by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
Different people responded to the changed realities in different ways. In Pardubice, the new Reich-approved authorities melted down the town’s commemorative statue of Tomáš Masaryk in April 1940 and gave the metal to the German war effort as a ‘birthday present’ for Hitler. František Aubrecht, by contrast, was already working for the Czech resistance, among other things by helping to distribute the illegal magazine, V boj (‘In battle’), in Pardubice and Prague. In Velká Chuchle, Willibald Schlagbaum had taken a break from horse racing to join the German army, while Eberhard Mauve was among a number of prominent figures who signalled their acceptance of the new status quo by contributing a prize for a new race. Mauve became prominent in the new Jockey Club of Bohemia and Moravia – which replaced the Prague Jockey Club as Czech racing’s governing body. The Prague Jockey Club’s considerable assets appear to have gone straight into Nazi coffers or pockets. Mauve was eventually judged sufficiently ‘German’ in outlook to be made deputy to the club’s president, SS-Brigadeführer (later SS-Gruppenführer) Count Carl Friedrich von Pückler-Berghaus, whose other responsibilities would soon include being in charge of the Waffen-SS (the military version of the SS) in the Protectorate.
Then, in the summer of 1941, the realities changed again. In June, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. The Wehrmacht advanced on Russia with devastating speed; the Waffen-SS mopped up resistance and Jews in its wake, savagely. Some of the worst atrocities were committed by the SS Cavalry Brigade, under the leadership of Hermann Fegelein. In a two-week period starting at the end of July, the SS Cavalry Brigade slaughtered at least 15,878 men, women and children in the Pripet Marshes in what is now Belarus. According to the historian Paul J. Wilson, it was ‘perhaps the first of Himmler’s murder brigades to receive and follow orders to shoot women and children’ .
In July, Hitler formalised his plans for a Final Solution to the ‘Jewish question’ . Berlin, Vienna and Prague were identified as the first cities to be completely cleared of Jews. In September, Reinhard Heydrich – who even Hitler referred to as ‘the man with the iron heart’ – was put in effective charge of the Protectorate as acting Reichsprotektor. His mission, he told an aide, was to ‘Germanise the Czech vermin’ . It also involved creating a holding camp for the Protectorate’s Jews in the Bohemian town of TerezÍn. More than 77,000 people eventually passed through the camp: nearly 90 per cent of the Protectorate’s Jews. Most were then sent for extermination in the east.
Amid so much evil, it hardly seemed worth grumbling when, that July, the estates of ten noble families who had associated themselves with the declaration of Czech national loyalty in (especially) 1938 were abruptly taken into administration. (Another fifty-five estates were seized over the next eighteen months, generally from owners who had signed the 1939 declaration.) The confiscation barely amounted to a hill of beans in the wider landscape of catastrophe, yet it did make a difference, especially for the struggling Brandis sisters – who were among those singled out for that first wave of punishment. All revenues earned by the Řitka estate would henceforth go to the Protectorate’s Land Office – leaving the sisters, theoretically, with nothing to live on. A German commissar, Herr Eickhart, was placed in overall charge of the administration, and a new manager, Josef Satorie, was installed on the estate.
Reluctantly, Lata dismissed the remaining chateau staff (who seem to have included a cook, a maid and a coachman). The estate still employed up to forty agricultural workers, but they now worked for Eickhart and Satorie, not for the contessas.
Luckily, Satorie, who set up home in part of what had been Řitka’s servants’ quarters, proved a more sympathetic manager than expected. The Brandis sisters were able to feed themselves, mostly from their own little patch of vegetable garden. The farm continued, just, to function, although the tenant farmer, Vladimír Daneš, would later be evicted as well. Occasionally, Satorie would pass on a sack of flour or potatoes to its original owners. The rest of the village struggled by as best they could. There were no round-ups of Jews in Řitka: the only Jewish family had left the village in 1937. But there were whispers about what was happening elsewhere. In neighbouring MnÍŠek pod Brdy, twenty-eight Jewish men, women and children were eventually deported to Terezín and other camps, mostly en route to Auschwitz. In Řitka, meanwhile, the vigorous malice of Heydrich’s regime made itself felt in lesser ways. That October, for example, the village Sokol was dissolved and all its assets confiscated.
Lata and her sisters responded, in the first instance, by refusing to speak German. This was awkward: German was their first language, and their mastery of Czech was imperfect. But they stuck to their resolution stubbornly, to the irritation of Protectorate representatives who had dealings with them.
‘It does not cross my mind at all to complain,’ wrote Lata to Lori Kinský, soon after the administration was imposed. ‘I can only say that my love for my fellow humans is not growing.’
On 27 May 1942, a team of British-trained Czechoslovak paratroopers tried to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. The acting Reichsprotektor died of his wounds eight days later. The reprisals plumbed the foulest depths of organised savagery. The villages of Lidice and Ležáky were obliterated; thousands of civilians were summarily shot; hundreds of women and children were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp – and later murdered.
Pardubice suffered, too. The paratroopers who killed Heydrich were part of a larger team, some of whom had based themselves in and around the town where Lata and Norma had sparked such celebrations five years earlier. Their operation, code-named Silver A, was helped by the local resistance, including František Aubrecht, who lived in the nearby spa town of Lázně Bohdaneč. Another resistance member, Arnošt Košť ál, was the latest owner of the Hotel Veselka – by then a popular drinking haunt for the Gestapo. Košť ál gave one of the Silver A agents, Josef Valčík, a job in his wine cellar. When word reached Košť ál that Valčík was under suspicion, he tipped him off – and persuaded him to drop, very publicly, a large pile of plates. Košťál, equally publicly, sacked him while he was still picking up the pieces, providing an innocent excuse for Valčík’s sudden absence. It didn’t help for long. The wave of arrests and torturings that followed Heydrich’s assassination eventually resulted in the whole Silver A network being exposed, along with most of the local resistance. The subsequent slaughter took place at the Zámeček. Over a nineteen-day period in June, 194 men, women and children, including the Silver A conspirators and much of the population of Ležáky, were murdered in the grounds where Poldi, Ra and Lata had practised their jumping skills. Most were kept beforehand in what had once been Poldi’s well-stocked wine cellar.
Four months earlier, in exile in Brazil, the novelist Stefan Zweig – Lata’s erstwhile compatriot – had taken his own life, overwhelmed by the barbarism that had engulfed what was once Austria-Hungary. Like Lata, he had lived his formative years in the peaceful, cultured prosperity of ‘a great and mighty empire, in the monarchy of the Habsburgs. But,’ he wrote bleakly in his final work, ‘do not look for it on the map; it has been swept away without trace . . . All the bridges between our today and our yesterday and our yesteryears have been burnt.’ Lata was a very different character from Zweig: simpler and more trusting in traditional values. Yet no one who had enjoyed the best of Austro-Hungarian civilisation – and who now contemplated the orgy of murder the Nazis had set in motion – could dissent very much from Zweig’s despairing verdict in The World of Yesterday, which he completed the day before he killed himself: ‘Europe . . . has torn itself apart suicidally in a war of brother against brother . . . Against my will I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the wildest triumph of brutality in the chronicle of the ages. Never . . . has any generation experienced such a moral retrogression from such a spiritual height as our generation has.’
For eighteen years before the Nazis came, every October, the brave young riders of Czechoslovakia and Germany – and Austria, France and Italy – had shared
danger and adrenaline and fierce rivalry, peacefully. They had drunk together, frequented the same hotels and grand houses, admired one another’s horses. Now they shared only the horrors and depravities of total war.
Some did so for longer than others. Oskar Lengnik, who had eventually reached the pre-war rank of SS-Obersturmführer but had a military rank of Leutnant, was killed in action on the eastern front (‘fighting the Bolsheviks’ , in the words of one SS journal) in 1942. Similar fates would in due course befall Curt Scharfetter, Hans Schmidt and Heinz Lemke (missing presumed dead in Russia in 1944). The records are incomplete, but as far as I can tell no Velká Pardubická jockeys were among the approximately one-in-three members of the pre-war Equestrian SS who were hand-picked by Fegelein to serve in his wartime Waffen-SS cavalry divisions. Lengnik fought in the 1st Cavalry Regiment of the main Wehrmacht, yet remained close enough to the SS to be awarded the Totenkopfring – the SS Death’s Head ring – in December 1941. The others were in artillery or infantry regiments. Given their prowess as horsemen, this is slightly surprising. Perhaps it counted against them that, being based in East Prussia, they were not part of Fegelein’s main SS riding school in Munich; or perhaps it was just a mundane matter of the Wehrmacht enlisting them first. But it is not inconceivable that their credibility as potential members of an elite killing force had been undermined by their humiliating defeat by a woman in 1937. I like to think that this was the case, because it would mean that Lata had inflicted on the Nazis’ paramilitaries precisely the dishonour that Czechoslovak officers had been so reluctant to risk in 1927; and, with gratifying further irony, that this dishonour then spared them complicity in the many atrocities committed by Fegelein’s horsemen. That is not to say that they were not complicit in other atrocities; but perhaps we can hope that death kept their hands relatively clean.
Poldi von Fugger also fought in the east, with the Luftwaffe. By the end of the war he would be a major general and a prisoner of the Soviets (who captured him after driving the Germans back into Czechoslovakia and did not release him until 1955). Willibald Schlagbaum fought in Russia, too. He was badly wounded in 1942 and eventually lost a leg; he then set up a bookmaker’s business in Prague, receiving his licence from the Reich authorities in April 1943. He lived in a flat that (his daughter believed) had been seized from a Jewish family, and kept a large swastika flag hanging from one wall. After the war he returned to Germany and became a successful and relatively contented innkeeper – although he never fully came to terms with the fact that he had lost the most important race of his life to a woman. He died of a heart attack in 1971. Helmut Böttcher never saw the war, having died in a motorcycle accident in 1937, mourned for his ‘gentle, modest’ nature. Heinrich Wiese continued to sit, notionally, in what was by then the Greater German Reichstag. On 26 April 1942 he helped pass a decree proclaiming Hitler ‘supreme judge of the German people’ – confirming the Führer’s right to overrule all other institutions, including the judiciary. Soon afterwards, he was awarded the War Merit Cross, a decoration for civilians who had performed valuable service in furtherance of the war effort. But there is no evidence that, after the Reichstag’s term expired for the last time in January 1943, Wiese then did his bit as a soldier. All we know is that he somehow survived the war (and, briefly, raced again).
Of the Czechoslovak jockeys, Hynek Býček was still helping the resistance – for example, by distributing food tickets – from his stable in Velká Chuchle. František Aubrecht – who had somehow avoided arrest – was trying to do much the same in the Pardubice region, although after June 1942 there wasn’t much of a resistance network left for him to help. Josef Charous had been sent to Terezín. He would soon be transferred to Auschwitz, where he died in August 1943 – just one among fifty former Olympic competitors to die in Nazi concentration camps, but as far as I know the only Velká Pardubická veteran to do so.
Karel Šmejda, Norma’s notional trainer, quietly continued his work at Velká Chuchle. He was one of fourteen trainers (counting Býček) who maintained stables there throughout the war. Hanuš Kasalický applied for German citizenship and membership of the Nazi Party. By 1942 he was said to be consorting with the Gestapo and to be insisting on ‘Heil Hitler’ greetings from visitors to his chateau in Všenory; he was also reported to have boasted of his connections to the Nazi branch of the Kinský family. Tried for collaboration after the war, he argued that he had not been collaborating, merely trying to preserve his property. The court was not convinced, yet the argument was perhaps not as flimsy as it seems.
Most people did what they deemed necessary for the preservation of life as they knew it, and would have told themselves that the choices they made were more innocent than they appeared to others.
But some were more careless of their safety. Josef Soukup, the groom who had escorted Norma from the Pardubice finishing line with the V-for-victory sash across his chest, was still employed by Ra – who, like Lata, continued to inhabit part of the property the Germans had taken from him. Soukup was the main operator of Ra’s high-risk scheme to spare his horses conscription to Fegelein’s cavalry – a fate that would otherwise have awaited them. Taking advantage of the fact that Chlumec and Obora were now in different administrative districts, Soukup would lead the most valued Kinský horses from one estate to the other at night, so that the requisitioning officers (visiting at different times) never actually saw them. Norma herself may have benefited from this ruse. She gave birth to five foals in the course of the war and may even have survived until its end. Yet the risks, to Soukup and to Ra, were enormous: getting caught would have led them at best to a concentration camp, at worst to summary execution.
Somehow the risks don’t seem to have bothered Ra. Even now, he saw life as a game, to be played with spirit and ingenuity. When the Nazis began to conscript young Czechs as forced labour for their war industries, he was able to wangle exemption for sixteen-year-old Génilde by threatening to tell his ‘good friend’ Major General von Fugger. Soon afterwards, when the Nazis tried again, Ra breezily approved Génilde’s whirlwind marriage to František (‘Toši’) Dobrzenský, on the grounds that Toši’s mother’s Hungarian citizenship (and with luck Génilde’s pregnancy) would help him to protect her from further danger. The marriage proved ill advised and fell apart shortly after the birth of their second child. But Génilde did at least survive the war – and, indeed, is alive at the time of writing. Ra was unable, however, to save Génilde’s brother Norbert from forced labour. And he was entirely helpless when, in 1943, the Germans occupying Karlova Koruna allowed a huge fire to break out, destroying the main domed tower and leaving most of the rest of the property uninhabitable.
Lata seems to have taken an equally happy-go-lucky approach. When the Nazis tried to requisition Řitka’s horses, she managed to sweet-talk the major in charge into categorising Hostivít, wrongly, as unfit for service. She then redoubled the risk, for her and for ‘the brave major’ , by describing the incident in a letter to Lori. Perhaps it never occurred to her that the letter might fall into the wrong hands. Perhaps she simply scorned caution.
Another time, according to family tradition, the Gestapo attempted a round-up of one or more people of Russian origin in and around Řitka – presumably including Kasian Rusniak, the former prisoner of war who lived up in the woods and worked on the (regimeadministered) Brandis estate. Lata went straight to Gestapo headquarters in Prague, carrying her horse whip, and complained very forcibly (presumably in German) that ‘a gentleman does not behave like this’ . The Russian(s) were soon returned.
More recklessly, Lata insisted on keeping a rifle on the estate, hidden in a hay loft. This was a crime punishable by death – as Lata came perilously close to finding out when, at some point in 1942, an unidentified farmhand found it and handed it over to the Gestapo in Jíloviště. Lata was named as the assumed owner, but Hanuš Kasalickýappears to have used his influence to make the case go away. If nothing else, this suggests that the bond of affection b
etween them had not been entirely broken.
The Gestapo were not squeamish about punishing respectable ladies. Being female reduced your chances of being ordered to commit terrible acts in wartime; it did not protect you from having them done to you. Several of the First Republic’s most prominent female activists, including Františka Plamínková and Milada Horáková, had already been sent to concentration camps. Plamínková was executed in June 1942; Horáková survived to be executed by a subsequent totalitarian regime. Lata may not have been aware of such details, but she must have known the kind of people she was up against, and the small value they placed on Czech lives. Yet cowed submission was not in her nature, and somehow her cheerful insubordination infected those around her.
One day, Markéta’s husband, Sergej Jaroševský, defied regulations by slaughtering one of Řitka’s pigs. This was illegal. Livestock belonged to the regime. But the family and farmworkers needed food, and Josef Satorie – who had by now developed a close relationship with Lata’s resident cousin, Gikina – not only turned a blind eye but lent a hand with the slaughter. This turned out to be a noisy process, and reports of the squeals reached the Gestapo. Some officers came to investigate. Satorie denied everything and the Gestapo left empty-handed.
Then there was the time that the contessas decided that villagers were tired of the ban on public gatherings and needed cheering up. They organised an impromptu May Day dance in the chateau, with a gramophone playing in the kitchen. ‘I’ll never forget it,’ said Františka Mašková, the village carpenter’s daughter, more than seventy years later. ‘We all went. I was just a teenager. We danced the whole night. There were waltzes, polkas, old Czech dances. I can still remember the tiles on the kitchen floor, and the cold air on my bare arms when we walked home in the early morning. It was magical.’
