by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
Those who dissented from such views became, by default, more Czech. Lata’s visible support for Řitka’s Sokol group should perhaps be seen as a symptom of this. Neither she nor Ra was anti-German: otherwise they would not have remained on warm terms with, for example, Poldi von Fugger’s family. (Fugger’s mother Nora was Ra’s first guest at Karlova Koruna.) But by 1936 both could reasonably have been described as pro-Czech, and anti-Third Reich.
I like to think that this was a symptom of their fundamental decency. It probably was. Yet there may have been another strand to their Czech patriotism: the kind of instinctive, bloody-minded defiance of which Oktavian Kinský would have approved – manifesting itself in an irresistible desire to stick two fingers up at Hitler.
There was an obvious way for Ra to perform such a gesture: by returning to the Velká Pardubická in October 1936 and making sure one of his horses actually won it this time. Perhaps that sounds trivial. Yet sport was inseparable from politics that year. That August, the Olympic Games had taken place in Berlin. Impassioned pleas for a boycott had come to nothing; so had welladvanced plans for an alternative, non-Nazi Games in Barcelona – which were scotched by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War a week before they were due to begin. Anti-Olympic feeling was stronger in Czechoslovakia than in most places: at one point there was talk of staging the alternative Games in Prague. None the less, despite angry protests in Wenceslas Square, a Czechoslovak national team was sent to Germany – minus its Jewish athletes, who refused to participate.
Fears that the Games would be abused for propaganda purposes proved well founded. Hitler turned the Olympics into an orgy of Nazi triumphalism, glorifying his regime and attempting to promote ideas of ‘Aryan’ racial superiority. It didn’t always work, thanks to Jesse Owens and others; but it succeeded spectacularly in the equestrian events. The Germans won everything: all three team golds and all three individual golds. It was the only such clean sweep in Olympic history. Low ticket prices ensured that tens of thousands of people saw the world’s finest horsemen humiliated by Trakehner horses and German army officers, most of them trained at the Hannover riding school. Only four teams out of fourteen completed the eventing competition. The Czechoslovak team came fourth, with 18,952 penalty points to Germany’s 676. They had briefly come within sight of bronze before incurring a vast time penalty in the cross-country, trying to catch a runaway horse. Lieutenant Josef Dobeš, veteran of three Velká Pardubickás, was the most successful individual Czechoslovak rider, in twenty-third place.
Some suspected dirty tricks. In the cross-country, there were complaints from several nations about a particularly tricky water obstacle, for which horses had to land in a deep pond. Most competitors came to grief here, yet the Germans all seemed suspiciously well prepared, finding precisely the right landing spot despite being supposedly as unfamiliar with the obstacle as everyone else. Post-event mutterings did nothing to improve German- Czechoslovak relations.
In the aftermath, Czechoslovaks felt bitter and humiliated. It barely mattered if the Germans had cheated or won fairly: either explanation was unpalatable. Ra’s determination to strike a blow for Czech pride in the Velká Pardubická was redoubled. Lata may have paid the price. Ra entered two horses: Neklan and Norma. Both, he decided, would be ridden by men: Neklan by Captain Oldřich Kocourek, from the Pardubice military riding school, and Norma by Defendente Pogliaga, the Italian officer who had come third on Quixie the previous year. The implication was clear: Norma needed a man’s strong hand. Lata had been given repeated chances, but had failed to take advantage of them.
It is conceivable that Ra was influenced by a general backlash against women’s participation in sport. The World Women’s Games held in London in 1934 were the last of their kind. (Thereafter, women’s participation in the Olympics was marginally expanded, but on the men’s terms rather than Alice Milliatt’s.) Two stars of those games – the Englishwoman Mary Weston and the Czechoslovak 800 metres world record holder, Zdeňka Koubková – had scandalised traditionalists in the spring of 1936 by announcing that they had undergone gender reassignment surgery and would henceforth be known as Mark Weston and Zdeněk Koubek. Most people wished them well; but for conservatives who disapproved of any kind of female participation in ‘male’ events it was salacious proof of sport’s defeminising dangers.
All this is speculation. Such matters may not have influenced Ra at all. It is clear, however, that those early ideals of a golden age of equality in Czechoslovakia – with women placed ‘on a level with men’ – had begun to feel sadly outdated.
That August, Zdeněk Koubek gave an interview to Time magazine. It is unlikely that Lata read it. If she had, one passage would have resonated painfully. ‘A woman?’ said Koubek. ‘Bah . . . She is nothing. A man? Hah . . . He is everything. There is not anything in the world that is not open to him.’
21.
Himmler’s cavalry
The fifteen riders who contested the 1936 Velká Pardubická could hardly have been more manly. The line-up at the start shimmered with barely controlled aggression. All four Czechoslovak riders were army officers. There were two officers from fascist Italy (one riding Ra’s horse). And then there were the Germans: Oskar Lengnik, Heinrich Wiese, Curt Scharfetter, Hans Schmidt, Heinz Lemke, Otto Backenhaus, Helmut Böttcher; and, from Velká Chuchle, Willibald Schlagbaum. Some had experienced real warfare. Some were accustomed to the brutality of paramilitary work, without which the Nazis could never have risen to power. Several (Lengnik, Scharfetter, Schmidt, Lemke and Böttcher) were proud East Prussians, with all the self-conscious ruggedness that that entailed. This was the most intimidating group of riders the Germans had ever sent to Pardubice. Lengnik, Wiese and Schmidt each had a Velká Pardubická victory to his credit – and each had a horse in 1936 that was capable of winning again.
Germany expected nothing less. The brave horsemen of the Wehrmacht had already wiped the floor with the despised Czechoslovaks at the Olympics. Now it was the paramilitaries‘ turn to inflict similar humiliation in Pardubice, in Czechoslovakia’s most prestigious steeplechase, ideally with a clean sweep of first, second and third. If they succeeded, it would demonstrate once again that the Germans were, as the Nazis now openly claimed, an unstoppable warrior race.
Perhaps it seems fanciful to consider a steeplechase in such terms. Yet there were plenty in the Third Reich who discussed sports involving horses in precisely such language. At the Berlin Olympics, the equestrian events were organised by a fast-rising SS riding instructor, SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Fegelein. The son of a Bavarian riding school owner, thirty-year-old Fegelein was a skilled horseman and political schemer. He had hoped to ride in the Olympics himself but hadn’t quite made the grade; his scheming was more successful. More opportunist than ideological, he had joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and the Reiter-SS in 1933. He would eventually become part of Hitler’s most trusted inner circle. Now, however, his ambitions were tied up with horses and Himmler. Like the SS leader, he argued that German triumphs in the saddle were evidence of what Das Schwarze Korps called ‘the new spirit of our nation’; like him, he spoke the language of Nazi mysticism, with its imagery of Grail-seeking Teutonic Knights. He offered to turn the Equestrian SS into an elite fighting force – a fearless Aryan cavalry – and his career took off.
The Olympics boosted Fegelein’s reputation further, commending him to the Führer himself. Soon he would be in overall charge of the entire Equestrian SS; later still, he would lead many of its members, on horseback, into battle. For now, though, the triumphs he sought for his organisation were sporting ones. The horsemen of the SS had already won all three of Germany’s big equestrian championships that year (just as they had in 1935 and just as they would in 1937). The Velká Pardubická was their chance to show what they could do on the international stage.
Lengnik was their best hope: he was skilled, brave and tough, in precisely that unflinching way that Hitler thought was the mark of a true Aryan warrior. He was also a c
ommitted Nazi; or, at least, well on his way to becoming one. By the close of the decade he would be a Party member, a participant in Himmler’s grotesque Lebensborn programme (for achieving racial purity through selective breeding), and the proud possessor of a Julleuchter: a mock-pagan lantern awarded only to the most valued SS officers. Yet somehow, despite all that, it is harder to dislike Lengnik than most of his fellow paramilitaries. I don’t think he started out cruel. On the contrary, he was a sensitive man – described by one contemporary as ‘pretty as a picture’ – whose relationship with his favourite horse, Herold, was so close that Herold pined disastrously when separated from him. That doesn’t excuse his eventual surrender to Nazism. But perhaps we should also see him as, at heart, a hardy horse breeder, from Germany’s wildest frontier, who was tough and unyielding, like his horses, because he had to be; and whose fighting spirit the Nazis exploited but did not create.
At all events, he and his fellow SS officers, SS-Scharführer Schmidt and SS-Unterscharführer Scharfetter (both, like Lengnik, from Insterburg), were a fearsome set of opponents for the Czech jockeys in Pardubice to contend with. And if the SS riders failed, there was a strong supporting cast to salvage some glory for Hitler. Among them were SA-Standartenführer Heinrich Wiese, veteran brownshirt; Willibald Schlagbaum, anti-Czech admirer of Henlein’s SdP; and SA-Scharführer Heinz Lemke, a rugged East Prussian who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933 but was in the process of being thrown out for being too ‘unpleasant’ . It is likely that most of these would have thought they were riding for Hitler; and if they didn’t, there were plenty watching who did. Pardubice racecourse had become the arena, now and for the foreseeable future, for a symbolic struggle between the Czechoslovak republic and the Third Reich. Victory had never mattered more.
The Germans won – as usual. The best the Czechoslovaks could say for themselves was that they avoided a complete whitewash. Of the eight finishers, there were only four Germans. But there was no escaping the main headline: the race was another triumph for the Third Reich. SS-Untersturmführer Oskar Lengnik rode Herold to a second successive victory, by a big distance this time. Elfe, ridden by SA-Scharführer Heinz Lemke, came third. In between, on Hetre, came a bitterly disappointed Captain František Aubrecht, who immediately filed a complaint against the winner, claiming that Herold had missed out a jump. The protest was dismissed, to howls of public disapproval.
Of the rest, Lieutenant Josef Dobeš came sixth on Milonga; while Captain Kocourek came eighth and last on Neklan. Schlagbaum, on Quixie, finished fifth. Glückauf, ridden by Helmut Böttcher, came seventh. Harlekýn, a fourteen-year-old gelding that had been part of Czechoslovakia’s humiliated eventing team at the Olympics, embarrassed himself again by falling at the relatively easy Small Water Jump. Norma came fourth. She had run and jumped strongly, but any chance she had was ruined when Lieutenant Pogliaga, emerging into the late afternoon gloom from behind the Popkovice bend, temporarily lost his bearings and, in his panic, went badly off course.
We can only guess what Lata felt about this. No doubt she would have preferred a Czechoslovak victory; it seems unlikely, however, that she would have enjoyed seeing Lieutenant Pogliaga faring better on Norma than she had. Some relief at his failure would have been unavoidable, although she would have concealed it.
The Pardubice spectators were less coy about their feelings. Herold was given a frosty welcome on the home straight, whereas Captain Aubrecht and Hetre, approaching the finish, were greeted ‘by louder cheers than the winner’ , according to one account. Yet Lengnik was applauded by many of his fellow jockeys at the weigh-in, while a spectator’s obscure heckle (reported in the German press) to the effect of ‘Damn these Germans!’ should probably be interpreted as implying grudging admiration. The double Velká Pardubická winner promptly won the next race, the Kinský Memorial Race, as well.
There were celebrations, of a sort, in the usual Pardubice venues. At least one involved a singsong, with revellers adapting a traditional song to praise the great Oskar Lengnik, double-winner of the Velká Pardubická. But few Czechoslovaks would have felt very jolly, and when they reflected soberly on the outcome the next morning it felt even worse. Yet again, the hosts had had their noses rubbed in the dirt by Germans who despised them. Worse: it was hard to see what they could do to avert a similar outcome the following year. The Germans were simply better. They had better horses, better riders, better preparation – and a ruthless will to win that felt uncomfortably close to the spirit of military conquest. The Velká Pardubická had once been the brightest fixture in the Czechoslovak sporting calendar: a source of national pride and joy. Now it was starting to feel like a painful annual ritual, to be endured rather than enjoyed and then forgotten as quickly as possible.
Lata initially saw it differently. Her thoughts and hopes were already on next year. She still believed she could win. But which horse would she ride? She had had her chances with Norma: if Ra hadn’t thought her up to it this year, why would he change his mind the next – when Lata would be forty-two? There were question marks over Norma’s future, too. She had also been given repeated opportunities. Maybe she just wasn’t the winning type. Next year she would be ten. If Ra was going to breed from her, now would be a good time to start.
At some point, possibly not until early 1937, Lata discussed this with Ra, and heard the news she had been dreading: Norma would not be contesting the next Velká Pardubická. Nor, by implication, would Lata.
This was a dark time for her. She would never have said as much, but the conclusion is hard to avoid. Racing – and the Velká Pardubická, and Norma – had become the main focus of her life. Take that away, and what was left? Life in Řitka was pleasant enough, although the estate was struggling. But it must sometimes have been hard not to feel left behind, and with each passing year it must have grown harder. Four of her six sisters had found love and, notwithstanding Alžběta’s bereavement, had families of their own to look after or to look forward to. Lata was still tied to the halfvanished family of her birth. Perhaps she was content with this; more probably, she yearned from time to time for something more. Yet what paths were available to her, apart from God?
Even Velká Chuchle, for so long a place that allowed her to escape her worries, had begun to feel like a troubled place, what with Schlagbaum’s dislike of Czechs and female jockeys and a gathering sense (shared by the likes of Eberhard Mauve) that the future was German. There were still friendly faces: Karel Šmejda’s, for example. But the place wasn’t the haven it had once been. Only the church in Líšnice could be relied upon for solace. Week after week Lata prayed there, kneeling upright in the family pew, hands held high and tightly pressed together, face knotted in concentration. It seemed to be less a duty for her than a passion – as if some fire were burning within.
One probably was. The timing is uncertain, but at some point there was a crisis in Lata’s relationship with Hanuš Kasalický. The rides stopped, and he more or less disappeared from her life. It is possible that they fell out over ideology, since Kasalický did eventually throw in his lot with the Nazis. But that may have happened later. More plausible at this stage is some kind of emotional crisis. Perhaps they quarrelled. Or perhaps it was the opposite problem: perhaps years of warm friendship had ignited unexpectedly, as friendships sometimes do, into something more urgent, which one or both of them considered impermissible; at which point the relationship broke under the strain, and those easy, innocent years slipped irrecoverably into the past, unattainable as the forbidden version of the future.
It would be wrong to get carried away by such speculation. It would be more wrong to assume from the thinness of the evidence that nothing significant took place. We know that there was gossip about their relationship. We know that its closeness caused problems in Kasalický’s marriage. It seems highly likely that Lata, if she was aware of either fact, would have considered it her duty to end the relationship. And even if they had not yet reached the stage of breaking off contact, it seems r
easonable to assume that, by 1937, there was enough intensity in what was going on between them to cause turmoil in Lata’s heart.
Kasalický played a big part in Lata’s life, for many years. One day, he ceased to do so. That alone tells us something. Of course Lata cared: why would she not have done? If she cared more deeply than she felt was proper, she could not have said so; but she would still have cared – perhaps even more so because of the need for silence. No love gnaws the heart so relentlessly as the unfulfilled love that is also a guilty secret: unsharable, impassable; a grief the lover must both bear and hide.
At around this time, the jockey Eduard Zágler saw Lata at Velká Chuchle and asked her a question. ‘Countess,’ he said (he still called her Countess, despite having known her for nearly a decade), ‘please tell me: how do you bring yourself to jump those enormous obstacles in Pardubice? Aren‘t you afraid of killing yourself?’
‘You know,’ replied Lata, ‘the thing is: I’m not all that attached to life.’
22.
October 1937
On 14 September 1937, Tomáš Masaryk, founding father of the Czechoslovak nation, died at his summer retreat in Lány, twenty miles west of Prague. It is hard to convey the scale of the collective trauma. Think of the impact of Nelson Mandela’s death on South Africa or Winston Churchill’s on the UK; or imagine, perhaps, how modern Britain would react to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. The living embodiment of a nation’s sense of its better self was gone: vanished from the world. No one could have been surprised: Masaryk was eightyseven and his health had been failing. His inevitable end still came as a profound shock. For the first time in Czechoslovakia’s history, there was no Tomáš Masaryk in the background; and if a world without Masaryk was possible, what else might vanish tomorrow?