by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
It was the first time Lata had started a Pardubice race without wearing the Kinský colours. It was the first time she had started without wearing her Virgin Mary medallion, which she believed had kept her safe in all her steeplechases so far. Yet she must have felt confident, because she also started without a helmet. Shortly before the race she had lent hers to one of the other jockeys – a young man who for some reason had been unable to obtain one. According to Lata, he was ‘afraid to ride without it’.
The race began. For the first two obstacles, Coura-Iris led from Nella and Naďa. Then Rival, Petar and Viking II moved up to challenge. All six horses approached the Snake Ditch in a bunch, with Lata and Naďa just at the back with Nella and Petar. Then the Snake struck. Not for the first time that day, the horses failed to decode the glistening waters of the ditch-only obstacle, whose overflowing contents merged edgelessly with the wet turf on the far side. Coura-Iris plunged in, catapulting Captain Bozděch from his saddle. Viking II did much the same with Lieutenant Král. Naďa, jumping after them through a curtain of spray, was already in the air when Lata noticed the two fallen horses below.
No one quite saw what happened next, except that Petar came to grief at almost exactly the same moment. Radslav, jumping fractionally behind, always worried afterwards that Nella might have clipped Lata with a stray hoof, but there was no evidence of that. One picture seems to suggest that Lata – if it is her – landed on her head. Other accounts suggest, plausibly, that it was the flailing horses on the ground that were her undoing.
All we can say for certain is that, after Captain Bozděch had remounted Coura-Iris and galloped off in pursuit of the other surviving runners, three horses and three riders remained at the Snake Ditch. Nella and Viking II merely needed to be helped out of the water, but Petar was dead, having half cleared the ditch but broken his neck on landing. The three jockeys were alive, but all three – Lata, Lieutenant Král and Petar’s rider, J. Vágner – appeared to be seriously injured.
It took time for medical help to arrive: crowds on the course impeded the ambulance. Rumours of catastrophic injuries exacerbated the problem. By the time the ambulance reached the Snake Ditch, there were clear signs of life from Král and Vágner but Lata remained motionless. She was still unconscious when she reached the nearby hospital, half an hour or so after the accident. Král and Vágner were by then being described as having only minor injuries, but Lata’s appeared to be life-threatening. Before long, rumours were circulating that she was dead. Later, Communist propagandists are said to have added the insinuation that, knowing that she was on the wrong side of history, the former countess had deliberately tried to kill herself.
Lata could not defend herself. She was still in a coma several days later, although she uttered occasional monosyllables and sometimes cried out at night. By then she had been diagnosed with injuries including a fractured skull, a broken collar bone, a complex fracture of her left leg, a fractured sacrum, a damaged spine, several broken ribs, vaginal bleeding and assorted bruises and flesh wounds, notably on her right leg. When she fully recovered consciousness, five days after the fall, additional ailments revealed themselves, such as double vision and shaky limb movements.
She insisted, quite forcefully, that she did not want to be treated by doctors. She wanted someone to summon a vet instead. She may have had a specific vet in mind: perhaps Jaroslav Drobný from Městec Králové, who worked regularly for the Kinskýs and may have been important to her. More probably it was a symptom of confusion, or of a more generalised sense that it is better to put your trust in the world of horses than in the world of men.
Her twelve-year-old nephew visited with his aunts. ‘She didn’t recognise me at all,’ Petr Jaroševský remembers. ‘I was terribly upset.’ But gradually the clouds cleared. As they did so, it became clearer how much discomfort she was in. She said that her whole body ached. She said that she felt as if she had been beaten up.
Doctors removed a shotgun pellet from her head. She said that she thought she knew how it had got there, years earlier, when she and others were shooting in Řitka’s woods. She had never thought it worth doing anything about it.
She also claimed to remember everything about the race up until the fall itself. One account quotes her as describing it as follows: ‘There were two horses lying in the Snake Ditch. When I saw them, it was too late. Naďa had already taken off. I pulled her back, but you’re not supposed to do that. She tripped over something with her front leg, we went down, and other horses fell over us.’ As for not having worn a helmet, she said that she was glad that she had lent hers to the young man who needed it (presumably either Král, Vágner or Bozděch): ‘Maybe it helped him – who knows? Otherwise he might have crippled himself.’
By mid-November, getting on for a month after the race, she was becoming more like herself. ‘The patient does not complain of anything,’ noted the doctor. A week or so later, she was able to walk, shakily. She still suffered occasionally from double vision, and she had difficulties with balance. None the less, on 3 December she was ready to go home.
The hospital’s report on her injuries and treatment ran to four closely typed pages.
She was told she would never ride again. ‘Oh yes I will,’ she said. ‘Like the Devil!’
But the Devil had different ideas.
28.
Enemy of the people
Perhaps she found peace in Řitka. If so, it was shortlived. The Communist revolution – two years old in February 1950 – was entering its cruellest phase. Dissenters were being arrested; concentration camps were filling up; show trials were being prepared; the StB were recruiting informers by the thousand. Across the country, semi-spontaneous Local Action Committees had sprung up to advance and enforce the Communist agenda. Even Řitka had one.
Those familiar, ivy-clad walls could not insulate the Brandis sisters from the harsh winds: you could feel them everywhere. In May and June, for example, the entire nation heard radio broadcasts of the trial of Milada Horáková, feminist, democrat and wartime resistance activist, who was accused, absurdly, of counterrevolutionary crimes ranging from plotting to kidnap Party leaders to fomenting nuclear war. Suitably prepared by torture, she and her twelve co-defendants were supposed to stick to an agreed script during the trial, although Horáková repeatedly deviated from it. Meanwhile, the entire nation was encouraged to join in a ‘spontaneous’ hate campaign against the accused. Millions succumbed to the pressure. In Řitka, the Action Committee convened a public meeting on 7 June, which approved a statement calling for the ‘severest possible penalty’ for these ‘monsters’ and ‘pariahs’ . (Horáková and three others were hanged.) If Lata and her sisters did not participate – and I don’t think they did – this will not have improved their chances of avoiding pariah status themselves.
But perhaps they sensed that they were already pariahs. A secret police report a few months earlier had described Lata and her sisters as ‘downright class enemies’: estate-owners with a tendency to mix in politically unsound circles whose relatives had a habit of fleeing the country. Now they began to get a sense of what it meant to be out of favour. All through that year, the confiscation of land and the collectivisation of agriculture continued; so, more distressingly, did the demands for money from the Brandis family. The details were absurdly complicated but may be oversimplified as follows. The five co-owners of what remained of the Řitka property – Lata, Kristýna, Johanna, Alžběta and Petr Jaroševský – had been deemed since December 1946 to owe 207,378.50 crowns to the Fund for National Renewal, mostly as a result of the benefits that Vladimír Daneš alleged that their estate (now under administration on behalf of the state) had received during the Nazi administration. The claim was eventually reduced on the grounds that two-sevenths of the estate had been confiscated immediately after the war. The fact that the remaining five-sevenths had been taken into administration and that the co-owners were receiving little or no income from it was ignored. The family were required to
pay 145,627 crowns, plus steadily accumulating interest. By late 1949 the sisters were being threatened with the seizure of their furniture if they failed to do so. Yet they could not pay. In effect, they were guilty of two offences: being too rich and being too poor. They were being pursued for an alleged benefit (which they denied) to an estate which, with the exception of fifty hectares, they no longer possessed. Their income was in any case so pitiful that they could barely afford to live, let alone make six-figure payments to the state. Yet they remained aristocrats, born into unearned privilege. They could hardly expect a sympathetic hearing.
There had been a time – for most of the past forty years – when Lata could have been relied upon to take charge of such a situation. But she was not yet healed; and her incapacity made the problems worse. Months after her discharge, she was still troubled by memory disorders, mood swings, depression and mental weariness. Monthly payments that were supposed to reduce the family’s liabilities were missed; letters may well have gone unread. There was also the question of a bill from the hospital in Pardubice, for 5,670 crowns, which Lata appeared unable to pay. Eventually, Alžběta’s son, Jan Pospíšil (father of the current Jan Pospíšil), attempted to sort things out on the sisters’ behalf. Now a lawyer in his late twenties, he corresponded tirelessly with the authorities, explaining that Lata was incapacitated and that she and her sisters were unable to pay and were, in effect, being taxed on income that they no longer had. He succeeded in delaying the inevitable, but the authorities were implacable.
By the end of 1950, the estate had been incorporated into a collective state farm that also included the village’s ‘upper farm’ and another property just up the hill at Černolice. The three resident sisters were banished to a few rooms at end of the chateau. The rest of the building became a hostel for agricultural workers.
Lata and her sisters accepted their fate. They had little choice. Lata’s unaccustomed apathy added to their helplessness. In November 1950 a Prague neurologist declared her unfit for work. She still struggled with her balance and needed a stick to help her walk, and there was no question of riding a horse or even a bicycle. The fate of the estate’s remaining horses was in any case unclear. They seem to have ended up in Černolice. Řitka’s stables became a giant cowshed. Lata spent much of her time indoors – although she did make friends with several of the new farmworkers.
The months turned into years. Lata recovered her strength, both mental and physical. The grip of the Communists grew tighter and harsher. You can get a sense of how harsh from the story of Vladimír Hejmovský, who in 1951 became the oldest ever winner of the Velká Pardubická when, at the age of sixty-one, he rode Salvator to victory. He did not return to attempt a second victory in 1952 because the security services had by then realised that, during the Russian Civil War of 1918–21, he had been a colonel on the White (anti-Communist) side. He died during interrogation by the StB. Needless to say, he fell – or ‘jumped’ – from a window.
The same grip could be felt in Řitka. In early 1953, a CIA plane managed to scatter a batch of propaganda leaflets over the area. Some curious villagers picked them up; a few were rash enough to keep them. ‘My father was jailed for three and a half years,’ remembers Alena Brabencová (then Mašková). ‘I think there were five or six in the village arrested altogether. I was at elementary school at the time. When the time came for me to go to high school, I wasn’t allowed to go.’
Around the same time, in March 1953, Miloslav Sléha, son-in-law of Lata’s former gamekeeper, Jan Běhal, was arrested for supposedly subversive activities and sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment. For the next seven years – after which he was released under an amnesty – his wife, Jana, was left to raise two daughters alone, while earning a precarious living as a seamstress. Spare moments were spent travelling with her daughters to remote corners of the country, to visit Miloslav in various camps, including the notorious Jáchymov uranium mines.
At a time when Communism still had popular support, Řitka showed less enthusiasm for the cause than most villages. ‘We were a Sokol village,’ insists Jana Sléhová, who still lives in the village. ‘The Communists were mostly in Černolice.’ Even so, it was the Communists who wielded all the power now in Řitka, and there were more than enough of them to ensure that dissent was spotted, reported and punished. The climate of fear was suffocating. Altogether, around 130,000 Czechoslovaks – 1 per cent of the population – were sent to prisons, camps and mines under Communism, most of them in the 1950s. Former aristocrats were not immune: Arnošt Schwarzenberg, Karel’s uncle, spent four years in custody from 1953 to 1957, including two years of hard labour in Jáchymov. Nor did sporting fame protect you: several leading athletes were in camps, along with most of the world-beating national ice-hockey team. Lata and her sisters, in debt to the state and visibly unsupportive of the regime, were at obvious risk. None the less, they did what they could to support villagers who were in trouble: for example, with commissions for Jana Sléhová (usually delivered via Kristýna). But they could not do so for long.
In June 1953, the last vestiges of inherited aristocratic wealth in Czechoslovakia were vaporised by a radical reform of the currency. The old crown was replaced by a new one, whose value depended on how many you possessed. You could exchange five old crowns for one new one, up to a maximum of 1,500 old crowns; beyond that, each new crown cost you fifty old ones. Most private savings were erased by the reform, which also involved the nullification of insurance stock and assorted statebacked financial obligations. There were widespread protests, but few turned violent and all were successfully suppressed.
It was at around this time that the Brandis sisters’ financial problems overwhelmed them. Their aristocratic origins made it almost impossible for them to find paid employment – employers who knew what was good for them didn’t hire class enemies – and Lata was in any case unfit to work. But deriving an income from their land was no longer an option either. With no way of paying what they owed the state, they were effectively bankrupt. Eventually, after months of acrimonious correspondence about the valuation and seizure of assets, they were evicted. A small cottage was found for them in Klínec, a tiny settlement three miles to the east. To describe it as basic would exaggerate its comforts. There was just a small main room, with two tiny bedrooms and a toilet tucked away to the side. The steep slope below created space for a log-cellar underneath, and there was a small verandah. There was no upstairs, no running water, no electricity and, since the hillside was thickly wooded, not much light. But Lata was no stranger to physical hardship. The frightening new pain she had to bear would not be the absence of material comforts but the loss of the home and the village to which all her family memories were attached.
They took what possessions they could, in a large cart. One cartload was more than enough to fill their new home. Everything else, they abandoned.
An agricultural training college was soon based in the chateau in their place, in addition to the state farm and the workers’ hostel. Some say that furniture was flung out of the window in preparation for the conversion. Everyone agrees that there was looting. ‘There are many homes around here where you’ll see pieces of furniture which used to belong in the chateau,’ one old villager told me, correctly. (In May 2018 I actually saw one such piece returned, when a man from a neighbouring village, after half a century of being nagged by his conscience, appeared at Řitka with a big Venetian-style silver mirror in the back of his car.) Even if you question the fairness of the Brandis family’s having had so many possessions in the first place, you can imagine the sense of violation: like being burgled by a large group of local people who share your possessions among themselves and make little effort to conceal it. But no matter how much it hurt, and regardless of the affection that most villagers still felt for the Brandis family, ‘No one would stand up for them,’ says Františka Mašková. In some cases, people felt that they were safeguarding things on the sisters’ behalf. In others, according to Jar
oslava Orolová, grand-daughter of a former Řitka estate manager, ‘People who had cause to be grateful to the family didn’t show them much gratitude.’
Some fine china was initially kept in the cottage of a former estate worker but ended up scattered around the village. ‘Children used to use the plates and dishes for making mud-pies and things like that,’ remembers Alena Brabencová. ‘It used to make me sad, to see that beautiful china cracked and muddy, just lying around where the children had played with it.’
Petr Jaroševský watched Lata and her sisters leave their home for the last time. ‘When they left Řitka, they walked away beside the cart with their heads held high and never once looked back,’ he remembers. ‘They never returned. They never complained. They never even talked about it.’ Just as they had refused to speak German, so they now refused to speak the language of victimhood.
29.
In the woods
The story of the next twenty-five years can be told in a few pages. The cartload of possessions was unpacked. Lata and Kristýna took the larger bedroom; Johanna the smaller. You could barely see the floor in either room.
Johanna and Kristýna, both in their fifties, found jobs, with difficulty. Most employers wanted nothing to do with them, given their origins; but they had to earn a living somehow, and they were eventually allowed to start work on the production line of the vast Orion chocolate factory in Modřany, on the edge of Prague. This may have been intended as a humiliation. If so, they bore it quietly, and over the next few years – for nearly a decade, in Johanna’s case – they appear to have fitted in reasonably well. They were not the only members of the formerly privileged classes to do manual labour in 1950s Czechoslovakia, and they were probably more used to physical work than many. Occasionally, one sister or both would be hauled off the shop floor to undertake interpreting duties for visiting foreigners.
