by Unbreakable- The Woman Who Defied the Nazis in the World's Most Dangerous Horse Race (retail) (epub)
Lata’s injuries healed slowly: she was now fifty-one. Her convalescence cannot have been helped by an increasingly fraught political atmosphere. A nationwide drought in 1947 caused a crisis in food production. To ease it, the government introduced a ‘millionaires’ tax’ – a one-off levy on those with assets of more than a million crowns – to be paid into a Fund for National Renewal. That same summer saw the enactment of Law 142/1947, a legislative attempt (overseen in the Czech lands by the Communists) to complete the unfinished business of land reform. The First Republic’s programme had confiscated around four million hectares of land – roughly half of big landowners’ landholdings – but attempts to expropriate more had ground to a halt thanks to a combination of patient lobbying and practical difficulties. Now, with the Communists in charge of the ministry of the interior, a more aggressive programme was introduced. Broadly speaking, private holdings were limited to fifty hectares, which meant that, once the administrative wrangling had been completed, all the woods above Řitka would pass into new ownership. Ironically, the expulsion of all those Germans had meant that the supply of land now exceeded demand, but the Communists were determined to destroy large landholdings anyway, as a matter of principle. Most woodland ended up with the State Forest Administration. At around the same time, the burned remains of Ra’s Karlova Koruna were taken into state ownership – in due course being converted into a museum. And although he retained Obora for a little longer, the state soon seized the vast forests around it.
Lata tried to carry on as before. So did Ra. It was hard to see any other way of clinging to normality. So it was that, in July, fully fit once again, Lata rode Ra’s temperamental stallion, Otello – father of Nurmi – in the Velká Poděbradská steeplechase in Poděbrady. They were unplaced but, on the bright side, Lata was uninjured. A few weeks later, she, Ra and Génilde all rode in the Kunětická Hora steeplechase in Pardubice. Jan Masaryk (by then foreign minister) was among those who watched Lata win on Nora, another Norma foal. Ra came second on Nurmi while Génilde – twenty-two and married – came third on her own favourite mare, Puszta. It was, commented Masaryk, ‘a bit of a family affair’ .
But it was clear that this kind of comfortable exclusivity could not continue. Lata’s world was under attack again, and this time the attackers weren’t going away. All through that year, politicians such as Masaryk and Milada Horáková (once she had recovered from what the Nazis had done to her) fought stubbornly to preserve the traditions of First Republic democracy. But the Communists had the momentum. They were backed by Moscow, but there was also wide popular support for the idea that it was time to govern for the many, not the few. Traditional capitalism had delivered two catastrophic wars in three decades. Could a new system really do worse? As for the pre-war ruling class, hadn’t they failed the nation and, in many cases, betrayed it? Why should they not be stripped of their privileges? This last argument was a little unfair on those who hadn’t betrayed anyone but, on the contrary, had risked life and property to defend their nation. That didn’t stop the champions of change from making it. This was not a time of nuanced debate.
In October 1947, Lata returned to Pardubice. It was an even bigger occasion than the previous year, although this time the organisers were better prepared for the vast crowds. The prize money for the winner had been almost doubled – to 150,000 crowns – and the number of foreign visitors reflected this. The sixteen runners included five French horses, with officers from the French, Bulgarian and Czech armed forces among their riders. Lata rode Otello, the most exciting of Ra’s horses but also the least governable and most aggressive. (He was put down a few years later after killing his groom with a bite to the neck.)
By the time they reached the start, Otello was in his most volcanic, hellraising mood. Even Lata struggled to control him. After much bucking and rearing, he bolted. Lata could only sit tight as Otello charged towards a distant corner of the course. Meanwhile, the frenzy had spread. Vítěz bolted, too, and refused to stop until he had gone all the way back to the military riding school in the centre of Pardubice. His jockey, Zdeněk Widner, never lived down the embarrassment – and never stopped blaming Lata for his involuntary gallop through the streets. Lata took fifteen minutes to get Otello back to the start, whereupon the race began.
Otello set off like a rocket. He was well ahead at the approach to Taxis, which Lata hoped to jump on the right. At the last minute he veered left. He cleared the jump but left a nine-horse pile-up behind him. All but two remounted, and in due course Otello was overhauled. He had already squandered half his energy; by halfway he had lost his enthusiasm. At the Irish Bank, he refused. Lata could not persuade him to change his mind and, indeed, may not have tried too hard to do so. Otello was not going to win anything that day. It was a relief to get back to the stables, but also a deep disappointment: another year, another failure to complete the course. How many more chances would she get?
Four months later, Czechoslovakia became, in effect, a one-party state. The Communists provoked their coalition partners into resigning from government, then intimidated President Beneš into letting them govern alone. Formerly democratic ministries were occupied by the secret police; the army was confined to barracks; a general strike was organised; people’s militias roamed the streets. By the end of ‘Victorious February’ , Czechoslovakia’s Communist era had begun. There would not be another free election for over forty years.
On 10 March, Jan Masaryk died mysteriously, falling out of a window. Losers of political battles in the Czech lands have often suffered from such accidents. (The Defenestrations of Prague of 1419 and 1618 are the two most famous examples.) For the Communists’ opponents, Masaryk’s death epitomised their methods: backed by Moscow, they used violence and intimidation to achieve their ends, then denied everything. By May, when a new constitution formalised the Communist takeover, there wasn’t even any need to deny. There were no opposition parties, no free press; soon there would be no one who dared to accuse the Party of wrongdoing. Beneš, broken, resigned in June. He died three months later. Czechoslovak democracy had predeceased him.
In Řitka, nothing changed. Ivy still clung to the chateau’s long front wall. The farm girls still sang as they worked in the fields. The same ancient forest covered the hills beyond, irrespective of ownership. In the stables, three six-year-old mares rubbed shoulders with twenty dairy cows. Lata probably still rode in the woods, and on Sundays she certainly rode to church. A young village boy, Jiří Mudr, whose parents lived in Prague but had just begun to build a weekend cottage in Řitka, used to wave at her. After a while, Lata began to pause and greet him: ‘Hello, boy from Prague.’ Then, as they became friends, she would lean down, scoop him up and put him on the saddle in front of her. They would ride together through the village. ‘She was very elegant, always beautifully dressed, but she always remembered me,’ says Mudr, who still lives in Řitka today. ‘She would ask me questions: did I go to school? Did I like Prague? I’ll never forget her voice. Sometimes she’d give me a sweet.’ Then she would set him down and ride on alone to Líšnice, where her sisters would be waiting in the family pew.
This was life as Lata understood it. Her role was to serve God and to serve her community, to be kind to children and animals, and to keep up traditions that had served her family well. But tradition could no longer be relied upon; and what replaced it might prove harsh, if you were an aristocrat. The previous August, Law 143/1947 Sb – widely known as the Lex Schwarzenberg – had provided for the confiscation of all the property of, specifically, the Schwarzenberg family, including Orlík. A special law was needed because, in contrast to most confiscation victims, the Schwarzenbergs could not be faulted for their wartime conduct. Ra’s stepson Karel was considered a hero of Prague’s liberation (although his worst injuries resulted from accepting a lift from a drunken motorcyclist). But he was still an obscenely privileged aristocrat. In 1945 and 1946 he was often guest of honour at events celebrating the liberation. By 1947, such invit
ations had dried up. Orlík was taken over by the state, and by 1948, according to Karel’s son (then aged ten), ‘People were crossing the street to avoid him.’ The Schwarzenbergs fled to Austria.
For the rest of the former nobility, it was just a matter of waiting to see how bad the worst would be. Most of them could still inhabit the homes they had grown up in and enjoy the familiar estates around them – for now. But their world was being dismantled, with upsetting enthusiasm. At some point soon – perhaps within weeks, perhaps within months – all those memories and comforts would be wrenched from them. This may have been fair. Even so, it must have felt a little bit like waiting for a loved one to die.
The Kinskýs’ remaining estates were seized as 1948 unfolded, along with their horses. That June, Ra’s son Norbert married in Italy. Ra and Lori went to the wedding and never returned. Norbert’s younger brother Radslav, a brilliant geneticist who was then doing military service in Pardubice, remained in Czechoslovakia and would eventually find menial employment as an unskilled worker on a state farm at Slatiňany. Génilde, too, stayed behind, but soon found herself in trouble with the secret police, the Státní bezpečnost (StB). Her hastily arranged marriage was all but over; her soon-tobe-ex-husband, (ex-)Count Dobrzenský, was abroad; and the StB felt that the young Génilde was ripe for exploitation as an informant. Génilde was approached but refused to cooperate, at which point threats were made that involved her two young children (then close to their fifth and second birthdays). ‘I realised,’ she says today, ‘that I would have to escape.’ She made enquiries, found a people smuggler, and prepared a high-risk escape plan.
That October’s Velká Pardubická was a low-key affair, with only eleven runners. Foreign visitors were notable by their absence. Lata did not attend either. Instead, on the weekend of the race, she cycled to Prague, where Génilde still had her marital home. This was not prudent, given the political climate. But it was a visit that Lata was determined to make.
Her relationship with Génilde had always been a close one. The disappearance of so many family members on both sides had made it closer: Lata was almost a stand-in mother. So Lata knew that this was the night on which Génilde planned to leave Czechoslovakia. ‘She was in on the secret,’ says Génilde. ‘So she came in the evening to say goodbye. She was very kind.’ In addition to saying fond farewells, Lata gave her some sleeping pills – which may have been a herbal concoction made from a family recipe. (It is conceivable that they were originally intended for horses . . .) ‘She told me to give them to my baby.’ This was good advice, up to a point. Czechoslovakia’s Communist paradise was barely eight months old, but already a two-mile exclusion zone had been established on the border to block the flood of people wanting to leave. Génilde had to find her way undetected to a certain abandoned cottage within the zone, on the north-western border near Cheb, and wait there, in silence and darkness, until the people smuggler came for her. If a cry from twenty-three-month-old Harry alerted the border police, a lengthy prison sentence was the best that Génilde could expect. ‘We had to stay there most of the night, waiting. We couldn’t have any light and we couldn’t make any noise.’ Harry also had to be kept quiet during the final walk across the border into Germany. ‘Lata gave me four pills,’ says Génilde. ‘But when it came to it I was worried that it might kill my baby. So I only gave him one.’
This was probably just as well. Young Harry – whom Génilde carried in a blanket while leading his brother Václav by the hand – spent the entire escape in the profoundest of sleeps. Anything profounder might have been irreversible. Yet his silence did at least allow the young family to make their way undetected through the hills on foot, on a black autumn night, into the safety of the US zone of occupied Germany. Later, after a spell in a refugee camp, they reached Switzerland, where Génilde found work as a chambermaid. Later still, in 1949, she was able to join Ra and Lori in Italy.
By then, the message had got back to Lata that the escape had been successful. Initially, however, she had no way of confirming that her beloved Génilde was safe. Yet she did have faith that all was well: partly because she would probably have heard about it had things gone wrong but also for a more personal reason. ‘She gave me a medallion,’ says Génilde. ‘It had a picture of the Virgin Mary on it. She said: “I wore this medallion in every race I rode, and it kept me safe. So I hope now you will get safely over the border.”’
They never saw one another again, but I have no doubt that Lata comforted herself with the thought that her gift had helped protect Génilde and her children from the many dangers they faced. But there was danger in Lata’s life, too.
27.
The fall
Lata’s world was emptying. In ones and twos, in different ways, those who had meant most to her had departed: Ra, Lori, Génilde; Šmejda; Kasalický; the Schwarzenbergs, the Satories. Her family was dwindling, too, with three siblings dead and two living permanently in Austria, beyond the newly drawn Iron Curtain. Alžběta and her children were in Prague; Sergej Jaroševský had moved with Petr to Moravia. Life in Řitka continued in its familiar rhythms, more or less. But it sometimes felt ghostly.
She still had Kristýna and Johanna. Apart from that, little could be relied upon. She still had her home, but for how much longer? As for horses – in whose unfailing good nature she had always placed so much faith – it was hard to feel confident that they would be part of her world for much longer. The Communists didn’t approve of horses, sensing, correctly, that they were a crucial component of the world they had come to destroy. It wasn’t just that the privileged classes kept horses and employed the less privileged to help them do so. In the pre-war world, as we have seen, there had barely been a Czech or Slovak life in which horses played no role. The rural economy was built around them. Small, independent farmers – neither privileged nor collective-minded – were synonymous with horse-ownership. So, in a sense, was Czechoslovak democracy. Tomáš Masaryk, coachman’s son, often rode in public and sometimes wandered into crowds on horseback to chat. His habitual closeness to horses was seen as entirely consistent with his preference for the company of ordinary people: it emphasised his ordinariness, not his importance.
The horse, in short, could be seen as a symbol of bourgeois individualism as well as feudalism. What it didn’t symbolise was Communism. In the first decade of Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime, 300,000 horses are thought to have been sent to the slaughterhouse. Estates that had once kept horses became agricultural collectives, in which tractors replaced horsepower. Racehorses, studs and stables were mostly taken into collective or state ownership. (The Kinskýs’ horses, perhaps including Norma, ended up at the state farm at Slatiňany – where Radslav did his best to ensure that the breed was not wiped out entirely.) The Prague Jockey Club was abolished and replaced by the partly state-run Czechoslovak Racing Association. Racing continued, but the days in which the rich and fashionable gathered at the track to see and be seen – and ‘gentleman’ owners rode their own horses when they chose, or allocated them to favoured cousins – were over. This was a less frivolous kind of racing. There wasn’t much place in it for Lata.
But even the Communists did not dare to come between Czechoslovaks and their Velká Pardubická, and Lata, in turn, was not prepared to abandon her favourite racing event without a struggle.
The 1949 race was another quiet one. The foreign visitors continued to stay away; so did some domestic ones. A number of long-serving racecourse staff were absent, too: starter, judges, course inspector, handicapper and course vet had all been replaced by more politically acceptable appointments. Of the eighteen runners, all but four were owned by state farms rather than private individuals. Two, Nora and Čingischán, were Kinský horses, owned and trained by the state farm (strictly speaking the State Experimental Horse-breeding Institute) at Slatiňany.
Lata was unable to get a ride on either, or on any other Velká Pardubická horses. At fifty-four, she probably didn’t seem like the asset in the saddle t
hat she had once been – even though the standard of those who did ride does not appear to have been particularly high. But what she stood for – old-world privilege and First Republic self-belief – probably counted against her as well.
Even so, she had persuaded the Slatiňany state farm to give her a ride in the last race of the day, the soon-to-berenamed Kinský Memorial Steeplechase. On a five-yearold bay mare called Na’a – Norma’s daughter – she lined up at the start with five other runners at around 4 p.m. One of them was Génilde’s brother Radslav Kinský. He had not attempted to escape himself because someone had to stay behind in Czechoslovakia to look out for the children, if Génilde was caught and jailed. He was riding a dark buckskin Kinský horse called Nella on behalf of its new owners, the military riding school at Stará Boleslav.
Učeň, owned by the Pardubice military riding school and ridden by Captain Oldřich Dostál, had won the Velká Pardubická about an hour earlier, but there were still plenty of spectators, many of them not in the stands but at strategic vantage points around the course. The Memorial race includes most of the key Velká Pardubická jumps, apart from Taxis, but is about half the distance, without all the ploughed fields. The conditions were challenging, however. It was 23 October, about a fortnight later than usual, and heavy rain, possibly coupled with mishandling of sluice gates, had left the water obstacles filled to overflowing. In the Velká Pardubická, only five out of eighteen runners had reached the finish. In the Memorial race, most of the twenty-two horses which had originally been entered had dropped out before the start. Of those that remained, Naďa and Lata had as good a chance as any.