural festival in Nový Bydžov, near Chlumec, where she and František Schwarzenberg took part in a dressage display with Ra and his friends Prince Hans Thurn und Taxis, Count Jenda Dobrzenský and Count Franz Schlick. Presumably she enjoyed it. She was no socialite, but nor was she intimidated by the high aristocracy. And she always felt more confident in herself if horses were involved.
Back in Řitka, the estate kept her busy. There was always something requiring her attention. In 1935, for example, a new gamekeeper, Jan Běhal, arrived from Prague, bringing his young family and a well-behaved eagle owl, which helped him to patrol the woods. Lata made sure that the humans, at least, were properly housed – even donating a large piece of wooden frontage from a building on the main chateau property. She had her own woodland excursions, too, riding in the woods with Hanuš Kasalický on countless afternoons, talking about who knows what, with the young girls gazing curiously up at them from the bottom of the hill.
Her sisters filled much of her life. Alžběta had moved out, taking her children to an apartment in Prague. Gabriele, too, seems to have been mostly absent, staying instead with Marie Therese in Austria. But that still left four contessas: Lata, Kristýna, Markéta and Johanna. Like any bunch of siblings kept in close proximity, they had their quirks and their tensions, but they also enjoyed laughing and messing around together, and their home felt like a happy one. If you had visited them, you would have noticed – in addition to the hunting trophies – the jumble of mugs and glasses on the shelves in the hall (most kept for show rather than use); and a gun-rack with a dozen hunting rifles; and the carved wooden chest on the top landing; the piano in the smoking room, where all except Markéta smoked and Johanna played; Johanna’s paintings on the dining-room wall (including, at one point, a caricature of Lata); the pretty writing table in what was still Gabriele’s room; and the bright kilim rugs and the desk piled with paperwork in Lata’s room. One visitor described the house as ‘full of things of which one can say: the older they get, the nicer they are’ – which is true of many things but probably not of paperwork.
You would also have noticed the sisters’ closeness. Four decades of sharing a home had created an intimacy that must have made communication with outsiders seem laborious by comparison. They lived by a strict timetable: breakfast at 7.30 a.m., lunch at 12.30, afternoon tea at 4 p.m., dinner at 6.30 p.m. Within that inflexible framework, undercurrents of restless activity flowed. This was a house that was lived in: a place in which people were always coming and going and the battle against chaos and clutter was never won for long. There were dogs, too. It would have been hard to visit without noticing them. There were usually at least four in residence – mostly hunting dogs of the pointer variety – and often several canine visitors, since Lata was always happy to look after other people’s animals. (‘Dogs loved her,’ says Jan Pospíšil, ‘but she wasn’t very good at making them behave. ‘) Outside, in addition to the selection of jumps over which Lata practised, the sisters had created a makeshift volley-ball court on the grass. When Alžběta visited, as she usually did on Saturdays, the whole family would play exuberant games – to the delight of Alžběta’s children, Jan and Eva.
And then there were the horses. Those in the Řitka stables – Hostivít, for example, or Egon – were hardy old friends. Šmejda’s stable in Velká Chuchle housed Hubertus and, until she sold them, Lata’s other racehorses. All required her time and care. It is hard to get bored of such chores, if you love horses. Lata’s life was in this respect just like most other horsey lives. Long days of hard work on gallops and in stables piled up behind her. Looking back, the highlights were barely discernible.
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br /> One landmark, in June, was Lata’s fortieth birthday. She must have reflected on its significance. The infinite possibilities of youth, long receding, were never coming back. Unrealised dreams might have missed their chance. And the stiffness and soreness from riding were never going to get any easier. Even so, she showed no signs of wanting to spare herself, especially when it came to Norma. She exercised her whenever and wherever she could: on the racecourse, cross-country, at home – anything to build up her stamina, and Lata’s.
Somehow Lata also found time to travel in August to Hamr na Jezeře, not far from Czechoslovakia’s northern borders with Germany and Poland, to ride Ra’s Čigýr in a steeplechase. (She came fourth, after falling and remounting.) And although she never rode him herself in a race, she put thought and energy into helping turn Hubertus into a winner. When he was ready, she ran him repeatedly at Velká Chuchle, in September, October and November, over distances ranging from a mile to a mile and a half. It was worth it. Hubertus ended the season with two wins and two seconds to his credit, and Lata ended the season having won a grand total of 10,000 crowns in prize money, from two wins and eight places. This wasn’t a huge amount – winning the Velká Pardubická paid eight times as much – but it must have covered most of Lata’s costs for the year. And it did help bolster her sense that she was more than a mere nobody in the racing world.
This mattered. Despite everything, Lata probably didn’t always feel very valued in racing circles. She had achieved more in the Velká Pardubická than any Czech jockey since Popler, yet there were still those who regarded her participation as freakish and unnatural, and some didn’t keep it to themselves. In part this reflected a harsher mood in Czechoslovakia as a whole. Parliamentary elections in May 1935 had revealed a bitterly divided nation. There was a further increase in support for far-right factions; the biggest advances were made by Henlein’s increasingly strident Sudeten German Party (SdP). Tomáš Masaryk, elected to the presidency for the fourth time the previous year, was looking alarmingly frail, and so was the fair, inclusive society he had tried to create. Henlein and his followers prized social conservatism, not equality.
Supporters of the SdP could be found far beyond the Sudetenland. One was the East Prussian jockey Hans Schmidt, winner of the 1928 Velká Pardubická, who spent much of the 1920s working in the Sudetenland and joined the Sudeten German Nazi Party in 1925. (He now belonged to the Nazi Party proper and, following a spell in the SA, was an officer in the SS.) Closer to home, from Lata’s point of view, was Willibald Schlagbaum, a twentyfour- year-old German jockey working at Velká Chuchle. Born in Bavaria, Schlagbaum had been riding professionally since he was fourteen, initially as an apprentice in Vienna. He had been based at Velká Chuchle since 1927, riding mainly for Count Pálffy and for Count Erwein von Nostitz-Rienck, and was now a leading professional rider – in fact, in 1935 he was the year’s most successful jump jockey, with eighteen wins over hurdles and twelve in steeplechases. He was described as a ‘vociferous’ supporter of the SdP. Lata considered him ‘unpleasant’, which may or may not have been fair. What’s clear is that, probably around this time, the two of them fell out. Some say that Schlagbaum questioned Lata’s competence and blamed her failings on her gender. The Czech trainer Martina Růžičková-Jelínková, who has made a study of Lata’s life and discussed this matter with Lata’s niece Eva Pospíšilová (the Aunt Eva who bequeathed her boxes to Jan Pospíšil), believes that the animosity originated with an incident in which Lata cut Schlagbaum up on the racecourse. ‘He hated her from the beginning,’ she says.
No doubt Schlagbaum saw it differently. But the animosity, from such a prominent jockey, cannot have done much to make Lata feel welcome at Velká Chuchle. ‘It is always worse when a woman is racing,’ Lata observed bitterly. ‘If anything happens to her, people will say:’ “Why did she do that?”’
Lata had learned to shrug off disapproval. This may have felt different. Across society, a new triumphalism could be sensed in the traditionalists’ tone: a suggestion that, thanks to the Great Depression, the progressive elite had been discredited as out of touch; and that, thanks to the rise of the Third Reich, Masaryk’s liberal consensus was doomed. Some former aristocrats welcomed this, but it was bad news for women.
Meanwhile, it was becoming plainer by the month that the Reich-inspired return to völkisch values brought with it much other unpleasant baggage. Hitler was openly preparing for war. In September 1935, the Nuremburg Laws stripped Germany’s Jews of their citizenship rights. Henlein and the SdP made little effort to conceal their sympathy for this agenda – and were certainly not among those who called for an Olympic boycott when the German Olympic Committee announced that no Jewish athletes would be representing Germany in the following year’s Games in Berlin.
For Lata, who listened to the daily news on the radio, it was impossible to be unaware of such developments, and it would have been hard to dissociate them from Schlagbaum’s unpleasantness. She had some personal experience of what it felt like to belong to a group whose members were denounced from on high as enemies of the people; and she probably knew that proReich champions of ‘blood and soil’ values had inveighed explicitly against women who neglected their duties as home-makers in order to pursue more ‘manly’ activities. Hermann Goering, Hitler’s most powerful ally, spoke for many when he wrote, the previous year, that a woman’s proper role was to ‘take hold of the frying pan, dustpan and broom, and marry a man’.
As Masaryk had previously argued, and as many others have observed, democracy and gender equality are hard to separate as ideas. The same may be true of their opposites. If Lata didn’t feel intimidated, she must at least have felt an urge to fight back. And the obvious way to do so was to give the Third Reich’s representatives a bloody nose in the Velká Pardubická.
Schlagbaum couldn’t get a ride in the 1935 Velká Pardubická, which had an unusually small field. But there were some prominent representatives of the Third Reich for him to cheer on, even as he dreamed of making his own first attempt at the race the following year. Last year’s winner, SA-Standartenführer Heinrich Wiese, was competing. So was SS-Scharführer Oskar Lengnik. There was also Lieutenant Defendente Pogliaga, from fascist Italy, whose armed forces had begun a war of naked colonial aggression against Abyssinia just a week earlier. Pogliaga rode the fancied gelding, Quixie. A third German horse, Landgraf, was ridden for the Eilenriede stable by A. Peters. The eight-horse field was thus evenly split between Czechoslovaks and the representatives of potentially hostile foreign powers.
Perhaps we should not attach too much weight to the ostensible allegiances of the participants, or to those of other leading German steeplechase jockeys, such as Curt Scharfetter and Heinz Lemke, whose walk-on parts in Lata’s drama are approaching. Unlike us, they did not know where these political currents were taking them – only that they faced immediate and terrifying consequences if they tried to extricate themselves from the Nazi machine. Dr Horst Willer, a kind and wise expert on Germany’s pre-war racing history, put it well when he told me sadly that Wiese, Lengnik, Schmidt and Scharfetter had been ‘captured by National Socialism’ during the inter-war years. In another time or place, they might have lived differently.
Yet there could be no doubt about the increasingly raw political divide between Reich and non-Reich jockeys – which was emphasised by a very visible geographical and cultural divide. Many of the best German riders of the time came from East Prussia, a remote ‘exclave’ of territory on the Lithuanian border that since 1919 had been cut off from the rest of Germany by a chunk of Poland – and whose people, as a result, took a bitter pride in their regional identity. Many of Europe’s best warmblood steeplechasers shared this identity, especially those bred at the great Trakehnen stud near Insterburg, or in the archipelago of small breeding farms that surrounded it. A hardy, sure-footed breed that traced their descent from the warhorses that helped the Teutonic Knights to conquer these flat, pine-shadowed lands in the Middle Ages, Trakehn
er horses were a living symbol of East Prussian uniqueness and toughness. You could recognise them by their broad foreheads and powerful hindquarters; or, more simply, by the distinctive elk’s antler branding on their rumps. A single antler on the right rump signified Trakehner descent; the best horses – locally bred, with their Trakehner credentials recorded in the East Prussian studbook – had a pair of antlers on the left rump.
East Prussians took understandable pride in the excellence of their special breed. And when future SS-Untersturmführer Hans Schmidt won the 1928 Velká Pardubická on Vogler (with Udo von Kummer just behind on Beate), or when Gustav Schwandt won the 1929 Velká Pardubická on Ben Hur, these had been celebrated as East Prussian successes on Trakehner horses. Remus, too (winner in 1932 and 1933), although born in Saxony, was of pure Trakehner origin on both sides. Conversely, Pohanka’s victory in 1931 was hailed as a Czech victory on a Kinský horse. This rivalry based on nationality and breed had hitherto been fierce but good-natured. But Nazism had obvious potential for twisting it to its own ends; and East Prussia was more susceptible to malign manipulation than most regions. Its people had suffered badly in the First World War and felt betrayed by the subsequent peace settlement. (A further surrender of territory to Lithuania, in 1923, hadn’t gone down well either.) The Great Depression had left its farmers on the breadline, while Hitler’s demands for ‘Lebensraum’ – ‘living space’ in the east – offered the hope of a longed-for reunion with the rest of Germany. Social and racial attitudes were not enlightened: one of the Von der Goltz- Querfeldein obstacles, a murky water jump, was called Jew’s Creek. As for politics: a fading entry in Lengnik’s SS records offers a clue. He, too, it seems, had once belonged (like Wiese) to the Stahlhelm. He joined in 1928 – when he was fifteen. It is hard to imagine that happening in a society that was not conservative to the point of extremism. These were perfect conditions for spreading the Nazi virus. An East Prussian victory in Pardubice, on a Trakehner horse, could be almost guaranteed to accelerate its spread.
