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Authors: Barry Paris

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Thousands of men, women and children were burned or buried alive and 11,000 buildings destroyed in the barbaric Nazi firebombing of Rotterdam.
f
General H. G. Winkelman, the Dutch commander-in-chief, had planned to give up northern and eastern Holland and hold out for reinforcements from England and France. But the wild, wishful rumors of British war vessels and troops rushing to the defense of Holland were false.
41
The small Dutch army fought bravely, inflicting heavy casualties on the Germans especially around The Hague, where Nazi paratroopers were rushing to capture the queen. Feisty Wilhelmina reportedly told her secretary to shoot her if necessary to prevent her from falling into Hitler's hands.
But the situation was quite hopeless. Had Winkelman's forces continued to resist, Rotterdam's destruction would have been followed by similar attacks on Amsterdam and other cities. Three days after the invasion, the queen and her ministers left for London—as bitterly disappointing to the Germans as it then was to the Dutch. Two days later, to spare more carnage, Winkelman capitulated. Holland had been crushed in five days.
In the despair of the moment, many castigated the queen for her flight, but others thought her wise and pointed out that the king of Belgium—who stayed—was just a hapless prisoner of war. Soon enough, she would begin her new job as the symbol of Dutch Resistance. When Radio Orange made its broadcast debut from London in July, Wilhelmina delivered the inaugural speech. Hers was a captive audience in every way, and she exhorted them forward to liberation. From then on, whenever Radio Orange announced a speech of the queen, all Holland knew and listened—the extended van Heemstra family included.
From childhood, Ella had known the queen slightly and always found her more stiff than inspirational. But nowadays, Ella and her children cheered with the rest of Holland “when the old girl used the rude word
moffen
for Germans [or] called Dutch Nazis
lummels
(nitwits).”
42
Listening to Radio Orange was strictly forbidden, and at the end of each broadcast, it was Audrey's job to turn the dial elsewhere in case of any surprise inspection.
After the capitulation, Dutch officials were forced to release all imprisoned members of the Dutch Nazi Movement (Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging, or NSB), who now became the country's hated ruling class. But by and large, the first weeks went by with no rampant murder or pillaging, and by June, rail connections, mail service, and telephones were restored.
“The Germans tried to be civil and to win our hearts,” Audrey remembered. “The first few months we didn't know quite what had happened.... A child is a child is a child, [and] I just went to school.”
43
Vroemen, too, recalls life during the occupation as “quite normal” at first: “Life went on, though the rations were getting lower and lower. We had football and swimming matches, we went to the movies—not American or British, only German, of course, lots of propaganda and films of the victorious German army.
Holland had been a part of the historic Holy Roman Reich, or Empire, and the Dutch were given a chance to prove “willing” to rejoin it. They would not be crushed like the Poles and others. Germans did not take over civil authority; stamps were not, as elsewhere, imprinted with the words “Occupied Territory.”
Soon enough, however, the brutal truth was that half a million German soldiers were being fed, clothed and paid from Dutch resources. Civilians were required to “board” soldiers for ten Dutch cents per night, and the country's riches were fully exploited for the German war machine. A partial list of the immense wealth stolen from the Netherlands and sent to Germany included virtually all Dutch tea, coffee, butter, vegetable oils, fruit and woolen goods. In 1940, the entire apple harvest was requisitioned by Germany, along with fourteen million of twenty-two million chickens and most of the cattle.
By spring of 1941, it was hard to get the single weekly egg to which rationing entitled everyone, let alone meat. By summer there was no tea or coffee left at all. Most dire was the fuel shortage: In the freezing winter, only one room per home was allowed to be heated. Entire woods disappeared. The death rate for children from cold and malnutrition soared 40 percent over that in 1939.
44
Like everyone else, the van Heemstras had little food or heat, and—like everyone else—no choice but to endure. The Germans even confiscated bicycles. Insult to many injuries was the “personal identification card” which people now had to carry. Pre-invasion Holland had been the least-regimented state in Europe. In occupied Holland, Audrey was learning a harsh discipline very different from that of ballet.
But she was still learning ballet, too—with the help or hindrance of Ella's intense hovering. “Her mother was very dominant—a real ballet mother,” says Winja Marova, “and the other girls didn't like it. They were also jealous, because Audrey was always the one that was mentioned.”
Wartime reviews of her dance-school performances were, in fact, invariably enthusiastic about Audrey—the embryonic positive publicity of a lifetime. Wrote one critic, in July 1941, of a Marova school performance in the Musis Sacrum theater: “As all of them are just at the start of their dance development, we do not want to mention any names except for Audrey Hepburn who, in spite of the age of only twelve, was noticed because of her very individual personality and performance. She danced the ‘Serenade' of Moszkowski with her own choreography.”
45
A year later, she was singled out again by the
Courant:
Audrey Hepburn “is only thirteen years old and has a natural talent that is in good hands with Winja a Marova.” And again, in 1943: “She has a beautiful figure, posture [and] gave the most beautiful performance of the evening.”
Such public praise helped brighten her days and her life inside the house on Sickeslaan. It was modest for a baroness, but then the Dutch have always had a wide range of poor nobility. “My mother didn't have a dime,” Audrey often protested later. “I don't know why people always think that just because my mother had a title, she was also wealthy.”
46
From Sickeslaan, they moved up to a brand-new rental house at 8A Jansbinnensingel, in a sector whose fountains and sculptures are still the jewels of Arnhem. The house was tastefully decorated by Ella to serve both as a domicile and as a showcase for her freelance design business. Audrey and Ella would remain there through the rest of the war, having no contact with neighbors and keeping entirely to themselves. They were so short of funds that Ella also gave bridge lessons to bring in a little extra cash, and felt no shame in doing so.
47
Virtually all of the van Heemstra family's property had by then been confiscated : property, homes, bank accounts, securities and even jewelry. Old Baron Aernoud was barely able to secure permission to stay in his own home, Zijpendaal. Ella's sister and brother-in-law, Miesje and Otto, who were living with him, had to leave to make room for some Nazi officers. Eventually, the Baron himself was evicted, with permission to join Miesje and Otto in another of his houses in Oosterbeek.
48
Due to her British citizenship, Audrey was in some danger of internment, if and when it suited German needs, and Ella warned her ever more fiercely never to speak English in public. The reverse of that dilemma was taking place in England, where Joseph Ruston was among hundreds of pro-Nazi activists—including Oswald Mosley—imprisoned without trial by the government under the infamous Regulation 18b (much as the Americans were interning Japanese), despite a row in Parliament over its legality. Most of them, including Audrey's father, spent two to three years in London jails before being moved to a detention camp on the Isle of Man. His treatment was severe in both places.
The wife and daughter he had abandoned knew nothing of it.
 
 
THE SUFFERING of English fascists, at its worst, was nothing compared to the Nazi crimes against the Jews. Nowhere were the atrocities worse than in Holland where, during the previous forty years of Queen Wilhelmina's long liberal reign, all barriers between Christians and Jews had been erased. In 1933, when Hitler began his persecutions in earnest, thousands of German Jews fled—and were welcomed—to the Netherlands.
The first major blow to Dutch Jewry came in October 1940, when Jewish enterprises were forced to register, for eventual confiscation. A month later, all Jewish teachers, doctors and civil servants were dismissed. In December, Jews were barred from theaters and, soon, from parks and hotels. When the first physical attacks on Jews began the following February, Gentiles declared a strike in Amsterdam, paralyzing public services. As a result of that act of rebellion, municipal councils were dissolved and their powers transferred to Nazi commissioners.
In June 1941, more than seven hundred young Jewish men were rounded up at random and sent to Buchenwald. Their parents were later informed that the ashes of their sons could be obtained in exchange for “adequate payment.” Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, declared: “We do not consider the Jews a part of the Dutch people. They are the enemy with whom we neither wish to come to a truce, nor to a peace.”
By 1942, Jewish-owned industries and real estate had been “Aryanized.” Most Jews were transported to the larger cities and herded into ghettos. Their household goods were sent to Germany as “gifts to the victims of RAF bombings.” Dutch Jews were now obliged to wear a yellow Star of David with the inscription “Jood” in mock-Hebrew letters. The number of Jewish suicides grew; some also took the lives of their children. About 30,000 went into hiding, assisted by Gentiles with forged ration books.
Both the Catholic and Protestant clergy opposed the madness from the start. Priests were forbidden to say Mass for dead Nazi soldiers. The Dutch Reformed Church urged disobedience to all anti-Semitic Nazi decrees, declaring: “The Jews have lived among us for centuries and are bound up with us in a common history.” Infuriated by such opposition, the Nazis stepped up the arrests and deportations to a rate of six hundred per day. The adolescent Audrey Hepburn was a terrified witness:
I'd go to the station with my mother to take a train and I'd see cattle trucks filled with Jews ... families with little children, with babies, herded into meat wagons—trains of big wooden vans with just a little slat open at the top and all those faces peering out. On the platform, soldiers herding more Jewish families with their poor little bundles and small children. They would separate them, saying “The men go there and the women go there.” Then they would take the babies and put them in another van. We did not yet know that they were going to their death. We'd been told they were going to be taken to special camps. It was very hard to understand because I was eleven or so. I tell you, all the nightmares I've ever had are mingled with that.
49
The people she saw were mostly being taken to Transit Camp Westerbork, some seventy-five miles northeast of Arnhem, a “holding” center before deportation to Auschwitz and other death camps. Among them were some of her neighbors from Jansbinnensingel.
50
Non-Jews were victims as well. In May of 1942, seventy-two Dutchmen were executed in a single day for alleged crimes against their oppressors. Scores of others paid with their lives for helping British pilots who were downed over Dutch territory. When Dutch sabotage increased, the Germans announced a new policy of taking and executing hostages if the saboteurs were not turned in.
“The Germans were very good at reprisals,” says Vroemen. “Once they knew they were losing, they were much more brutal to the people in the occupied countries.”
For two years, the van Heemstras had escaped fatalities, but their luck now ran out. After a Dutch underground attempt to blow up a German train, the Nazis took five hostages from different sections of Holland, none of whom had any connection to the sabotage but all of whom had prominent Dutch family names. One of them was Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, an Arnhem magistrate and the husband of Ella's elder sister, Miesje.
“The Germans thought people with titles were very popular with the population and that they were all connected with the court, which was not true,” says Hako Sixma van Heemstra, a distant relative of Audrey's and family historian. “The Germans never really knew much about our way of living.”
Uncle Otto was one of Audrey's favorites. For several weeks, he and the others were held at a monastery in the province of North Brabant. When no one came forth to confess to the train plot, they were taken into the woods and shot on August 15, 1942.
51
Her uncle had the grim distinction of being in the first group of civilians executed purely for publicity and retribution.
More reprisals followed, some of which Audrey witnessed in Arnhem, until the horror became almost a routine: “We saw young men put against the wall and shot, and they'd close the street and then open it and you could pass by again.... Don't discount anything awful you hear or read about the Nazis. It's worse than you could ever imagine.”
52
For self-preservation as well as effective insurgency, more and more Dutchmen were going underground, and her brother Alexander now became one of them. He had no wish to be caught in the round-up of young men—tens of thousands of them—now being “enlisted” to work in the German war industry as forced laborers.
Her younger brother Ian did not escape that fate. He was caught and sent to work fourteen hours a day in a munitions factory in Berlin or—for all his family knew—to his death. Audrey and her mother were beside themselves. After Otto van Limburg Stirum's arrest and execution, his widow and old Baron van Heemstra left Oosterbeek and moved to a home of the Baron's called Villa Beukenhof on Rozendaalselaan in the town of Velp. With no other male protection or sanctuary left to them, Ella and Audrey now turned to him in desperation, and he took them in.

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