by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
In fact, in the 1935 Velká Pardubická, not all the national or ideological dividing lines were clear. Ra’s Čigýr was again ridden by a Frenchman, Lieutenant de Cavaillé, while Typ was ridden by Martin Münzesheimer, a Prague-based jockey who may well have felt more German than Czechoslovak. Most competitors, in any case, would probably still have felt, most of the time, that the shared bond of the Velká Pardubická ordeal counted for more that the artificial hostilities imposed by other people’s nationalisms.
Yet the divisions were still there. Those taking part were aware of them, those watching even more so. Many of the riders will have felt a sense of patriotic duty – or at least of national expectation – as they contemplated the challenge ahead. Lengnik, riding Herold, refused to take part in the pre-race parade. He also skipped the test jump. Instead, his ten-year-old grey Trakehner gelding was led directly to the start. This wasn’t a calculated snub: Herold was notoriously nervy in pre-race situations. But it was easy to perceive it as a snub, fuelling a perception that the Velká Pardubická, conceived as a preparation for warfare, was becoming closer in spirit to war itself.
Lata was not intimidated. It was her sixth time at the start. She wore the same red and white Kinský colours as usual, with the same Virgin Mary medallion underneath. Norma, by now as familiar as a sibling, was as fit as she had ever been: in ‘sinewy form’, according to one cavalry officer. She was used to a little tension on the start line; and at least this time she could count on the support of her fellow Czechoslovaks.
The race began at 3.34 p.m. Čigýr, the 16:1 outsider, led them off at a brisk pace. The autumn had been dry again, and the organisers had once more been forced to put rails in front of the Big Water Jump to make it an obstacle worth jumping. Lata began gently, keeping an eye on Wahne, the evens favourite. The dark bay mare had looked stronger than ever when winning her third successive Von der Goltz-Querfeldein steeplechase in September; she had also impressed at the Ostsee steeplechase in Danzig. But Lata was confident that Norma – who with Quixie and Landgraf started at 5:1 – was stronger than she had been the previous year. All she had to do was stick to a sensible pace and stay out of trouble.
Taxis should have been easier than usual: with only eight horses, there was less risk of getting tangled up in a crowd. Norma was well placed at the approach, set herself well – yet somehow misjudged the moment of take off. She landed just short, crumpling against the far bank of the ditch, and Lata was once again flying over her head in a red and white blur.
Lata later claimed that a fallen horse was involved, too, although it is not clear which one or how. Whatever the detail, the sense of disaster must have been crushing. Lata needed help getting back on her feet, yet Norma, who may well have been hurt herself, remained calmly nearby, waiting for Lata to remount. When they set off in pursuit, there was still hope, although only a faint one.
The field thinned out, as it usually did. Typ, the old chestnut gelding, also fell at Taxis; Münzesheimer was slower to remount – and was soon out of the race altogether, after Typ first refused and then unseated his rider at the Irish Bank. Čigýr continued to lead until the eleventh, after which she drifted backwards. Quixie refused twice but in each case was persuaded to think again and remained in some sort of contention. Monarch fell once, then unseated his rider, and was pulled up at the Big Water Jump. Landgraf, who appeared to be acting as Wahne’s pacemaker, lost touch around the Snake Ditch, then fell for the last time at the Popkovice jump, four from home.
But Wahne and Herold appeared to be in a class of their own, jumping confidently and steadily extending their lead. For the final three-quarters of a mile – from the moment the horses came into view again after rounding the Popkovice woods for the second time – it looked as though there were two races rather than one: Wahne against Herold, and then Quixie, Čigýr and Norma vying for third place. The leading pair jumped the last together, whereupon Lengnik, making energetic use of his whip, drove Herold – who had started at 8:1 – to a convincing three-lengths victory. Some time later, Pogliaga roused Quixie into a successful final spurt to claim third place.
Norma trailed in fifth; or, bluntly, last. Perhaps she was still feeling the effects of Taxis. Perhaps the realisation that she was too far behind to win sapped her enthusiasm for the final fight. Or perhaps she – or her rider – simply didn’t have what it took.
Racegoers greeted the German triumph ‘coldly’, according to one account. So did the national press – in contrast to Das Schwarze Korps, whose headline later that month rejoiced at the ‘SS riders’ triumph in Czechoslovakia’. Some commentators complained that Czechoslovak horses were inadequately prepared, compared with those from the Third Reich. This was probably true. There is no record of Ra’s reaction, but he cannot have been pleased.
Soon, however, he had something else to ponder. Two days after the race, without explanation, Poldi von Fugger disappeared. The details are confused. He appears to have gone straight to Germany, although by one account he was still in Czechoslovakia in early November. One way or another, he was never seen again in Pardubice.
The police were quick to investigate. They had long suspected that Fugger was spying for the Nazis. His brother-in-law, Count Heinrich Schaumburg, who had visited Fugger in Pardubice in 1931, was thought to have been engaged in military espionage at the time of his death in a flying accident in 1932. Could Poldi’s presence in Pardubice have had a similar explanation? The circumstantial evidence seemed strong.
Fugger was a trained aerial photographer, and while in Pardubice he had displayed a keen interest in aviation. It wasn’t just his friendship and flights with Major Snášel from the 4th Air Regiment; he also enjoyed sitting by an airport hangar watching aerobatics. There were also those enthusiastic friendships with Czechoslovak army officers to consider, as well as the proximity of Explosia Semtín (as the A. C. Nobel chemical plant was now called).
A search of the Zámeček unearthed an unusual number of maps, of, among other places, Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. The police also confiscated forty photographs, some showing Czechoslovak military premises. None of this proved anything, and rumours about a ‘secret transmitter’ at the Zámeček appear to have been unfounded. But the fact remained that Fugger had left, apparently in a hurry; and that, after resurfacing at Hildesheim in Germany, he never returned. Instead, he joined the Luftwaffe, for whom he became first an instructor in aerial photography and then an officer in the notorious Condor Legion – which from 1936 to 1939 would provide bombing support for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War (causing untold civilian suffering in, among other places, Guernica). Historians consider the espionage case against Fugger unproven; the court of public opinion concluded, less fastidiously, that he had obviously been a spy. There could, at any rate, be little doubt as to which side he would be on in any coming conflict between the Third Reich and Czechoslovakia.
For Ra, Poldi’s good friend, the affair was awkward. Members of the German-speaking ex-aristocracy were already viewed with suspicion. The security services feared that they would conspire against the democratic First Republic in the hope of getting their lands back. That was one reason why the police knew so much about Fugger’s habits: his friendships with former nobles such as Ra had prompted them to keep an eye on him.
In fact, the security services could hardly have been more wrong about Ra’s loyalties. That didn’t make Poldi’s flight less embarrassing for him. Ra may also have felt betrayed: on the face of it, Poldi had abused his trust. Yet Ra did remain on friendly terms with members of Fugger’s family, as did Lata; so perhaps they weren’t too bothered. What was harder to dismiss was a more obvious lesson. The era in which Czechoslovak, German, Austrian, Polish and French horse lovers could share their enthusiasm in one big happy, extravagant Pardubice party was coming to an end. Emotionally, Ra still inhabited the multicultural world of the Habsburgs, in which borders mattered less than class, character and connections, and decent sorts who liked to hunt, dance and pla
y tennis could share their charmed lives without thought of national loyalties. Both he and – to a lesser extent – Lata had had a lot of fun in that world. Now the party was over.
20.
‘A woman? Bah . . . ’
Lata went home to Řitka. Norma returned to Chlumec. Read into that what you will. Lata had her other horses to think about: in the weeks following the Velká Pardubická she raced Hubertus repeatedly. His successes – a first and a second – soothed her Pardubice disappointment without erasing it.
Ra, equally frustrated, had the fallout from Fugger’s flight to distract him; and, in December 1935, the death from flu of his elder brother, František, who was fiftyseven and had no children. This meant that Ra, eight months short of his fortieth birthday, became the new owner of Karlova Koruna, the domed, hill-top chateau that overshadows the town of Chlumec nad Cidlinou.
The inheritance was absurdly magnificent. Another architectural masterpiece by Jan Blažej Santini Aichel, it was a paradise for any confident, super-rich aristocrat who felt comfortable in grand surroundings and whose twin priorities were outdoor leisure and lavish entertaining. It was on Karlova Koruna’s marbled stairway and terrace that Oktavian Kinský used to run amok with his carriage. The pillared, octagonal dining room, overlooked by one of central Europe’s most magnificent domes, was fit for any king or emperor. (The castle is named after its first guest, King Charles VI.) Its stables were breathtaking in their comfort and convenience, with so much spare space for carriages that the children used one section as an indoor tennis court. (Stable lads were occasionally dispatched to the rafters to retrieve stuck balls.) Outdoors, gardens in the English style, with lawns shaded by artfully arranged exotic trees, sloped down past a summer house, an orangery and other lesser buildings to vast stuccoed walls that snaked around the grassy hill-top impregnably.
Much else that Ra held dear was within easy reach: the hunting lodge of Obora, with all its woods and gallops; the stud farm at Ostrov, Norma’s birthplace; and the near-replica of the Velká Pardubická course that Oktavian had constructed near Kolesa. Not least, there was Pardubice itself: magnet for the international movers, shakers, horse lovers and pleasure seekers in whose company Ra was happiest.
For Ra’s children – then aged between eight and twelve – it was part paradise, part prison. On the one hand, the idyllic setting gave Norbert, Génilde and Radslav endless scope for mostly unsupervised play. On the other, those snaking walls cut them off from everything else in the world. When the circus came to Chlumec, the young Kinskýs were allowed one brief, segregated excursion, but that was all. ‘The other children thought there was something wrong with us,’ remembers Génilde sadly. This was the price of noble birth, even in a postaristocratic age. You were supposed to mix only with your own kind – and as a child you couldn’t even do that very much, since a social life was considered an exclusively adult need. The children’s closest friendships were thus with one another; with their favourite servants (such as Josef Soukup, the young groom); with their horses; and with their favourite aunt, Lata.
But Lata wasn’t much in evidence in Karlova Koruna that year. She had other matters claiming her attention, including her sister Markéta’s impending marriage to Sergej Jaroševský, the Russian exile who helped manage the Řitka estate. Whatever was going on between her and Kasalický must have occupied her time as well, or at least her thoughts. Even without such distractions, however, there was a new awkwardness between Lata and Ra. No matter how polite he was about it, he clearly felt that her riding had not given Norma her best chance of winning. And Lata, no matter how polite she was, cannot have felt happy about that.
The cousins were still friendly towards one another. But I am not even sure that Lata visited Chlumec for Ra’s fortieth birthday (which fell – incongruously, given Ra’s excesses – on Bastille Day: 14 July). The extensive celebrations included a carriage ride, during which Norma, galloping alongside, was ridden by František Schwarzenberg – which suggests either that Lata was absent or, at least, that she was no longer considered Norma’s primary rider.
Ra’s children entertained themselves with horses instead. They had learned to ride by the age of five, and there was rarely a day when they were not on horseback. Part of the appeal was that, in the saddle, they were allowed to take more or less any risks they liked. Génilde, who had been well taught by Lata, was jumping replica Velká Pardubická obstacles by the time she was eleven – although she was never allowed to try the replica Taxis. ‘There was a prevailing view that children had ten guardian angels,’ recalled Radslav in later life. ‘So no one was afraid they might get hurt.’
In this, at least, Ra and Lata saw eye to eye. A lack of any normal human instinct for caution appears to be a distinguishing feature of most parts of the Kinský family, including the Brandis branch and their modern descendants. Flick through what remain of Ra’s family photographs and you’ll keep seeing examples: children climbing around the outside of a house at first-floor level; children riding horses without hard hats; Ra jumping horizontally over his own personal high jump, the bar set at about six feet, with only the hard ground to land on. It’s the same with Lata’s: you see Lata and Kristýna up a tree; Lata, aged about eleven, firing a rifle unsupervised; Lata sending her six-year-old nephew Jan Pospíšil off to play with what looks suspiciously like a gun in his pocket. It seems to have been an almost moral principle. Decent sorts had a go. Only funkers worried about what might go wrong.
It was a principle that would soon find applications that had little to do with horses.
Beyond the cream-coloured walls of Karlova Koruna, the air was charged with a sense of impending catastrophe. In December 1935, an ailing Tomáš Masaryk had relinquished the Czechoslovak presidency. In March 1936, Hitler had reoccupied the demilitarised Rhineland. In Germany, thousands of the Nazis’ political opponents were in concentration camps. In Czechoslovakia, the economy remained disastrously depressed. The SdP was gathering strength; so, at the opposite extreme, was the Communist Party. The collapse of Czechoslovak democracy seemed far from unlikely.
Many former aristocrats welcomed this – as long as what came next was closer to Germany’s Third Reich than to Russian Bolshevism. For nearly two decades the nobility had suffered in silence as Masaryk’s rudely egalitarian state had stripped them of their titles, their lands and their prestige. They had been denounced as alien parasites whose participation in public affairs was unwelcome. If Bolshevism triumphed, they risked worse. But now, possibly, a viable alternative seemed to be emerging. In Germany, the high nobility was more Nazi than the general population. Nearly a thousand aristocrats had joined the Nazis before they even took power, and noble families would soon supply getting on for a fifth of senior SS officers. Many of their German-speaking counterparts in Czechoslovakia were similarly inclined: throwing in their lot with the Hitler-friendly German separatists offered the tantalising prospect of a return to the good old days – and an escape from the dangers of the present.
Eventually, when forced to choose, roughly two-thirds of Czechoslovakia’s former nobility – who were, after all, mostly German-speakers – would identify themselves as pro-German. But some, including both Ra and Lata, took the opposite view: their loyalty was to democratic Czechoslovakia.
This was surprising, given their families’ long histories as German-speaking servants of German-speaking emperors. It seemed particularly strange in Ra’s case. As a prisoner of war in Russia during the Great War he had refused the opportunity to obtain his freedom by joining the Czech Legion. But that had been because he considered himself bound by his oath of loyalty to the Austro-Hungarian Emperor. Two decades later, the Kinský family motto – ‘God, honour, homeland’ – had a different meaning. The multinational homeland of the Habsburgs no longer existed. The choice was now between the idealistic Czechoslovakia to which Masaryk had given birth – or the Germany that Hitler was reshaping in his own image.
Many people who felt that democracy had
served them badly preferred not to look too closely at the realities of the Nazi alternative. But Lata and Ra both seem to have understood early on that a Nazi-backed restoration of aristocratic privileges would come at an intolerable human price. The grievances of Czechoslovakia’s German-speakers were not without substance, but that didn’t make the Third Reich’s ideology less hateful. And if you understood the depth of the Nazis’ contempt for’sub-human’ Slavs – whose lands they wanted to seize for the Third Reich – it was hard to avoid the inference that to be pro-German in Hitler’s world was to be viciously anti-Czech.
For both Lata and Ra, that was a line that could not be crossed. In their different, privileged ways, each dealt with Czechs on a daily basis. The polite society they moved in remained mostly German-speaking, but they were in constant contact with Czech-speakers. Their wealth, their status, their horses, their property: all were sustained by Czech land. There could be no question of betraying the Czechs who looked after it for them.
Over the next few years, this new ‘German question’ became increasingly important in upper-class life, not least in racing circles. There were some prominent figures, such as Eberhard Mauve (whom Lata knew well as a Velká Chuchle owner and fellow amateur jockey) or Ra’s relative Prince Ulrich Kinský, who felt that Czechoslovaks should adapt their ways of doing things to accommodate the aspirations of the Third Reich. Soon, there would be talk of managing horse racing in a more ‘German’ way – which would ultimately mean excluding Jews.