Gustaw Rau -Ocena Konia Szlachetnego V

Salvete Omnes,
[in Polish]
finałowa, V cześć, pracy Gustawa Rau o pokroju konia szlachetnego z Jeździec i Hodowca.


 
milej lektury
Valete!

Gustav Rau - Ocena Konia Szlachetnego IV

Salvete Omnes,
[in Polish]
cześć IV pracy Gustawa Rau o ocenie konia szlachetnego z czasopisma Jeździec i Hodowca.





- cdn
Valete

Gustaw Rau - Ocena Konia Szlachetnego III

Salvete Omnes
[Polish]
cześć III cyklu Gustawa Rau z Jeździec i Hodowca o pokroju konia szlachetnego
 
 

 

 

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Valete

Gustav Rau - Ocena Konia Szlachetnego II

Salvete Omnes,
[in Polish]
kontynuacja pracy Gustawa Rau o pokroju konia szlachetnego z Jeździec i Hodowca.
czesc II





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Valete

Gustaw Rau - Ocena Konia Szlachetnego I

Salvete Omnes,
[Polish]

Gustaw (Gustav) Rau użyczył redakcji czasopismu ''Jeździec i Hodowca'' ( publikacja dostępna na platformie Federacji Bibliotek Cyfrowych) praw do przetłumaczenia i wydrukowania na łamach czasopisma w 1936 roku pracy Ocena Konia Szlachetnego.
Oto całość tej pracy hipologicznej o pokroju konia szlachetnego, podzielona na części tak jak były one drukowane w originale -




 

 




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Valete

Sarmatian stela from Temryuk Museum

Salvete Omnes.
a short entry - in a summer style one may say - the Archaeology News Network I read today that Salzburg Museum, Austria, will return to Russia 'a trove of ancient[...] artefacts plundered during the World War II.'
The ancient treasures were taken from the Temryuk Archeological Museum during the German occupation of the Taman Peninsula 1942-43AD. Perhaps some Austrian German officer, being part of the Third Reich conquering armies (Austria being the most Nazi of all the German lands during the Hitler's rule), 'conquered' these artefacts from the archaeological museum.
It took oh, 70 odd years to finally return these treasures to Russian Federation.
I am not sure if you remember but the Nazi Germans performed systematic, with the strictest scientific approach one may say, looting of cultural objects from private collections and museums in German-occupied Poland during 1939-45.
One of the artefact shows a horseman, and I think this a Sarmatian of the Bosporan Kingdom.

In many respects it is similar to the funerary stelae (Ic BC -Ic AD) from Panticapaeum in Crimea, that are on display in the Odessa Museum, Ukraine.


 
The country- Taman Peninsula and Kuban steppe to the south - over there in Russia has been the Tatar and Cossack country - it should come as no surprise that the original Cossacks were Tatars in the Genoese service during the colonial Genoese empire of the north Pontic shores  the XIV-XV centuries.
 
Wiki commons contains a large number of photos from the 'ethno-turist' center 'Ataman' that is 'recreating' a Don/Kuban Cossack  stanitsa (village). The place appear to be located in   Taman.  In some of the pictures there are modern Cossacks doing dzhigitovka.



Valete

Polish & Jewish together and separate - around latest hoopla

Salvete Omnes,
I have got this feeling today that I need to comment on the latest hoopla surrounding  the change  of Polish law in Poland [sic!] and the reception of this statutory amendment to the IPN law- link to the amendment.
 My translation of a section of the amended law:

• Article 55a:
  

1.  One who publicly and against the facts imputes to the Polish Nation or to the Polish State responsibility or joint responsibility for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich, defined in Article 6 of the Charter of the International MilitaryTribunal, Annex[...]major war criminals of the European Axis, signed in London on August 8, 1945 [ Dz. Ust. 1947], or for other offenses constituting crimes against peace, crimes against humanity or war crimes, or who in different manner blatantly reduces the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of said crimes, may be subject to a fine or imprisonment for up to 3 years. The judgment will be made public.

2. If a perpetrator of the act defined in subsection 1 acts unintentionally [he or she] will be subject to a fine or non-custodial sentence .

3. Perpetrator commits no prohibited act as defined in subsection 1 and 2 who has manifested the act as part of artistic or scholarly activity.

There is nothing sudden or new about this law- already in 2016 English-language media in the UK etc were reporting about these proposed changes, eg The Independent.  According to the official statement by the Polish President the Polish officials had been in discussion about this law with their Israeli counterparts since 2016.

It is about the Nazi German genocide, and to lesser extend about the Ukrainian crimes,  against all Polish citizens perpetrated during the World War Two and the Holocaust committed by the Nazi Germans within the pre-1939 Polish Republic's occupied (both Soviet and German) territories during the period of 1939-45. And it is about the invention of Polish culpability, including the invention of the term ''Polish concentration camps,'' by the former-Nazi officials in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1950-60s (part of the German historical policies and blame shifting).

For years media, be it  'fake news' creators and allegedly truthful news media outlets like New York Times et al. in the US, Canada or Australia had been writing about the  Nazi camps as 'Polish ones' and perpetrating the awful lie invented by the Gehlen people/BND - especially by  Alfred Benzinger and Dienststelle 114.

 Back in the 1990s and 2000s I used to call NYT or NY Daily News etc complaining about the lies stated in their biased articles, when writing about old or contemporary Poland, Polish society, Polish history and finally about the mythical and alleged Polish  antisemitism.
Mind you, my immediate ancestors participated in and saved Polish-Jewish  citizens by also hiding  two Polish-Jewish artisans from Lodz Ghetto during the WWII, and they, according to my Grandmother who hid these men in her barn, left for Israel and new life after 1947.
In 1940, I do not remember from my Grandmother's story what part of the year but must have been after April 1940, my Grandmother was beaten to unconsciousness by a Glowno Ghetto German guard for the offense of throwing loaves of bread over the ghetto fence to the ghetto inhabitants on the other side. She was only saved from being beaten to death by her friend, who was a Polish-German woman and her friend since the elementary school. As a consequence she had been unconscious for a week and sick for a month, with my Grandfather in a prison camp since September 1939 and my little father taken care by my Great Grandfather who was a widower.

ad rem, the law had been delayed too long and its final passage last week by the Polish Sejm (parliament ) and subsequent signing of it by Poland President this week will remedy some of this decades-old negligence and outright cowardice on the part of the Polish State as represented by her elected officials, diplomats and academics.
This new mindset displayed by the Polish Republic's  government, especially this novel approach to Polish historical policy,  has been brutally attacked, not criticized [sic!], by Israel and even criticized by US State Department.
The US critics of this law citing the freedom of speech, please note that even in the US freedom of speech is not unqualified, certain type of speech that is not protected under the 1st Amendment of the Constitution, see hate crime statutes.
Nota bene Israel already has many laws  muzzling the expression of speech, eg the 2011 law punishing people or companies for calling for boycott of Israel, eg threat to punish the Amnesty International, New Zealand 2018 example.
How badly this law is needed can be seen in this article by Danusha Goska - it describes an unjust bias and prejudice against Poland, Polish descent and even Polish names in the US, yet then the author concludes that the law is a mistake - please read it carefully. [Do note that I completely disagree with the author's conclusion as to the new amendment to the IPN law being a mistake]

I just want to add here -
remember the Medieval  Statute of Kalisz ('Calisia' in Latin) passed into law by Piast duke Boleslaw Pobozny (the Pious) AD 1264, and adopted as the royal law for the entire Kingdom between AD 1334-62 ,  by last Piast king Kazimierz the Great and subsequent Polish rulers, thus these laws survived in effect until the passage of the May Constitution of AD 1791. Compare this and contrast with the English, Spanish, Portuguese, French or German Jewish histories of the same period.

and the beautiful art by Polish-Jewish artist Artur Szyk illuminating the XX century multilingual re-edition of this Polish Medieval  Statute.

so cui bono?
I hope the truth will ...
enjoy
ps
cavalryman and officer, rotmistrz Witold Pilecki is the hero of the quest for truth about the Nazi concentration camps, and Jan Kozielewski (better known under the nome de guerre as Jan Karski) comes in as second being the official Polish Government in Exile emissary to the Western, especially American government etc. Along with hundreds of thousands of Polish citizens who participated in this quest, and millions who suffered.
Unfortunately the director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp Museum found no room for the family of rotmistrz Pilecki in 2015, during the 70th anniversary of the liberation of this Nazi camp by the Soviet Red Army.

Walter Spitzer and his own Holocaust

Salve,
this post is not about the horses or riders.
It is about a book I finished reading yesterday.

Walter Spitzer (Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial & Museum has a page about him, and Buchenwald Museum  too) is a painter and sculptor living in France who wrote a book about his life  between the early 1930s through the summer of 1945.
The book I devoured like a hungry wolf.
It is titled Sauve par le dessin ( Saved by the  drawing - I read the Polish edition, Uratowany rysunkami, to my knowledge there is not English edition) and it is not a simple memoir.
For Walter is a Holocaust survivor who spent his best boyhood  years in various Nazi German controlled places - starting with this ancestral home in Cieszyn, Poland, through a shtetl & ghetto in Gross (German added post 1939) Strzemieszyce, then Auschwitz III, then the 12 day death-march, then Gross Rossen, then the death-train, then Buchenwald and then the escape into the woods(amidst fighting between the American forces and German defenders) from anther forced march to the final liberty brought to him and his friend Coco by the American Army.

I am not a novice to the genre of Holocaust memoirs and recollections, but it has been some time since I read one of those - nota bene it was Byłam sekretarką Rumkowskiego: dzienniki Etki Daum edited by Elzbieta Cherezinska(2008 ed), about the Litzmannstadt [Lodz] ghetto daily live by the secretary to Chaim M. Rumkowski, the infamous (not only in my opinion) commander-in-chief of the ghetto.
So when I read the cover description and skimmed some first pages into the book, including Eli Wiesel recommendation-introduction, I thought that this was  one rather late memoir, after all  this author was 77 years old in 2004, sort of another late bloomer to the now revered Jewish past but with much established Holocaust industry, but when started reading the book I could not put it down.

And it is mostly because it is about this Polish-Jewish boy success, about the spectacular survival against all odds and about tons of Good Fortune in the world gone German Nazi pitiless, and to the core. Not a small part was played by the fact that Walter had been educating himself all that horrible days, months, and years, not only in the art of survival but also in art history and various aspects of fine art - drawing, photography, sculpture, painting etc

So if you think you have it bad and are in need of motivational or inspiration, do read this book.

Walter does his storytelling with such an ease and poise  as with a stroke of a pen, pencil or brush - one might say: after all his trade has been fine arts.
He does not stop and writes about intimate aspects of his own life and lives of others, so the memoirs is much more personal and very coming of age at the same time.
 They (museums, galleries etc) write about him that the Communists at the Buchenwald KL saved him, but he had had to come to them first, and to do so he crossed, at the peril of immediate death, the gate between the death and political camps there, putting all his life and the lie of his friend Coco in the hands of good Fortune. It apparently worked. He made good his promise to record the Hell by his pencil etc - eg this one.
There are very personalized pictures as well - some etching and drawings by Walter, his own family and boyhood pictures, there is one of smiling beautiful Pola (you need to read the book to find out what role this photo played), then the American soldiers and unpublished photos from Buchenwald KL. 

nota bene good reader tell US Holocaust Museum to get some money to translate this book into English pronto.

There is a video about Walter, where he talks in his own English about this life and art, and there is also his Facebook page. So you can explore away about this little Polish boy from Cieszyn who made it alive and kicking from the German death machinery.

There are few horses that appear in his book too - one is a picture of their defunct stable with dusty horse tack at his home ground floor before the World War II, then 1938 and  the Polish army cavalry and officer marching into Czechoslovakia to take Zaolzie; then 5 years later during the infamous death-march from Blachhammer to Gross-Rossen  Walter drew a big cart horse (in his estimation it was a loot from some French or Belgian farm) in some snowed-in German village farm, the sketch  he did for the German farmer in exchange for some bread and margarine given to him upon inspection and final approval by the farmer.
Finally there is a wild joyride within the American-occupied zone, when he was lent a saddled cavalry horse to ride across the woods and mountains. The horse was Hungarian like its owner, they are being part of the Hungarian Cavalry division awaiting return to Hungary after the Nazi Germany capitulation.  Walter did not knw how to ride but he did it anyway. Sweet ignorance and dexterity displayed by many a boy then, albeit this boy was special, he just survived the Hell and came back.
I strongly recommend this book, oh, I do!

September 1939 & Wola'44

Salve amigos et amigas,

first post in this nice month of September. Yes, it is the end of summer and beginning of autumn, fine time for horse riding or just horse watching :).

 Just wanted to remind you that on  September 1, 1939 Republic of Poland was attacked  by Nazi Germany (aided by Slovakia) and Soviet Union (17th of September), beginning World War II. The ensuing war caused unprecedented slaughter of Polish elites, Polish Jewry, the destruction, pilage and robbery of Polish museums, art, archives, human resources and natural resources. While our allies stood idle. My grandpa Wincenty fought in the Polish army as a soldier during this war.

* Lengyel, magyar — két jó barát, együtt harcol s issza borát. / Pole and Hungarian — two good friends,joint fight and drinking are their ends

In the summer of 1939 when Nazi Germany demanded that Hungary open its borders to German troops and allow them to cross over to invade Poland, Hungary's Prime Minister Pal Teleky, he answered: 'I rather blow up our rail lines than [Hungary] take part in the invasion of Poland.' (confirmed by Regent Horthy who told the German ambassador that "he [Teleky] would sooner blow up the rail lines than to participate in an attack on Poland.)

Today's also happens to be the anniversary of the modern Thermopylae, not Greek but a Polish one, for about 720 Polish soldiers under cpt Raginis  entrenched near Wizna defended their position against the invading  42,000 strong German corps under gen. Guderian for almost 4 days (7-10 Sept.)  And Swedish band Sabaton wrote a song about this heroic event .

Nota bene Soviets and Germans destroyed Polish horse breeding (my great grandpa had bred horses for the Polish army prior to 1939, and his horses were confiscated in 1941 for the Hitler's adventure on the Plains of Russia). The invaders  killed the horses and breeders,  destroyed the private and state horse breeding, dispersed the studs, took horses as pillage and spoils (famous Soviet stud at Tersk was augmented with fine horses  with this rapine, eg  famous  stallion Ofir, his daugher mare Mammona)  one of the affected was the famous stud at Janów Podlaski.

Accidentally, American Arabian horse breeders benefited from this rapine - gen. Patton got some prime Polish Arabians (theft really): of Kuheilan Haifi line stallion Witeź II (Ofir & Federacja ), stallion Opal and his son stalion Lotnik, and several mares (I do not know their names)  were taken to US, where they were bred with great success.

According to the census taken in 1938 Poland had almost 4,000 000 horses, (perhaps 100-200,000 more in 1939) and in 1945 only 1, 394 900. (after Witold Pruski, ''Dwa wieki polskiej hodowli koni arabskich 1778-1978 i jej sukcesy na swiecie,'' Warszawa 1983 )

Wola'44
During the massacre of civilian population of Warsaw's district of Wola during the Warsaw Uprising '44, also a traditional home of thousands of draft horse, during the slaughter and  banishment of Wola inhabitants the German troops and the Police killed and starved to death thousands of these working horses and took some as the spoils, while some were eaten by the soldiers and civilians of the Warsaw Rising'44.

Horrors of war... from the Museum of Warsaw Rising '44

Horses of Wola '1944

 

It was still a horse war in 1939

...
sources - archival films and photos from Wikipedia and Youtube

*
By the way, I have to comment on this sudden outburst of Germany pursuing the last surviving Nazi SS-men, Nazi soldiers and their ilk (eg here), bah, only 68 years after the war!
So, let me demonstrate this drive for high moral ground by pointing to this example of  great  Justice where the  92 years old accused allegedly killed 1 [sic!] (one) Dutch resistance fighter,  but when Dutch courts sentenced this man to death (later commuted to a life in prison) in 1949  Germany refused to extradite him - :) .

  Let's contrast the latest case of zealous pursuit of justice by the present German authorities with the case of the very  man who commanded the Wola Massacre - 60,000 killed, countless girls and women raped, so  Gruppenfüher Heinz  Reinefarth who was  awarded  the Oak Leaves to his Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for his actions during Warsaw Rising'44 on September 30, 1944 ,  lived out his life peacefully  in then-West Germany, first being the mayor of a town, then a state parliamentarian,  finally a lawyer who retired with a grand pension and lived out his years in his manor, unburdened by  the genocide and crimes against humanity he committed.
Repeatedly democratic Republic of Germany refused to extradite this man to Poland, citing mostly lack of evidence (first request for extradition was refused by the Americans). Thousands of these German Nazi butchers lived their lives comfortably in democratic Germany, German justice ministry saw no problem with theses war criminals, perpetrators of Holocaust and genocide, rape, pillage and theft. But then post-war Germany was built by the pardoned and reformed (with light prison sentences) Nazi officials and soldiers. Polish writer and journalist Krzysztof Kąkolewski interviewed many of these criminals, including Reinefarth,  in West Germany in 1970s, and published a book titled 'How are you, sir?'.  There is also this East Germany TV film-interview with Reinefarth, made in 1957, titled  'Holidays on Sylt.'
Travesty of justice.