by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
Then there were parties: in Pardubice, in Prague, in Řitka. In Chlumec, Ra’s friends joined his house guests at Karlova Koruna for a ball that night in Lata’s honour, with dancing until dawn. A photograph shows Lata sitting on a gilded chair, bare-armed in a black ballgown. A string of pearls is partially hidden by a fur stole, and totally outshone by her gleaming, white-toothed smile. It is the only picture I have seen in which Lata really looks like a countess.
Returning eventually to Řitka, Lata was greeted as conquering hero. There were flowers, tears, hugs: Lata described it as a ‘stormy welcome, from people as well as from dogs’. Congratulations poured in from friends and strangers; Jan Masaryk was among those who sent telegrams. A party was held for the whole village. Afterwards, Lata went up to Marketa’s room, where three-month-old Petr was sleeping. She leaned over her nephew’s cot and said quietly: ‘I won it for you.’
There was no prize money: that went to Ra. There was no trophy. All Lata got to mark her triumph was a small commemorative whip, presented by the Jockey Club to every competitor; and, from Ra, a silk scarf – her only unique physical memento of her day of glory.
But there were headlines by the hundred – Czech, Slovak, German, French, English – and countless thousands of words beneath them. The stream of journalists demanding interviews was unrelenting, until November snow in Řitka discouraged further intrusion. The articles varied from detailed race reports to profiles and interviews. The headlines were mostly variations on a single astonishing idea: ‘Woman wins Velká Pardubicka’.
Early reports in the Czechoslovak press also emphasised the patriotic aspects of Lata’s success. It was a ‘victory for our breed’, a ‘German debacle’; a triumph by ‘a Czechoslovak national, on a horse from a Czechoslovak breed’; a defeat of ‘the dreaded foreigners’ by ‘a steeplechaser from our own country’. ‘News of this sensational triumph will go all around the world,’ proclaimed Narodni listy.
Then the story was ceded to the features pages, where a succession of articles – many by female journalists – analysed Lata’s lifestyle and appearance. Readers were variously reassured that Lata was a ‘slim, elegant lady’ with ‘eyes full of brightness’; that she had ‘not lost her feminine grace’; and that she was ‘not, as I had anticipated, a man-woman’. She was praised for her firm handshake and ‘graceful elegance’, but also, more warmly, for having a ‘slim girlish figure’ and for being’suave . . . but not at all prim’. Pražanka magazine celebrated ‘a victory for all of womankind’ – which might have felt more convincing without the headline: ‘Does sport spoil women? Does it ruin their femininity?’ A report in Svoboda-Brno focused largely on the question of whether Lata should have dyed her greying hair.
Two weeks later, Konstantin von Neurath, the German foreign minister, was summoned to a meeting with Hitler and some of his senior generals. From now on, declared the Führer, the aim of the Third Reich’s foreign policy would be to take over Czechoslovakia and Austria, if necessary by invasion. The objective was to free up food supplies and living space for Germans, to boost military security and ‘to preserve and enlarge the racial community’. Up to two million Czechs and Slovaks would be expelled to facilitate this.
There is no evidence that the Germans’ failure at Pardubice influenced this accelerated viciousness; but it is not impossible. Hitler did have some awareness of horse racing. Five months later, he would create a lucrative new race, the Union Klub Prize of Honour, with an endowment to provide a 40,000-mark prize for a century. He may well have heard about Lata’s triumph. If he did, it isn’t hard to guess how he felt about it. Anti-Czech rhetoric in the Reichstag in the week following the race was described by one foreign observer as ‘the most violent used by Germany against another country since 1918’.
The Third Reich got its revenge, anyway. In March 1938, Germany annexed Austria, in a non-violent ‘Anschluss’. In April, at the SdP’s annual congress in Karlovy Vary, Konrad Henlein declared his party’s loyalty to Nazi ideals and demanded political autonomy for the Sudetenland. At a meeting in Berlin a few weeks earlier, Hitler had told Henlein how he intended to deal with Czechoslovakia: ‘We must always demand so much of them that we can never be satisfied.’ Over the next eighteen months, that strategy proved horribly effective.
For Lata, these were strange times. Her wildest dream had come true. She was admired, respected, loved. In Řitka, there was pride and hope. At Velká Chuchle, Hubertus was thriving. As a jockey, she had nothing left to prove. There were many reasons to be happy, yet the wider world was going to hell in a handcart – while who knows what romantic yearnings were draining the colour from life’s other pleasures? Erstwhile friends were concluding that it would be more advantageous to swim with the rising tide of Nazi-inspired pan- Germanism, and Kasalický – who was convicted after the war as a collaborator – was at the very least inclining in that direction. This cannot have endeared him to Lata. Perhaps, even now, he and she were still seeing one another. If so, the relationship’s days were numbered.
As usual, Lata sought diversion and sanity through horses. At Řitka she kept Hostivít – a two-year-old buckskin Kinský horse – and Egon. These were her main form of transport but also trusted friends. I don’t think Řitka had any stable staff left, so Lata was responsible for their daily care. Hostivít and Egon knew her better than most humans did. Riding gear – jodhpurs, long boots, tweedy jacket – seems to have been her default mode of dress.
In racing terms, the year was uneventful but busy. Hubertus raced ten times between April and November, mainly at Velká Chuchle. He came second three times, but that was all. The prize money barely covered his costs. If Lata was indeed on more awkward terms with Kasalický (from whom she had originally bought Hubertus), that would have been an additional reason for taking less delight in her equine pride and joy than she had done in happier times.
She found a less ambiguous pleasure in a springtime adventure on horseback involving Ra and Poldi von Fugger’s sister, Sylvie Münster-Fuggerová. Sylvie had decided that she needed to take herself and her horse from Berlin to Vienna; a journey that was most easily accomplished if she rode directly south, cross-country, including a stretch of about 200 miles across Czechoslovakia, for which Ra (given the strength of anti-German feeling in the Czech lands) had agreed to escort her. Lata accompanied them for much of the journey. Few things soothe the soul more effectively than a long, slow, exploratory journey through the countryside. Lata, on horseback, in friendly company, her senses saturated with the sights, sounds and scents of spring, would have struggled to feel much anxiety while it was in progress. According to Ra, she and Sylvie were ‘always joking together’. The weather was fine; each bend or hill-brow promised to reveal a bright new slice of the ancient land she loved; the troubles of Berlin and Prague were far away.
The journey ended. The troubles did not. All that summer, Hitler stoked up the Sudetenland ‘crisis’ with escalating demands. Europe’s great and good fretted about where it was leading. Britain dispatched Lord Runciman to Czechoslovakia, to explore the scope for mediation. Runciman, hoping to ascertain how the country’s movers and shakers really felt, had several meetings with Ra and other pro-Czech aristocrats, who tried to persuade him against compromise with Hitler. It is conceivable that at one point, possibly at žd’ár nad Sázavou, Lata was present. It did little good. Runciman spent far more time with pro-Reich, pro-fascist aristocrats, and found them far more persuasive. Ra’s distant relative, Prince Ulrich Kinský, lobbied with particular vigour in support of Henlein and Hitler, arguing (according to one account) that ‘Czechoslovakia is a Bolshevik monster and must be destroyed’.
The pro-Reich faction, which among the aristocracy was far larger, won. Runciman reported that the rise of Nazi Germany had given the inhabitants of the Sudetenland ‘a new hope’ and that their desire to join the Reich was ‘a natural development in the circumstances’. In September, the British, French and Italian leaders – Neville Chamberlain, Édouard Dala
dier and Benito Mussolini – discussed the matter repeatedly with Hitler, then conveyed to Czechoslovakia’s leaders their conclusion: that concessions must be made. Edvard Beneš’s government agreed to give the Sudetenland some political autonomy – at which point Henlein upped his demands. What he wanted now was immediate annexation of the Sudetenland by the German Reich. Beneš responded by banning Henlein’s increasingly violent paramilitary support group, the Ordnersgruppe. The next day, 17 September, Hitler created the Sudeten German Freikorps: in effect, a German-based paramilitary group whose raison d’être was to commit acts of violence on Czechoslovak soil – as it began to do within hours of its creation. Czechs and Slovaks looked on in baffled despair. The Third Reich had all but started a war, and Czechoslovakia’s allies showed little sign of coming to the nation’s defence. Maybe the Third Reich really was unstoppable.
Then something odd happened. That same day, on 17 September, just after the anniversary of Tomáš Masaryk’s death, a small group of Czech nobles, with Ra and his stepson František Schwarzenberg prominent among them, presented President Beneš with a declaration of loyalty. It is hard to convey how surprising this was. The declaration had little practical significance. There were only eight signatories, and the aristocracy was not the political force it had been two decades earlier. Yet there was something quite inspiring – at a time when most influential people were quietly adjusting their values to suit the prevailing Nazi wind – about a gesture that was so plainly not in the interests of those who made it.
The Czech historian Zdenék Hazdra, who has written several studies of the behaviour of the nobility during the Nazi era, is adamant about two things. First: the nobles had nothing to gain from it. ‘In the years right after the First World War, nobles might have had something to gain from emphasising their Czech identity. But not now. A gesture like this could only damage them.’ Secondly: each signatory would have been understood as signing the declaration on behalf of his whole family, unless they actively dissented. This wasn’t very progressive, but it was significant, because it meant that, when Ra signed, his signature implied the support of the famous Lata Brandisová. ‘I am sure she was implicated,’ says Hazdra. ‘Certainly the Nazis knew that she was loyal to the Czech nation.’ They would not forget.
That declaration was swiftly submerged by events. To cut a long story short: at the end of September, at the notorious Munich conference, Chamberlain, Daladier and Mussolini decided, without consulting Czechoslovakia’s leaders, that Hitler’s demands for immediate annexation of the Sudetenland must be acceded to. Beneš had no choice but to capitulate. The news was greeted with fury in Prague, where there were violent demonstrations, and with jubilation in the Sudetenland – although probably not by the 10,000 or so people who, over the next six months, would be arrested there as ‘enemies of the Reich’; or among the tens of thousands of Jews, Czechs and democrats who, over the same period, would flee to what remained of Czechoslovakia. (At least one such family ended up renting a property at Všenory, near Řitka, where they got into a financial dispute with their landlord, Hanuš Kasalický.)
Chamberlain returned to London with a piece of paper, proclaiming ‘peace in our time’. German troops poured into the Sudetenland. Henlein, as Gauleiter and Reichskommissar, became the Nazis’ supreme representative in the territory. Hitler got on with his plans for war. Czechoslovakia contemplated its own collapse. Overnight, the country had lost much of its industrial base and all of its border defences – which the army (mobilised and ready to fight) was ordered to abandon. President Beneš resigned and went into exile. Masaryk’s First Republic died when he did so. An emasculated, Reich-friendly Second Republic took its place, with Emil Hácha as president. Only two political parties were allowed. Censorship was introduced. Most governing was done by decree. Fascists and anti-democrats filled most government offices. More than 20,000 Jews were driven out of public life. The political elite, at least, had recognised that the future was German.
In Pardubice, where there had been repeated demonstrations against such a future, no one had the heart to go through with the steeplechase that had brought so much joy the previous year. The fifty-seventh Velká Pardubická was quietly dropped, notwithstanding a high-class field of entries that included representatives of French, Belgian and American stables. It would be eight years before the race was held again.
A few weeks later, Lata sold Hubertus. We can speculate as to why she did so, just as we can speculate about her choice of purchaser, the Jewish industrialist Otto Ippen. Maybe she was disillusioned with horse racing. Maybe she wished to distance herself from the pro-Reich elite and its policies. Maybe she needed the money. All we know is that, abruptly, her name ceases to feature in the admittedly scanty records of the Jockey Club and the racing press. Racing continued at Velká Chuchle. Šmejda continued to train there. Lata continued to ride out for him. But perhaps, with so much encroaching darkness, the thrills of racing had temporarily lost their lustre.
Chamberlain’s peace wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. In March 1939, the armies of the Third Reich marched into Czechoslovakia. Hitler celebrated in Prague Castle the next day. Slovakia, with Hitler’s approval, became an independent, pro-fascist state. What remained of the Czechoslovak Republic became the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, with Konstantin von Neurath as Reichsprotektor. Masaryk’s former citizens were now Hitler’s subjects: in effect, second-class citizens of a Greater Germany.
Still Czechoslovakia’s Western allies did nothing. This may have encouraged the new regime to proceed with relative restraint. Thousands of dissenters were arrested over the next six months, but thousands of others weren’t. Jews were excluded from public life but not, as yet, rounded up. For those not on the receiving end of such policies, it was still just about possible to make a meaningful choice between implicitly accepting them or showing disapproval. Some tried to protest subtly, through culture: patriotic Czech films, plays and musicals proved particularly popular in Prague that summer. Some participated with extra enthusiasm in Sokol activities. A fearless few attempted to establish an underground resistance network. Most people simply kept their heads down.
The nobility, on the other hand, were mostly enthusiastic about their nation’s new German rulers. Some, such as Count Max Egon Fürstenberg, immediately began to lobby for the return of their former property; a few, such as Karl Khuen-Lützow (who described Hitler as a ‘guardian angel’), suggested that they might be allowed to use their abolished titles again. Karel Belcredi and Hugo Strachwitz helped set up a Czech Union for Cooperation with the Germans. Many others did little, but none the less felt what Prince Alfons Clary-Aldringen – who owned 8,000 hectares of Sudetenland real estate near Teplice – had recently described as ‘deep, heartfelt joy’ and an ‘overflowing feeling of thanks for our great Führer’. Thanks to Masaryk’s democracy, aristocratic landholdings were half what they had been twenty years earlier, and the shadow of Bolshevism threatened a future that was still worse. Nazism – if you didn’t look too closely – seemed to promise a return to the old order: more civilisation, not less.
This interpretation became harder to sustain in September 1939, when Hitler’s stormtroopers marched into Poland. Britain and France finally responded. Europe was once again at war; civilisation’s certainties were once again in doubt. Yet most nobles in the Protectorate still saw the Nazi Reich as a force for conservatism, and Prince Alfons Clary-Aldringen’s two sons were among many well-born young men who rushed to enlist with the Wehrmacht.
As the fighting began, tolerance of dissent in the Protectorate was sharply reduced. So it was both surprising and brave when, on 7 September, the Protectorate’s puppet president, Emil Hácha, was presented with another declaration from a group of Czech nobles. There were eighty-five signatories this time, represented by sixty-nine signatures and representing thirty-three different aristocratic families. Ra was once again among the ringleaders, and is once again assumed to have implicated Lata with his
signature. The letter spoke of the nobles’ ‘inherited identification’ with the Czech ‘national community’ and their ‘shared history, fate, and responsibility for future generations of the nation’ – and stated emphatically that, ‘whatever happens’ their loyalty was Czech: ‘With the conviction of the unity of all parts of our nation . . . we want always and under all circumstances to identify ourselves with the Czech nation.’
This was even bolder than the previous declaration. It could serve no conceivable purpose except as a gesture of defiance: a signal that, even at this darkest moment, there were Czechs who had lost neither their courage nor their pride. They knew they would pay for it. They did it anyway. The jolt of hope it delivered to the despairing nation was as thrilling as it was brief.
The Nazis took note and waited for their revenge.
25.
The reckoning
The early months hardly felt like war. Konstantin von Neurath, the Reichsprotektor, governed Hitler’s new province cautiously. Dissent was purged, anti- Semitism encouraged and slavish sycophancy towards the Third Reich demanded; but the aim was to keep the population submissive – not to provoke general rebellion. Atrocities occurred: notably the execution of nine students, with 1,200 others being sent to concentration camps, following anti-Nazi protests in Prague in October and November 1939. But these were still rare enough to shock.
Most people did what Lata did: kept their heads down and hoped for better times. Travel was difficult and public gatherings were discouraged, but some strands of normality were unbroken. Racing continued at Velká Chuchle and continued to be popular. Lata went when she could, especially to help Šmejda. But time was scarce. Gabriele was spending extended periods in Austria, Alžběta was living in Prague, Markéta had her young son to attend to – and the workload at Řitka wasn’t getting smaller. Among other things, Lata was responsible for three horses; at least one of which, a bay gelding called Holomek, was a gift from Ra. These kept her busy and sane but also tied to Řitka. They didn’t alter the fact that her nation was sinking into a moral abyss.