Audrey Hepburn (6 page)

Late in life, when an interviewer dwelled on her absent father and “lack of a man,” Audrey bristled: “I had my grandfather and we lived with him; he became the father figure in my life. I adored him. He and I would do very old crossword puzzles, sitting around a little lamp with no heat.”
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She remembered those days in Velp as an endless waiting game. “Had we known we were going to be occupied for five years, we might have all shot ourselves. We thought it would be over next week ... six months ... next year.... That's how we got through.”
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That, and by resisting the enemy—in whatever large or small ways they could. Resistance leaders and the queen demanded that Dutchmen “must undo all Nazi measures in the struggle for liberation.” But Dutch Resistance was, in fact, quite late in organizing. The prewar leaders had failed to lay the groundwork for any underground espionage or communications network. Yet the Dutch were masters of obstruction when they wanted to be. Once the movement got going, Dutch youth presented an especially united front: Of 4,500 students at Utrecht University, for example, a total of twenty joined the Dutch Nazi party.

In Arnhem, as elsewhere, the Resistance had many levels and was not highly unified, and the roles played by many of its citizens were ambiguous—including the van Heemstras. It is possible, as later claimed, that Ella engaged in some fund-raising for the cause and may have passed along information from certain of her pro-Nazi friends to the underground. But she is nowhere mentioned in the city's 2,000 archival files on the subject. Local Resistance leaders must have known of her fascist past and would not have considered her very trustworthy.

The far-fetched report that Ella was overtly pro-fascist in order to hide her covert work in the Resistance is debunked by her own daughter-in-law, Alexander's wife, Miep, who says Ella's German sympathies were no cover but a kind of fashion that was “in” for a long time before the invasion of Holland: “Ella was very English, but she was also pro-German. A lot of people in the aristocratic class were pro-German. She even went out with a German general, although it's said she did this to protect her children, as many did. Later on, she became anti-German.”
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David Heringa and his mother, Ella's Christian Science friends, once dropped by Ella's and were surprised to find a German officer “who was introduced to us as one of her relations.”
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Many Hollanders still cannot accept the fact that, while some actively resisted the Germans, many—perhaps most—did not. The retroactive outrage against “collaborators” contains much hypocrisy and sheds little light. In Ella's case, it can only be said that she did what she had to do to survive and take care of her children. As a good Dutchwoman, she could not have held on to her erstwhile Nazi views much after her husband's desertion and her firsthand experience of the occupation. She certainly never benefitted in any way from her former fascist leanings. The bottom line is that no one really knows what Ella was up to politically—if anything—during the war.

More is known about the activities of her daughter; there was never any doubt where Audrey's sympathies lay. Resistance work was a sensitive subject long after the war ended. From the heroic to the humble, most Netherlanders wanted to forget and not relive the experience. “Interviewers try to bring it up so often, but it's painful,” she would say. “I dislike talking about it because I feel it's not something that should be linked to publicity.”
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In her case, the publicity put forth after she became a star contained some truth and much melodrama.

“Audrey did have contacts with the underground forces,” confirms historian Vroemen after extensive research of her Arnhem activities, “but there was no espionage. She was only twelve or so, after all. And yet it's true that youngsters had an advantage because they had less fear and more freedom. I was about eleven, by the middle of the war, and could go where I liked. I was mostly interested in stealing things from the Germans if I got a chance. I'm sure Audrey had similar experiences.”
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Chief among the Hepburn legends—and quite true—are her exploits as a courier and occasional secret messenger. Her son Sean remembers that “she told us stories about carrying messages as an eleven-year-old for the Resistance in her shoes.”
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Children often did such things, as Vroemen noted, because they could move about with relative freedom, especially going to and from school.

“Once I had to step in and deliver our tiny underground newspaper,” she said. “I stuffed them in my woolen socks in my wooden shoes, got on my bike and delivered them.”
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The illegal leaflets came from Dr. Visser 't Hoofd, a general practitioner and Resistance worker in Velp. Regular shoes were tightly rationed and extremely expensive. Her mother once got her a pair of brown lace-up boots that were two sizes two big, in the hope they'd last longer. “I never grew into them,” Audrey recalled, but she made good use of the extra space inside.
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Her performing talents were also put to use for the cause and, equally, for herself. In 1943, the Germans confiscated all radios. Thenceforth, in more ways than one, a girl had to make her own music. “I was left to my own devices,” she said, and those devices drew her more deeply into music and dance, “where one didn't have to talk, only listen.
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There was a war, but your dreams for yourself go on [and] I wanted to be a dancer.”

Her personal ambition linked up with the Resistance in a series of “blackout performances” that served both as an outlet for the dancers and a fund-raising activity for the underground: “We would literally do it in somebody's house with locked windows, drawn blinds. I had a friend who played the piano and my mother would run up costumes out of old curtains and things. I'd do my own choreography—not to be believed!”
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They were her own condensed versions of classic ballets, performed behind locked doors with lookouts posted to watch for German soldiers, several times at the home of Dr. Wouders, a local homeopath, and at least once at her own house. “The best audience I ever had,” she said years later, “made not a single sound at the end of my performance.”
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After a silent curtain call, the hat was passed and “the money we made helped saboteurs in their work against the Nazis.”
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They were never caught, and Audrey's involvement in those recitals continued until late in the war when the lack of food weakened her so much she could hardly walk, let alone dance. “Every loyal Dutch schoolgirl and boy did their little bit to help,” she said. “Many were much more courageous than I was. I'll never forget a secret society of university students called
Les Gueux
[The Beggars], which killed Nazi soldiers one by one and dumped their bodies in the canals. That took real bravery, and many of them were caught and executed by the Germans. They're the type who deserve the memorials and medals.”
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Neither her days nor her life felt heroic. In later years, and with great emotion, she would identify with Anne Frank, whose life was “very much a parallel to mine”:

Audrey's favorite passage in the diary, which she could quote from memory, was written in 1944, just six months before Anne Frank was taken to a death camp:

Audrey's comfort came from dance, despite all difficulties and debility. By now it was impossible to buy ballet clothes or shoes, but “as long as there were any old sweaters to pull out, my mother would re-knit my tights,” she said. “Sometimes we were able to buy felt to make slippers, but they never lasted more than two classes.”
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She danced endless hours in shoes that were worn to shreds, finally resorting to the only painful alternative—wooden ones.

By 1944 she was Winja Marova's star pupil, sufficiently advanced to help instruct the youngest students, one of whom was kindergartner Rose-Marie Willems:

“Ballet was something that belonged to your education, like swimming and gymnastics. [Audrey at fourteen] was tall and skinny, with big hands and feet. Her teeth were a little bit crooked, but her big eyes were really remarkable. She was very serious for her age, and she really tried to make something out of the lessons. They had an old gramophone, and she would clap her hands. I wasn't always the best-behaved child and once in a while [she] would say, ‘You there in the brown suit. Don't be so bad! You have to behave better.”'
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Audrey also gave some under-the-table private lessons in those days, which Winja Marova pretended not to know about. Marova felt her protégée might pass along the wrong technique, but others were doing it too and she couldn't blame them for trying to earn an extra guilder or two for their families.

One of Audrey's “private” students was Hesje van Hall, who lived in Velp. The lessons took place in the family dining room, and Hesje's brother Willem remembers them well: “I was starting puberty then. Audrey was very slender and walked so gracefully. When she came in, the whole house would look different.”
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The biggest dance moment of Audrey's young life came on January 8, 1944, in a student showcase choreographed by Winja Marova at Arnhem's City Theatre. “Audrey Hepburn-Ruston,” as the program billed her, featured in many numbers, from Burgmüller's
March Militaire
to Debussy's
Danseuse de Delphus,
returning late in the show for her tour de force—the “Morgenstimmung” (Morning Mood) and “Death of Aase” sections of Grieg's
Peer Gynt.

She was quite “magnificent” that night, says music teacher Carel Wensink, “no doubt the best of Marova's pupils.” Audrey the dancer was getting better, but things in Arnhem were getting worse. A local fan found her looking “slightly dazed” one day and asked when she had last eaten. “I had some bread yesterday morning,” she said, “but I'm not hungry.” “You're a very good dancer, but a very poor liar,” he replied.
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Under such circumstances, “I could not go on dancing,” she said. “It was the war diet and the anxiety and the terror.”
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Audrey was growing fast—“really tall, skinny and pale,” Marova says. “She didn't get the right nutrition, and she fell apart. I agreed with her mother that she should stop dancing temporarily.”

As the war dragged on, food and money became even scarcer. She and her family were now subsisting on watery soup and a kind of “green bread” made from peas. “We ate nettles, and everyone tried to cook grass, only I couldn't stand it,” she said.
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At one point, there was nothing to eat for days but endive, and they thanked God for that. But like Scarlett O'Hara in
Gone With the Wind,
“I swore I'd never eat it again as long as I lived.”
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As AUDREY often said, no one believed the war could last five years. Even less believable was that Arnhem could be the site of the greatest airdrop operation in twentieth-century warfare.

Eight weeks after the June 6, 1944, invasion of Normandy, the Allies reached Paris. Now, with much of Belgium and France liberated, British Field Marshall Montgomery conceived “Operation Market Garden.” It was a bold plan to end the war by Christmas and make military history: A vast number of airborne troops would be dropped behind enemy lines to capture the Dutch towns of Eindhoven, Grave, Nijmegen and Arnhem—and most important, their bridges over the Maas, Waal and Rhine rivers. Land forces would join them for a quick advance into the German heartland and on to Berlin, thus ending the war in a lightning stroke.

The Germans were raggedly retreating east on foot, poorly armed and demoralized. But the Allies failed to finish the job, allowing 80,000 enemy troops to escape into Holland. The Allied command did not imagine how quickly they might reorganize. Nor did they believe Dutch underground reports that two powerful Panzer divisions were regrouping just outside Arnhem.

Five crucial bridges had to be taken, according to Montgomery's plan. If any one of them failed to fall, so did the entire operation. The 101st U.S. Airborne Division was to capture the bridges by Eindhoven and Veghel, which it did. The 82nd U.S. Airborne was ordered to grab the bridges at Grave and Nijmegen—likewise taken, with great difficulty.