The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr

Set in the vast Ukrainian steppe in 1941, this novel tells the story of a young girl who tries to save the last of a herd of rare horses, known as the Przewalski's horses while outwitting a cruel SS captain.

In the summer of 1941, the Soviet caretakers at the State Steppe Nature Reserve of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic prepare to abandon the reserve with the coming of the German army. The senior manager, Borys Demyanovich Krajnik, advises the elderly caretaker,  Maxim Borisovich Melnik, to abandon the animals. Borys tells Max that when the Germans arrive, they will kill him and he orders him to slaughter all the animals on the reserve. The reserve is home to many exotic animals including ostriches, zebras, llamas and Przewalski horses. The Soviets do not want the animals falling into the hands of the Germans.

Max however has no intention of killing all the animals. The sanctuary at Askaniya-Nova was created by a German, Baron Friedrich Falz-Fein with whom Max had a good friendship. The baron had always treated Max kindly. And the sanctuary which was mostly open grassland covering three hundred square kilometers was there to protect the animals from being hunted. Max who speaks German and who doesn't want to judge all Germans by what's he's heard, believes he will be able to reason with the German soldiers when they arrive. 

When the Germans come to Askaniya-Nova a mere two weeks later, Max meets the cultured, intelligent Captain Grenzmann. He explains how he came to learn German but is insulted by Grenzmann who notes that his aristocratic German doesn't match his impoverished look. When he tries to explain the uniqueness of the Przewalski horses to Grenzmann, Max is astounded to discover that the Germans do not consider the endangered horses to be something that should be saved. This is even more astonishing considering that Grenzmann claims to have been on the 1936 German Olympic Equestrian team. Instead, Grenzmann explains to Max that this is nature's way of saying that this type of horse is not fit enough to survive. Parroting Nazi ideology he states,   "No. I almost imagine they're almost extinct because nature just wants it that way. It's survival of the fittest. You've heard of the phrase? What Charles Darwin says, about natural selection? In the struggle for life, some species, and for that matter, some races are simply stronger than others. So the strong survive, the weak perish." The Przewalski horses are a forbidden breed and are to be destroyed on orders from Berlin.

Meanwhile unknown to Max, hidden in the forest on the Askaniya-Nova reserve is a young Ukrainian Jewish girl, Kalyna (Kalinka), who has fled her village of Dnepropetrovsk. The entire Jewish population of Dnepropetrovsk was murdered including her own family.  Kalinka loves the horses she has found in the forest, she knows they are intelligent, clever and playful. She observes how they are able to communicate with one another through neighs and snorts. One of the horses, a mare leads Kalinka to a small blue cottage. Finding the door unlocked, Kalinka enters and steals some food, as she is so desperately hungry. 

Later on the mare leads her to her stallion and they allowed Kalinka to sleep between them to keep warm. Observing the wild horses, Kalinka comes to realize that the horses make many different kinds of vocalizations and that they seemed high intelligent and even cunning. In particular, she befriends a stallion known as Temujin and his mare, Borte whom seem to sense that like them, Kalinka is a refugee.

Max quickly comes to fear the Germans, as Borys predicted. It wasn't because they shot and ate many of the animals in the reserve. It was that they would return home from a "special police action", their guns splattered with blood and a crazy look. Max learned from the people in the village on the estate that the Germans murdered thousands of people and buried them in mass graves. 

With the war with Russia going poorly and the likelihood that the Germans will now be retreating as the Red Army is only one hundred kilometers away, Grenzmann wonders what to do with the "mongrel sub-horses". Eventually he reveals to Max that he must shoot the Przewalski horses, to "complete the work that nature has started ..." and that it is all "part of our eastern master plan for the destruction of Ukrainian and Asian culture so that you people can be properly Germanized." Max tries without success to convince the German commander to simply leave the horses. He has no idea how to help the horses who are impossible to catch. There are likely two or three herds of ten horses each and Max has only seen one of the stallions, Temujin and his mare Borte from a distance.

Then during the night Max hears the sound of gunfire and races out onto the steppe to see the an SS motorcycle chasing the horses and shooting them. Equally horrified is Kalinka who watches the entire scene with a mixture of horror and terror. After seeing if she can help any of the horses, Kalinka finds the stallion and his mare. Meanwhile Max is horrified to discover that the Germans have butchered the horses and are now eating them. He also learns that the Grenzmann's unit is now encircled by the Red Army and will likely be on the reserve until the spring.

That night Kalinka comes to Max's small cottage, with Temujin and the mare Borte who is bleeding from a shoulder wound. Kalinka begs him to help the wounded mare. Max questions Kalinka as to where she has come from and she tells him that she has been living in the woods by the lake since late summer. He has her take the horses to the stable behind his house. In the stable, Kalinka tells Max the her family along with all the Jewish families were made to gather in the botanical gardens in her city. "Three uncles, three aunts, my brothers, my sisters, my grandparents, my great-grandmother, and all my cousins." As they were being marched to the botanical gardens along Haharina Avenue, someone pulled Kalinka out of the line and into a house and told her to go out the back door and run no matter what she heard. 

Max treats the mare, removing the bullet from her shoulder, gives the horses oats and rice and then carries the exhausted Kalinka to his cottage. Despite the risk to himself, Max invites her to stay as long as she likes, determined that she is not to go back out into the cold. This offer astonishes Kalinka because every person she's met on her three hundred fifty kilometer walk from Dnepropetrovsk has driven her away, sometimes with stones. Max suggests that Kalinka and the two horses stay in the old abandoned waterworks buildings which are quite dry and well hidden.

After Kalinka tells Max how she came to be out in the forest, he tells her his story. In the morning Grenzmann shows up early and asks to have his horse fed. Fortunately Kalinka covers the two Przewalski horses with hay and hides herself in the hayloft and Grenzmann leaves, but not before insisting that Max come for dinner. During the next snowfall, Max sets up Kalinka and the two horses in the old waterworks tanks. 

This seems to be the perfect solution for the tired and cold Kalinka and lonely Max until Grenzmann becomes curious about the abandoned buildings. Despite attempting to dissuade the German from exploring the old waterworks tanks, Grenzmann is determined to see them himself. Realizing Kalinka is in great danger, Max gives her provisions and a compass and instructs her to head southeast towards the Red Army along with Temujin, Borte and his dog Taras. For helping Kalinka and the horses escape Max pays the ultimate price. And for Kalinka, it will take every ounce of strength and wit she has to escape from the fanatical Captain Grenzmann as he and his soldiers pursue her across the steppe.

Discussion

The Winter Horses is a story of deep tragedy and senseless brutality, but it is also a story about self-sacrifice, resiliency, and courage.

The story centers around two main characters,  Maxim Borisovich Melnik and a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl named Kalyna (Kalinka) Shtern and their interaction with a third character who is the villain of the story.  Both Max and Kalinka are heroic figures who have suffered under the Soviet Communists and/or the Nazis.  Kalinka is a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl from the town of Dnepropetrovsk, in the Soviet Ukraine. The town was occupied by German Nazi forces on August 24, 1941. Most of the almost ninety-thousand Jews who lived in the city at this time managed to escape prior to the German occupation. However, while under German occupation, those Jews who remained and those who came into the town from rural areas were robbed, assaulted and murdered. From October 13 to 15 the Nazis murdered over ten thousand Jews on the outskirts of the city. Kalinka is the sole survivor of her family, and has walked over three hundred kilometers to find refuge on the Askaniya-Nova reserve.

Although she is resilient, it is obvious that Kalinka has suffered significant trauma which she herself recognized. She calmly responds to all of Max's questions. "She had thought there would come a time for tears, but ever since her escape, this had not happened. She had now concluded that she might never cry again, the something human inside her had died alongside the rest of her family." Inadvertently being saved, has resulted in Kalinka suffering intense guilt. "...she felt ashamed that she was alive and everyone in her family was not. How could she have done such a thing? This was the thought that haunted her, day and night." Later on when Taras dies from his wounds from the lynx attack at the zoo, Kalinka still finds she cannot grieve. "How could she cry for a dog when she had not cried for her mother and father, her grandparents, her great-grandmother, her brothers and sisters, her aunts and her uncles, her cousins and her neighbors? How could she cry for Taras when she had not cried for Max? Where was grief to be found for a wolfhound when there had been none for them?"  Eventually Kalinka does break down and grieve for those she has lost, her family and her friend Max.

Kalinka is also courageous, as she stands up to the Russian soldiers who want to shoot the two Przewalski horses for food. She manages to convince the soldiers of the importance of the Przewalski horses.

Maxim Borisovich Melnik, is the elderly caretaker on what has come to be known as the State Steppe Nature Reserve of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In fact the reserve was founded by a descendent of German colonists in the south Ukraine, Frederich Falz-Fein in the late 1800's. Max tells Kalinka that he came to the reserve in  1897 from Sevastopol, to Askaniya-Nova working as a groom for the reserve founder, Baron Faiz-Fein's Hanoverian horses. With the arrival of the Przewalski horses in the early 1900's, the baron began to breed these wild horses which until recently had been believed to be extinct. When the Bolshevik's (Communists) came to power in 1917, they confiscated Askaniya-Nova from the family. Max was arrested and tortured by the NKVD but eventually freed. He returned to live at Askaniya-Nova, now a People's Sanctuary Park in 1921, caring for the animals. Max's life has not been an easy one. He was married to a girl, Oxana Oleniva who was a maid to the baroness. She disappeared when the baroness was killed by the communists and he has no idea if she was murdered or taken prisoner. Max, who has had experience with the NKVD, knows the type of man Grenzmann is, but in an attempt to preserve the reserve's animals, he tries to simply get along with Grenzmann.

Their archenemy, Captain Kaspar Grenzmann, is a blonde-haired German, cultured but fanatical about the Nazi doctrine he is tasked to uphold. He claims that all he wants to do in life is "paint pictures, ride horses, listen to Mozart..."  but when he and his German unit arrive at the reserve in 1941, it's clear that his duties as an SS officer are paramount.  Grenzmann identifies himself as an accomplished equestrian who was on the German Equestrian team which medalled in the 1936 Olympics. Max notes that Grenzmann's pen-and-ink drawings of the Hanoverian horses are "among the finest" he has ever seen and yet he wonders how an "...artist of such great sensitivity should be capable of such diabolical cruelty."  The cruelty Max is referring to is the mass murder of people in the village on the reserve. 

When Captain Grenzmann informs Max that all the animals but especially the Przewalski horses must be shot, Max challenges him to consider what he's going to do. Grenzmann states that he is simply following orders from Berlin and that he doesn't have any choice in the matter, but Max tells him it is his ability to choose that makes him human. Otherwise, he is like the horse Molnija, with a saddle on his back and bit in his mouth -  just an animal. However, to Grenzmann, the Przewalski horses are "sub-equine" and part of what needs to be destroyed to make room for Germans to live and thrive - a common theme in Nazi ideology.

Grenzmann insists that Max dine with him and the officers at their house. He knows Max loved the Przewalski horses and it is these same horses which Grenzmann butchered, that will be served up for dinner. In this way, Grenzmann is shown to be a very twisted man, normal looking on the outside but incredibly cruel inside.  At this dinner Max wonders how "men who had murdered so many men, women and children could appear so very normal--that they could laugh and joke and enjoy music like any other men..."  Max also learns that it was Grenzmann's men who had carried out a "special action" in Dnepropetrovsk, killing tens of thousands of people, most likely including Kalinka's family. 

Upon discovering that Max has harboured not only a breeding pair of Przewalski horses, but also a Jewish refugee, Grenzmann doesn't even consider just letting the entire incident go. The Red ARmy is days away and the war with Russia has been lost. Instead, his fanatical adherence to Nazi ideology demands that he not only murder Max, but that he also pursue the Jewish refugee and the horses with the intention of exterminating them. 

Kerr does offer another German character in contrast to the fanatical Grenzmann in that of Joachim Stammer, Captain from the Second Company of the German Field Police in Simferopol. Stammer, who is from Bonn, "...was not and never had been a Nazi" and he had not wanted to fight against Russia. He treats Kalinka with great kindness, taking her and the horses to the abandoned zoo in Simferopol. He also advises her that when the Russians do arrive, she does not tell them she is Jewish, but that she pretend to be Ukrainian Christian. He brings her food, a letter and other supplies before he leaves the city. His kindness shows Kalinka that not all Germans are like the ones who murdered her family and hunted her.

The Winter Horses offers young readers insight into the effects of war on soldiers and civilians through the characters of Kalinka, Max and Grenzmann while showing that people are often resilient and courageous. The novel ends on a hopeful note, although as history tells us, the struggle in Ukraine was one that continued on even after liberation by the Soviets.

Kerr has crafted an engaging story in southern Ukraine set against the famous Askaniya-Nova reserve and the famous and endangered Przewalski horses. The Przewalski horses are endangered horses which were named after Colonel Nikolai Przewalski who spent time studying them. These dun-coloured horses were once found in the Central Asia steppe. Their likeness can be found in European cave art painted some twenty-thousand years ago. Their numbers dwindled drastically and they were on the verge of extinction. However, a committed breeding program has restored their numbers. Przewalski horses  can be found today in Mongolia, China and Russia and where there are now about twenty-five hundred. Since they were never domesticated, they are considered the last true wild breed of horse.

The Winter Horses would have benefited from having a map showing the location of Ukraine, the town of Dnepropetrovsk, the Askaniya-Nova reserve, as well as a map showing Kalinka's journey. This would have been helpful in establishing the setting for the novel's young readers. Otherwise, The Winter Horse is an engaging historical novel that will appeal to middle grade readers, especially those who love animals.

Book Details:

The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr
New York: Alfred A. Knopf        2014
274 pp.