by Jane Kendall
“Ach, I remember those days,” Anton said wistfully. “When I was so young I thought life was fair.”
The Heldenplatz emptied, Hitler went back to Berlin, and my days returned to normal. But the ground had shifted under my hooves, and somehow I didn’t feel safe. People had started to disappear. Sweet old Herr Epstein, who sold hand-carved wooden toys from a little cart on the Josefsplatz—gone. One day he was there and the next he wasn’t, and I never saw him again. Liesl would come in from school with stories of friends who had simply vanished, and no one ever asked what had happened to them.
In the midst of all the tension and sadness, something wonderful happened to the Spanish Riding School. On New Year’s Day of 1939 we were placed under the control of the Wehrmacht, the German Armed Forces. When I first heard about this, I wondered if I would have to join the cavalry and fight in battles! It only meant we could go on as before, since the important generals in Berlin, the capital of Germany, thought we were a tradition worth preserving. But the best of all was that Count van der Straten, who was the head of the school, retired. I don’t mean to sound as if I didn’t like him—he was a fine fellow with lovely manners—but he was old and tired, and running the school was no easy task.
Colonel Alois Podhajsky was named the new Rittmeister. The day he came striding into the Winter Riding Hall should be celebrated every year with parties and apples and fireworks! Without the Colonel (that was how I always thought of him), the Spanish Riding School would not have survived. Without the Colonel, I would never have performed for a great American general or seen the world. But I’m getting ahead of my story….
I remembered the Colonel from my first year in Vienna; he had been a Bereiter for two years before the army decided he should train cavalry officers instead. The Colonel was a splendid rider who had competed in dressage events at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. He was tall and handsome, with a long, lined face and dark hair that, as soon as he took over the school, seemed to grow grayer by the day.
There is an old saying that a new broom sweeps clean. That was the Colonel. He turned every inch of the Stallburg inside out, poking into corners and cleaning out drawers and cupboards. He even found the money to freshen the Winter Riding Hall, which badly needed a coat of paint and much dusting and scrubbing. It was he who decided that we should have an orchestra, and he who combed Vienna for the finest unemployed musicians. He put old horses and old Bereiter out to pasture and brought up new horses from Piber and new Bereiter from his old cavalry unit. The Stallburg hummed like a beehive, and on Sundays there was a line waiting to get into the Winter Riding Hall.
He made one change that brought the widest smile I had ever seen to Anton’s face. Ever since the Anschluss, the Bereiter had been told to thank the people for their applause by raising their right arms stiffly, in the Nazi salute. “It is a monstrosity,” said the Colonel. “No more.” So the Bereiter went back to lifting their cocked hats with a flourish, as they had for two centuries. That was when I knew the Colonel was a brave man who cared more about the Spanish Riding School than anyone ever had.
It was all so exciting, and we were all so busy, that it was almost—almost—possible to forget that Europe was at war. And the war was coming closer.
Flight
To this day I’m not sure how the Colonel kept the Spanish Riding School going through the war. Maybe he just pretended that nothing had changed. On the surface that was how it looked, for Morning Parade and training sessions and performances continued as before.
But Vienna was a gloomy place. You almost never saw men in the streets anymore, unless they were too young or too old to be soldiers. Instead of the jolly policeman, a woman in a long coat and shabby boots directed traffic in the Josefsplatz. No more the rich aroma of coffee wafting out of sidewalk cafés or Apfel strudel smells from the bakery. The Viennese lined up every morning with their ration cards, waiting for dark heavy bread made from rough flour, and by midday even that was gone.
Somehow the Colonel kept our Bereiter and grooms from being sent away to fight. He even persuaded the Wehrmacht to send us straw and hay and grain every month. As the war went on it was longer and longer between shipments, and sometimes the hay was moldy. The oats were awful.
And no more treats from Liesl. No more squares from her mama’s sugar bowl, for sugar was rationed and in short supply. No more celery and no more apples, and the carrots she brought me were tough and wrinkled.
“I’m sorry, Petra,” she said mournfully. “It’s the best I can do. Mama wanted these for the soup, but I won’t eat much tonight.” She gave me a potato once. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I ate it, but there’s nothing very nice about a raw potato.
On the brighter side, I had completed my training! Now I performed in the Sunday-morning exhibitions, which followed a strict order. We entered in single file and went through our various gaits, including the piaffe, and then came the grand quadrille, where we crisscrossed the hall in complex and wonderful patterns. We ended with the “airs above the ground,” which were always greeted with gasps of awe. It had taken years of strain and sweat and practice, but I had learned my two (the airs are so difficult that most Lipizzaners can only master two). After Martin and I had tried all of them, he had decided which moves I did the most easily and gracefully. And so I performed the levade and the courbette I had dreamed about as a young horse. To rear into the perfect pose and then jump forward on my hind legs—two, three, four, five times—was all I had ever wanted. Maybe I was showing off a little, but it was my favorite part of every performance. I always smiled to myself when the new horses from Piber were led around the hall on the longe. I knew they watched me every morning, as I had once watched Conversano Stornella and Favory Montenegro. Do you keep the music in your heads? I asked them. Does it make you want to dance? I hoped they were inspired, as I had been. Dancing to Mozart and Strauss, and hearing the people of Vienna reward us with their applause, was what kept us going in those years. We made them forget their troubles, if only for an hour, and that is a job worth doing.
Every summer we left the Stallburg to stay at the Schönbrunn, the imperial summer palace in the town of Lainz. It was deep in the Vienna Woods, and we could graze on the lawn. After the food the Wehrmacht had been sending us, it was wonderful to taste real grass, but it was an eerie place. The lawn was surrounded by looming fir trees that blotted out the sun, and at night, when all was quiet, I could hear the lions in the Lainz Zoo. I was always glad when summer ended and we returned to the Stallburg.
In the summer of 1944 the bombing of Vienna began. How I longed then to be anywhere else, even if it was dark and spooky and lions roared at me. But the Colonel was afraid the wooden stables of the Schönbrunn would not protect us like the stone walls of the Stallburg, and so we stayed in the city. Anton had always said that the Allies, the English and Americans who were trying to free Europe from the Nazis, would never bomb Vienna. “They did not bomb Paris or Rome,” he told me, “and Wien is every inch as old and historic and beautiful.” I wish he had been right.
Airplanes flew low over the city, great roaring birds that made the air tremble like a thunderstorm. From their bellies fell bombs, which exploded with huge bangs! that made the ground shake and buildings fall down. At night we listened for the wailing sirens, which meant the airplanes were coming. That was the signal to file out of our stalls and into the courtyard for what Anton cheerfully called Evening Parade. The Winter Riding Hall was a strong building with thick walls, and it became the air-raid shelter for the Lipizzaners and the people in our neighborhood. One raid in September lasted for over an hour, and all the windows broke and the doors came off their hinges.
“You are such a smart boy, Petra,” said Anton, who never left my side. “So brave, so quiet.” It’s true—I was quiet. When the noise got very loud and the floor wouldn’t stop shaking, I put my head between my legs and remembered meadows and apples and clear blue skies while I waited for it to stop. I wanted to run, but
why even try? There was nowhere to go.
After that September raid, the Colonel had everything packed up: the uniforms and the perky cocked hats of the Bereiter; the framed pictures of past Lipizzaners on the walls; our everyday tack; and the double bridles that were decorated with gold leaf, the soft handmade saddles, and the fringed scarlet saddle blankets we wore to perform. He even had the great crystal chandeliers in the Winter Riding Hall taken down from the ceiling and packed into crates.
Even though the Colonel made us exercise and train every morning, our performances had stopped in May. It was too dangerous for people to walk through Vienna, even to see my courbette. The Colonel also went away for days at a time, hitching rides on ammunition trucks into Upper Austria, trying to find a place far away where we would be safe. It was more than the bombing, said Anton; the Russians were moving in from the east, and everyone was afraid of the Russian army.
We left Vienna on the sixth of March, almost six years to the day since the Anschluss. The year before, a rumor had swept through the city that the Spanish Riding School was being shipped off to Berlin. It wasn’t true, but the people of Vienna had gathered at the Stallburg to protest loudly and unhappily. I guess the Colonel didn’t want to cause more trouble, so we left in the middle of the night, when everyone was asleep. Again I was loaded into a truck and driven through the streets, this time past piles of rubble and houses torn in two, past more destruction and misery than I could bear. A train was waiting for us at the Franz Josefs Bahnhof. It was no shining green creature like the one that had brought Conversano Nina and me to Vienna, but a battered wreck that sputtered and coughed and stank. But Anton was with me, and my girl. (Martin had begged the Colonel to let Liesl and her mama come along, and the Colonel had agreed.)
The boxcar was drafty and crowded with too many horses, and there was only a thin layer of filthy straw to stand on. There were many stops and starts. Every time we pulled into another bomb-damaged station, the Colonel would have to argue with the stationmaster and show his travel orders from Berlin before we could be on our way. The train didn’t go very fast, and it shuddered along as if the wheels were square instead of round.
We went west, away from Vienna, and the night was bitter cold. Through the open door I could once again smell the sharp scent of pine trees and see rivers tumbling over their beds. The night wind sang sweetly over the rattle of the train. We were going into the mountains, and my heart seemed to lift with every mile.
We made it as far as Wels before the airplanes came back.
They came in wave after wave, at night and in the daylight, and the sky turned red and filled with smoke as the fine old city burned. The train pulled into the station at Wels and there we stayed for two and a half days. Horses are more afraid of fire than anything—you never know where it will go next—and Anton and Liesl and Hans, who had bravely walked back along the tracks to help us, had their hands full keeping us calm. By the second day we were even a little bored. There was nothing to do, nothing to eat or drink. And so we waited.
On the tenth of March we finally reached our destination: St. Martin im Innkreis, a tiny old-fashioned village built around the foot of a castle. We arrived at dusk. The lady who owned the castle greeted us as graciously as if we had arrived in fine carriages for a party, not rattling up the hill in trucks.
War had not been kind to the castle. It was as dirty and tired as we were. The stables were a mess. The wooden walls between the stalls had been used for firewood by the Polish and Russian prisoners of war who lived in the castle and worked the farms in the valley. So we stayed in the cowsheds while the Colonel found wood—some of it cut from the forest—and had it made into new walls. Fresh straw was put down, and we were fed and watered and left for the night.
There is no other way to say this. We ate those walls … and they were delicious. If you’ve ever tasted a fresh sapling, all green and tender with a thin, crispy crust of bark, you won’t blame us a bit. After years of no apples and dried-up carrots, it was a thrill to tear into something crunchy! Once the walls were down we did have a party, waltzing around in the fresh straw and stretching our legs and poking into corners and nipping each other.
When the Colonel saw the next morning what we had done, he just laughed and made new walls, which he painted with something that made them taste terrible. We were there to stay, at least for a while.
Rescue
I thought St. Martin would be safe, but nowhere was truly safe in the spring of 1945. Airplanes streaked over the valley, and we could hear the deep rumble of artillery to the west. The American army was moving down through Germany and into Austria, liberating towns and villages and fighting what was left of the Nazi empire.
Although the castle was large, with more than fifty horses, our Bereiter and grooms, and hundreds of prisoners of war and refugees, it was dreadfully crowded. There was only one small shed to train in, and we certainly couldn’t stay in our stalls all day and grow fat and lazy. So the Colonel decided we should put on our everyday tack and go hacking about the countryside, just like normal horses. But there were more horses than Bereiter. Thus, after the Colonel tested her skills (and Martin put in a good word), Liesl was allowed to ride me. You can imagine how excited we were!
There is nothing more peaceful and pleasant than spring in the mountains. The air was soft and cool, the trees were covered with new leaves, and pink and yellow wild-flowers grew beside the trails that wound into the hills. Every time you came around a curve, you could see the farms in the valley below, spread out like a green and brown patchwork quilt, or the breathtaking line of mountains to the east.
“If you pretend those artillery guns are thunder,” Liesl said to me one afternoon as we rode along, “it could almost be the old days, before the war.”
But it wasn’t, and that was a dangerous thing to forget.
It was a perfect April day, and we were heading into the forest. There was a thick cushion of pine needles on the trail, which reminded me happily of the floor in the Winter Riding Hall. The birds were cheeping and peeping and flying around, and squirrels chattered in the trees. I was ambling along, daydreaming, when suddenly Liesl cried out and pulled me up short.
Two German soldiers stood in front of us. Their uniforms were ragged and dirty. The younger one had a bloodstained bandage on his forehead, just below his helmet.
“Oh ho, what have we here?” said the older of the two. “A fine lady on a fine horse. You better give me that horse, lady.”
“I can’t do that,” said Liesl. Her voice was calm but her hands were shaking on the reins.
“You don’t argue with me,” he growled, and then he grabbed the gun stuck in his belt and pointed it at us.
“This is a Lipizzaner; he belongs to the state.” Now her voice was shaking, too. “If you steal him you’ll go to prison.”
“All I see is a horse I can sell,” he said angrily, and gestured with the gun. “Down. Off.”
“Look at his head,” Liesl said loudly. “See the brand, the L? He’s famous. You’ll never get away with it. See?” She pulled my right rein sharply so he could see my left cheek. I knew it was really so I could start to turn around. Then she gave me a mighty kick with both heels and we were off!
I hadn’t galloped since my days in the meadow and I put everything into it. I flew down that trail so fast I don’t think I touched the ground half the time, and Liesl was light in the saddle. I could hear footsteps pounding behind us. After a while they stopped, but we didn’t! I burst out of the forest like a racehorse coming down the homestretch, sped across a field, and clattered into the courtyard in front of the castle. I was panting and my sides were heaving and Liesl was screaming, “Men, men in the forest!”
That was the end of afternoon rides.
By May the artillery was very loud, roaring like the lions in the zoo. Anton told me the end of the war was only days away. The village of St. Martin erupted into panic. The Americans were coming, and no one knew what they would do. Wou
ld they burn down the village, or put everyone in prison? Would they make life worse than it already was? People broke into the bakery and the greengrocer’s to steal food. The road past the castle was filled with exhausted German soldiers and frightened villagers trying to get away. Somehow, in the midst of all this, the Colonel found ordinary clothing for the Bereiter to wear instead of their Wehrmacht uniforms. They were fine riders and not Nazis, and he wanted the Americans to know that.
The Americans arrived at the castle on May 2, 1945, pulling up in a fleet of funny green cars with no tops called jeeps. The Colonel went out to meet them. He was the Rittmeister of the Spanish Riding School of Vienna, he explained, and not a Wehrmacht officer to be arrested and put in prison. But the general who was in charge of the Twentieth Army Corps had never heard of the Spanish Riding School! There was only one thing to do. We had to show the Americans who, and what, we were.
Just four days later, with almost no rehearsal, we gave the performance on which our future would depend. Instead of a hall, we were in an open field. Along one side, seats were set up for all the American generals in the area; the troops in their baggy green uniforms and muddy boots stood or sat on the ground on the other three sides. The generals filed in, looking very important with decorations and medals shining on their chests and gold braid on their hats.
The last one to come in was a four-star general named George Patton. When the Colonel saw him, I think he relaxed a bit, since General Patton was a famous horseman who had also competed in the Olympic Games. “It’s a good sign,” Martin whispered to me as we waited for everyone to sit down.
We began with a pas de deux, two horses moving as one, and Martin and I shouldered in beside the Colonel and Pluto Theodorosta, who was his favorite mount. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that General Patton was somewhat bored, since he kept turning to chat with the generals on either side of him. Then we went into the best piaffe I have ever done … and he stopped talking. By the time we got to the levades and the caprioles and my courbette, he was leaning forward and smiling.
