Unbreakable
Page 22
Spreading magic was part of what Lata and her sisters saw as their duty. Someone needed to keep morale up, and although much of their inherited privilege had vanished, their sense of inherited responsibility remained. Lata, as a local and national hero, could project the idea that all was well simply by being there. She lacked the popular touch but, instead, had what you might call the aristocratic touch. Tall, graceful, kind, upright, she never betrayed anxiety or fear. Villagers watched her riding to church on Holomek, and noted that the horse, despite spending the rest of the week working in Řitka’s yard, was as beautifully turned out as its rider. Somehow it felt as though, despite Heydrich, the village life they had always known was still intact, and would endure.
Sometimes, however, there was a price to be paid. On a cold May evening in 1944, Markéta, unexpectedly soaked by rain, insisted on fulfilling a commitment to read the litany for a service outside Řitka’s little roadside chapel. The next day, she had a fever; a few days later, it was pneumonia. They managed to get her to a hospital in Prague, but there were no antibiotics. A few weeks later she was dead.
Lata, Kristýna and Johanna immediately assumed responsibility for bringing up her seven-year-old son, Petr. His father, Sergej Jaroševský, had had to find work some way outside the village, and had been coming home only at weekends. So the sisters, reeling from their own loss, had to find it within themselves to provide, between them, all the mothering their distraught nephew needed. ‘They always made me feel loved,’ Petr remembers tearfully today. ‘I was never lost, with them.’
As if that wasn’t enough to worry about, Alžběta’s twenty-three–year-old son Jan was soon in hospital as well, suffering from pleurisy. He spent much of that winter being treated. Lata shared her concerns with Lori Kinský. ‘You know Lori,’ she wrote, ‘when my heart becomes very heavy, then I think to myself: the dear Lord God knows best how he arranges things, after all. One must trust in him . . . But Lori, despite all my confidence, I am still very anxious about the boy . . .’
A fortnight later she wrote again: ‘I would like to wish you with all my heart a good and merry Christmas and a happy 1945. In these hard times, however, it seems almost like a mockery . . .’
In fact, it was the most hopeful new year the world had seen for a while. The old year had already brought hints that the tide was turning: the relief of Leningrad (January), the D-Day landings (June), the (failed) Slovak National Uprising (August); and the liberation of Rome (June), of Paris (July), and, in September, of Kalinov, near the Dukla Pass on Slovakia’s eastern border. But you didn’t hear much about such Nazi reversals in the Protectorate’s mainstream media; and in most places, including Řitka, there were more local troubles to worry about. The Allies were still disembarking on Normandy’s beaches when Markéta breathed her last.
By 1945, however, it was hard not to notice the change. The Nazis were worried, which made them more dangerous but also less terrifying. At Velká Chuchle, the regime’s new insecurity had resulted, since September 1944, in racing being closed to the public. Horses still raced, but only in Saturday ‘breeding tests’ , accessible only to Jockey Club members, stable owners and licensed racing personnel. Lata is unlikely to have had anything to do with these, although she did still exercise horses sometimes for Šmejda. Like most people, she had gradually lowered her horizons in the interests of sanity and survival. But she must have sensed the new atmosphere. And it must have occurred to her that, if she could hang on for just a few more months, the Nazi nightmare might end – and things might return to how they had once been.
One spring day, patrolling the woods with horse and dog, Lata came across a wounded man. If family accounts are accurate, he was a Russian soldier, hurt in battle and on the run. Lata told no one but Kristýna. The fewer people who knew, the fewer there were who could be caught and punished. They managed to treat his wounds – Lata is said to have made use of her stock of horse medicines – and provided him with food until he was well enough to link up with local partisans, who were hiding out in the woods near Mníšek pod Brdy.
As the year progressed, the number of Czech partisans increased. Across the Protectorate, there may have been as many as 7,500. Their hideouts moved closer to Řitka. Lata ensured that food was made available to them. A row of potatoes in the vegetable garden was left in the ground, so that they could be taken at night. Lata took additional supplies up to the woods in a churn, returning with the churn filled with water from a hill-top well. To the casual observer, she appeared to be fetching water; none the less, villagers seemed to know about it. This, again, was high-risk behaviour: getting caught meant death. But perhaps now it felt as though it might not be a purposeless death.
People felt much the same all over what remained of occupied Europe. Men and women who had been keeping their heads down sensed that, if they seized the moment, they could liberate themselves. Those who had thrown in their lot with the Nazis began to fear that they had backed the wrong side. Some decided that it was not too late to switch. In Berlin, Hermann Fegelein, whose work with the SS Cavalry had helped him become one of Hitler’s very closest henchmen (he had even married Eva Braun’s sister), made hurried plans to desert but was caught red-handed. Hitler had him shot on 28 April, drunk and strapped to a chair. Two days later, the Führer took his own life.
The Red Army had reached Zlín by then, in the southeast, and was advancing slowly towards Prague. In the north-west, the Americans had reached Pilsen. Rumours were swirling about uprisings in various parts of the Protectorate; some of them were true. In Řitka, hopeful young men were drifting into the woods, keen to associate themselves with the partisans. Finally, the Czechs of Prague decided that their time had come. On 5 May, two announcers on the official radio channel defied Nazi censors by speaking only in Czech and playing only Czech music. The Waffen-SS – whose leader in the Protectorate, Jockey Club president Count von Pückler-Berghaus, had promised to drown any revolt ‘in a sea of blood’ – moved in to stop them. Soon there was fighting in and around the radio building on Vinohradská street. At 12.33 p.m., a desperate broadcast went out: ‘Calling all Czechs! Come to our aid immediately! Come and defend Czech radio!’ People responded. Word spread. This time, the Czechs were going to fight. They were going to liberate themselves.
By the time rebels had secured the radio building, seventy-nine people had died in that battle alone. But the fire they had lit could not be put out. A full-scale uprising was in progress. The Gestapo headquarters were occupied, hundreds of barricades were erected. The Germans must have known that the Protectorate was doomed. None the less, they fought back fiercely: Poldi von Fugger, whose unit’s retreat from the east had briefly brought him all the way back to Prague, was among those who did so. Count von Pückler-Berghaus even tried to call in airstrikes on the city. The gunfire and the explosions could be heard in Velká Chuchle. Those who heard knew immediately what it meant.
Lata heard. She got on her bicycle and headed for Prague. Reaching the River Vltava, she was stopped by rumours that the Germans had booby-trapped the bridges. Instead she found a boat to take her across. She then found her way to the big Sokol gym near Vyšehrad, where for the next three days she worked more or less non–stop, nursing the wounded. Her sisters had no idea where she was.
Karel Šmejda remained in Velká Chuchle, keeping an eye on his horses. The fighting continued, and spread south and west from Prague as German forces fought for survival – or, if they could get far enough west, for the opportunity to surrender to the Americans rather than the Russians. By 7 May, there was a large, heavily armed Waffen–SS presence in and around Velká Chuchle. A curfew was imposed.
Many villagers had fled by then, along with a number of horses, to a small settlement on the far side of the hill. Other horses were trickier to move and thus remained in the stables. That evening, the gunfire grew so loud that Šmejda became concerned for their wellbeing. ‘That’s all he wanted,’ says Jan Zágler, Eduard Zágler’s son: ‘to make sure his ho
rses were all right. He was such a gentle, kind man.’ Ignoring the curfew, Šmejda walked to the stables to feed, water and reassure them. He was shot dead by a German machine–gunner before he could get back to his place of safety.
That morning, at 2.41, Germany had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. The ceasefire took effect the following morning, at one minute after midnight.
26.
Brave new world
It proved harder than expected to celebrate. After more than six years of Nazi tyranny, Prague was officially liberated on 9 May. The Red Army claimed the credit, although the Czechs had done most of it themselves. Even then, fighting continued outside the city. That same day, a train carrying ammunition exploded near Velká Chuchle station, setting fire to the nearby stables. Despite heroic rescue efforts, three horses could not be saved from the inferno.
The last Germans surrendered on 11 May. The following day, SS-Gruppenführer Count von Pückler-Berghaus, under house arrest in Čimelice, killed first his family and then himself. The Jockey Club president had been apprehended with the help of Norbert Kinský, now working for the Americans as an interpreter. His suicide has been described as ‘the last shot fired in the war in Europe’ . By then, more than 3,000 Czechs had lost their lives in the Prague area in less than a week. No one counted the German losses, but many Czechs took savage revenge.
The woods above Řitka were soon full of Soviet soldiers. Thousands camped there until June. Locals greeted them with garlands, but were glad to see the back of them when they left.
Then, sooner than anyone had expected, it was back to the grind of survival. Czechoslovakia had got off lightly compared with most of Europe. Yet there were still so many loved ones to mourn, so much material loss to be made good, so much wrong to forgive.
Edvard Beneš’s restored government, ruling mainly by decree for the first five months, decided to keep forgiveness to a minimum. Czechs deemed to have collaborated with the Nazis had their property confiscated. (Kasalický lost half of his. His wife was eventually allowed to keep the other half, on the grounds that they had been living more or less separate lives.) The justice was rough: the local People’s Courts that administered it often had private agendas to pursue. Some felt that it was better than no justice at all.
The nation’s remaining German minority were presumed guilty of collaboration and stripped of their citizenship. Those who could prove that they had resisted the Nazis were allowed to apply to become citizens again. The rest had to leave. Reliable figures are impossible to come by, given the post-war chaos, but by the end of 1947 more than two million people had been expelled, mostly to Germany. The ethnic cleansing was enforced so harshly that anything between 10,000 and 30,000 people died in the course of it. The rest of the world barely noticed, so numb had people become to atrocity.
But they noticed in Řitka. Lata’s German-born cousin, Gikina, was among those eligible for expulsion – a threat that may have encouraged Josef Satorie, already probably her lover, to propose marriage. Soon afterwards, the newly-wed Satories moved to the eastern Sudetenland, where the state employed Josef to protect the estates of expelled Germans from looting and degradation. Meanwhile, the National Land Committee was considering confiscating two-sevenths of the Brandis estate to reflect the fact that Marie Therese and Gabriele had, in effect, identified themselves as German: the former by living in Austria, the latter by spending much of the war there and, now, moving there permanently. (It was even alleged that she had become a Reich citizen in 1941.) The local committee that initially proposed this action may not have been entirely disinterested: most confiscated land was divided into small lots and allocated to small local landowners.
The case took time to resolve, but the newly restored Řitka estate appears to have been placed almost immediately into provisional administration. This was partly an emergency measure. The departing German administration had left the estate with nothing: even the harvest and seeds had been taken away. That was the price Lata had paid for being among the minority of aristocrats who stood by the Czech nation in the face of Nazism. Now there was a new price to be paid. The plundered estate had too few resources remaining to it to support a workforce big enough to put things right. Some labourers were reported to be moving instead to the Sudetenland, seeking newly vacated properties with which to make a fresh start. At the same time, Lata and her sisters found themselves on the receiving end of an obscure claim relating to the question of what had happened to the non-fixed assets of Řitka’s tenant farmer, Vladimír Daneš, following their confiscation in 1941 – and who, if anyone, had ultimately benefited from them. The arguments were confusing, and we will not get bogged down in them. But we have not heard the last of this claim, and nor had Lata.
It barely needs adding that, whatever the rights and wrongs of these cases, it cannot have been pleasant for Lata to have had them hanging over her, so soon after the liberation. Even now, it feels slightly shocking. She had done her bit for her country before and during the war. She must have been looking forward to a time in which, once again, she could enjoy ‘the feeling that, far and wide, there was no one who did not like me’ . Instead, with the blood barely dry on the streets of Prague, her fellow Czechs seemed to be turning on her.
In 1946, elections were held. The Communists, who by now had more than a million members, were the most successful single party, with 38 per cent of the vote but no overall majority. The next two years were marked by bitter, dirty political infighting between Communists, social democrats (many of them in the party known as the National Socialists) and smaller parties. The Communists insisted on control of the ministry of the interior. This allowed them to make ruthless use of the security services. It also meant that land reform remained high on the political agenda.
All this cast a shadow over Lata’s life. She probably wasn’t too bothered about ceasing to be rich; and she was used to being considered a class enemy. What must have hurt was the fear of losing her past. Řitka was all that remained of that lost period of innocence, half a lifetime earlier, when her parents had been alive and well, her days had been full of laughter and outdoor play, the pains of adulthood were unimagined, and a benign, whiskery Emperor had embodied the promise that the world would never change. She had never left home. To have all that torn from her now would be like losing a part of herself. That’s the trouble with idyllic childhoods: it’s hard to let them go.
She tried to pick up the pieces of her past regardless, and to enjoy some kind of return to the way things had been before the Nazis came. It wasn’t easy. With Šmejda dead and Kasalický out of reach or out of bounds, Velká Chuchle was no longer the attraction it had been. But Orlík was still there, and for a while Lata resumed her visits, when Ra and Lori were in residence. She rode there, naturally, and sometimes she took Petr Jaroševský with her, tucking her ten-year-old nephew onto the saddle in front of her.
There was also Obora. Lata went there at least once after the war – the seventh prince Karel Schwarzenberg, son of Ra’s stepson Karel (and a significant figure in twenty-first-century Czech politics), remembers seeing her there. It would be nice to think that, while she was there, she was reunited with Norma. Sadly, there is no proof that Norma survived the war. We know that she was alive in 1943, and by one account until April 1944; after that, the trail goes cold. Perhaps she and Lata did indeed meet again. But the golden heroine of 1937 was already so forgotten, her glory so submerged in subsequent history, that no one kept a record of how, where or when her life ended. It was a sad prefiguring of the fate awaiting her rider.
In October 1946, Pardubice racecourse reopened for business. The Nazis had converted it into an airfield; their overthrow had resulted in forty-two bomb craters. Yet two months of frantic repairs had made the course ready for the first Velká Pardubická since 1937. Huge crowds descended on the town, which was decked out as if for a festival: one account mentions ‘specially illuminated historical buildings, decorated shops, social evenings, fashion shows a
nd a crowded theatre’ . Many officers of the Allied armies, notably the English and French, had promised to attend, and did so. So did more than 50,000 other people – far more than the course could safely accommodate.
There was, of course, no question of East Prussian involvement. Even ignoring the fact that Germans were not welcome in Czechoslovakia, there was no East Prussia left. The frontier land of the Trakehners and their riders had been utterly obliterated in the post-war settlement. More than two million civilians were forcibly evacuated to Germany, and at least 300,000 people (along with around 18,500 out of 20,000 Trakehner horses) had died in the course of a westward journey so cruel that, even now, it hardly bears thinking about. But I doubt if many people thought about that in Pardubice in October 1946.
Instead, a race-day ceremony paid tribute to the Czech war dead associated with the race, including Karel Šmejda, trainer of the last winner; Josef Charous; and Arno Košťál, executed owner of the Hotel Veselka.
The organisers struggled to contain the crowds within their allotted areas, and the chaos, though cheerful, caused delays. Eventually, however, the Velká Pardubická runners appeared on the course. Lata rode Nurmi, a four-year-old stallion who lacked the placid temperament of his mother, Norma. When it came to the trial jump, Nurmi refused – but in time-honoured tradition was allowed to race anyway.
It was hardly worth it. Nurmi ran strongly for three jumps but fell badly at Taxis. Lata, catapaulted ahead as he hit the ditch, was lucky not to be crushed as he somersaulted after her. Nurmi was unhurt; Lata suffered a broken collar bone and a severely bruised shoulder. There was no point in carrying on: this was no life or death struggle between nations and ideologies. While the rest of the field charged into the distance (Titan, ridden by Captain Miloš Svoboda, was the eventual winner), Lata was escorted from the course by some French army officers – a well-meant gesture that she is said to have found patronising and irritating.