Solomon’s final mystery
QUESTION What happened to Solomon Northup after the events depicted in the film 12 Years A Slave?
STEVE MCQUEEN’S 2013 film 12 Years A Slave was an adaptation of Solomon Northup’s 1853 book, one of the most detailed slave narratives of the 19th century. the details of his later life are mostly speculative.
Violinist Northup was born in 1807 as a free man in New York. In 1841, he was offered a travelling musician’s job and went to Washington DC, where he was drugged, kidnapped and sold as a slave.
He was shipped to New Orleans, bought by a planter and held as a slave for 12 years in Louisiana’s Red River region.
After his release from the clutches of sadistic edwin epps, we know Northup returned to Saratoga Springs, New York, where he told his story to the local Press and spoke at abolitionist rallies.
The 1855 New York State census confirms he was living with his wife Anne and he is listed as a landowner and carpenter.
The memoir 12 Years A Slave had appeared in July 1853 after three and a half months of research, writing and interviews with the ghost writer David Wilson, a prominent New York lawyer.
Henry B. Northup, the attorney who had helped to free Solomon, encouraged the speedy publication of the book in an effort to bring the kidnappers to trial.
It was Henry B. Northup’s greatuncle who had freed Solomon’s father Mintus in his will. Mintus took his former master’s surname.
Solomon Northup’s fate after the publication of the book is uncertain. He may have been involved with the Underground Railroad, the network of secret routes and safe houses that helped enslaved African-Americans to escape from the Deep South.
There is some evidence that he was delivering an abolitionist speech in Canada in the summer of 1857 when it was broken up by an angry mob. this led to rumours that he had been murdered or kidnapped again.
An 1875 New York State census lists Anne as a widow. the whereabouts of Solomon Northup’s grave is unknown.
QUESTION Did a camel accompany Russian armed forces all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin?
CAMELS were used on the eastern Front during the Battle of Stalingrad. Soviet troops called up from the Astrakhan region, bordering the Caspian Sea, didn’t have enough trucks and horses for cargo and artillery transportation. the soldiers captured wild bactrian, the two-humped, steppe camels, to fill the role.
The most famous camel was Kuznechik, which means grasshopper. He was conscripted in 1942 into the Soviet 308th Rifle Division — later renamed the 120th Guards Rifle Division — to carry food and cooking equipment.
As the division advanced into Germany, fighting numerous battles along the way, including the east Prussian offensive between January and April 1945, Kuznechik marched at the rear.
There are various Russian accounts of soldiers meeting Kuznechik during the war, suggesting he had become emblematic of the pack camels.
War correspondent vasily Grossman was with General Pavel Batov’s 65th Army on the Belorussian front as it attacked the city of Bobruisk in June 1944, when he described an encounter with the two-humped hero.
‘The first thing we see when we return to the dust and thundering of the main road is a brown camel pulling a cart. It proves to be the famous Kuznechik,’ he wrote. ‘He has earned three wound stripes and a medal for the defence of Stalingrad.’
Nearly 350 camels took part in the war. Many were killed and the survivors were demobbed in local zoos on the route across eastern europe. What happened to Kuznechik is uncertain.
Popular legend has it that he made it all the way to Berlin, where his driver led him to the steps of the Reichstag to spit upon the ruined building.
It is more likely he was killed in an air raid near the Baltic Sea in 1945.
James McClear, Jedburgh, Borders.
QUESTION Why was Hungary’s St Stephen’s crown held in Fort Knox for 30 years?
ST STEPHEN’S crown has huge political and cultural significance for the Hungarians. It dates to AD 1000, when Stephen, a devout Christian and patron saint of Hungary, became king.
Tradition holds that Pope Sylvester II gave Stephen the crown as a gift.
For centuries, at their coronation, successive kings of Hungary were cloaked in the mantle that had been worn by St Stephen, crowned with this ancient diadem and held the sceptre he had once grasped in his right hand.
That right hand also survived, preserved as a sacred relic in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Budapest. Known as the Holy Right, it’s carried in procession every year on St Stephen’s day, August 20.
In 1918, Charles Iv, the last king of Hungary, was deposed. Hungary was led by Miklos Horthy from 1920 to 1944 before the Nazis replaced him with a puppet government led by Ferenc Szalasi of the fascist Arrow Cross party.
Months later, as the Red Army advanced on Budapest, Szalasi fled, taking the crown jewels with him.
During the first week of May 1945, Hungarian SS soldiers surrendered to the U.S. 86th Infantry Division at the village of Mattsee, near Salzburg, Austria. Among them was Szalasi and some empty iron chests.
Under interrogation, it was discovered the chests’ contents had been transferred to an oil barrel and buried in marshland. U.S. soldiers dispatched to find the barrel were astonished to discover the crown, sceptre and orb.
These were taken to the U.S. Bullion Depository in Fort Knox for safekeeping from 1948 to 1978, when the then President Jimmy Carter decided to return them to Hungary.
Matthew Scott, Salisbury, Wilts.
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