Audrey Hepburn (7 page)

Last and most important was the Rhine bridge in Arnhem, which had been blown up by the Dutch early in the war but since rebuilt. The unenviable task of retaking it was assigned to the First British Airborne Division and the Polish Independent Parachute Brigade Group. The parachutists were ordered to take and defend the Arnhem bridge for forty-eight hours while the ground troops pushed up from the south to join them.

The Battle of Arnhem—the largest air-land operation of the Second World War—began Sunday, September 17, 1944, with the first drop of British paratroopers under the command of Major-General Roy Urquhart, an infantry officer who had never been in command of an airborne division. The Germans were stunned, but the drop had been made some ten kilometers from the center of Arnhem. Every minute is precious in an airborne landing, but this one was afflicted with terrible delays and a failure to capitalize on the Germans' surprise. Most of the 3,000 men dropped that first day were left on the landing zones. Only one battalion of seven hundred, under Lieutenant-Colonel John Frost, made it to the bridge. Worse, a breakdown of communications equipment left them without information as well as reinforcements.

When the great drop began, many German soldiers ran away in terror, recalls Paul Vroemen, whose best friend was killed that day by a British—not a Nazi—bomb as he was leaving church after Mass. Vroemen remembers the Germans running past his house, shouting, “The tommies are coming!” and throwing down their weapons: “About forty-five minutes later, we saw one lone jeep with some English paratroopers—that was all.” Immediately, the townsfolk began to celebrate, filling the streets, showering the advance guard with flowers and otherwise getting in their way.

But in the next seventy-two hours, Arnhem became a slaughterhouse. Reinforcements in C-47 transports and gliders landed the second day under heavy fire—an incredible feat in which many men lost their lives while floating to earth under their parachutes, easy marks for the German artillery below. The following morning, a desperate attempt was made to break through to Frost's men at the bridge. But General Urquhart's troops were simply too far away, forced to defend themselves on three sides at suburban Oosterbeek—including the grounds of the van Heemstra family.

“There was fighting in our garden in Oosterbeek,” says Audrey's cousin Michael Quarles van Ufford. “My grandfather was an amateur moviemaker, and we have footage of those gliders coming in and people scattered all over the front lawn.”
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The Baron was shuttling back and forth between his bomb-damaged properties in both Oosterbeek and Velp. Ella and Audrey were living at the latter place, three miles outside Arnhem, when Audrey was summoned—in view of her good English—to deliver a message to one of many British airmen stranded in the nearby woods. According to a widely published story later, by Audrey's friend Anita Loos, it happened like this:

Audrey entered the woods, found the paratrooper, explained he was surrounded, and led him to a nearby house for some food. When he could hide no longer, “he gave himself up, refreshed and prepared for his forthcoming ordeal as a prisoner of war,” wrote Loos. “Before they parted, the young man gave Audrey his only possession of value, a silver locket with the Lord's Prayer engraved on it. After the war, she heard from the young paratrooper and at Christmas, 1947, went to England to visit his family and to receive his mother's thanks.”
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It is a poignant story—and mostly nonsense. Loos was a notorious embellisher. The accurate version is contained in a 1956
Dance
magazine article for which Audrey was actually interviewed: She went into the woods to a designated rock, found the man, traded information quickly, and then skipped off, picking flowers. Encountering a German soldier on the way back, she smiled and sweetly handed him her bouquet and proceded on into town to signal a street cleaner that the soldier would be coming in that night to hide out with him.
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Similar civilian efforts to aid the British, singly and en masse, were taking place all over the area, which was infested with German units. On Thursday, September 21, the brave and bloody—almost suicidal—landing of General Sosabowski's Polish parachutists did not improve the situation, which degenerated to streetfighting in Arnhem itself. Heavy fighting raged around St. Elizabeth's Hospital, where the wounded on both sides were taken and treated, indiscriminately, by Dutch and German doctors alike.

The tide was fast turning against the liberators, many of them now dependent on the townspeople. One of the most desperate was Major Anthony Deane-Drummond, an officer of the First Airborne Division Signals. He had gone into Arnhem to investigate the communications breakdown between Frost and Urquhart but was caught in the fighting and ended up leading the remnants of a company in search of homes in which to hide. Deane-Drummond and three others sought cover in a corner house near the foot of the bridge, at 69 Eusebius Buitensingel. It belonged to Countess Miesje van Limburg Stirum—Otto's widow and Audrey's aunt—who had strong reasons to offer help, and did so.

But their asylum was in the eye of the hurricane. The Germans were rushing to reinforce that exact spot, and within hours the Englishmen were trapped. After three days in hiding, with Miesje's direction, they dashed east to Velp but were caught and detained there in a large manor house with hundreds of other British prisoners. In the confusion, they located a hidden wall space where they managed to elude notice for thirteen days, existing on water and bits of bread. Helpful Dutch servants inside made their plight known to a woman in the adjacent home—Ella van Heemstra—who dug into her father's secret reserves to provide the men with food on the night they escaped.
^g

“On opening up the basket,” wrote Deane-Drummond in his memoirs, “I found a bottle of vintage Krug champagne, a jar full of beef tea and some coffee.... I would have been even more incredulous if someone had told me that the daughter would one day grow up into the beautiful stage and film actress Audrey Hepburn. The delicacies that they had sent round were literally more valuable than gold in wartime Holland, and were freely given to a complete stranger. I later heard that the Heemstra family were themselves suffering shortages of food and that little Audrey was even too weak to dance. Such was true generosity which I will always remember.”
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The Deane-Drummond story had a happy ending; the Battle of Arnhem did not. The British defended their ground at Oosterbeek until September 26, when 2,400 men were evacuated back across the Rhine. Frost and his men held the bridge twice as long as they were ordered to, but at a terrible cost. In the end, Allied casualties at Arnhem were far greater than in the D-Day invasion of Normandy—17,000 vs. 12,000. Hundreds of civilians died, as well. Virtually all of Arnhem's historic buildings were destroyed and 75 percent of its homes left uninhabitable.

The Arnhem invasion has been refought a thousand times on paper: Had the Allies moved in a week earlier, the town might have been taken without a fight. The German officers were incredulous: “If they wanted the bridge,” said one, “why would they land ten kilometers away?” The same question was asked in the Allied high command, where British-American rivalry led both to ignore reliable information from the Dutch underground. As usual in war, the problem was at the top.

Today, the landing zones outside Arnhem look just as they did fifty years ago, green and deceptively inviting. Vroemen points out shell holes and monuments containing the emblems of the various parachute units—the famous Pegasus, for instance, with its inscription: “They shall mount up with wings as eagles,“ from Isaiah 40:31. Some veterans still like to jump, he says. During a recent reunion, one of them—at age seventy-three-did a double.

 

 

THE BATTLE was over, but worse was in store for the shell-shocked locals. Expecting a British counterattack over the Rhine at any moment, the Germans now ordered all citizens to leave the town “for their own protection.” If that was humanitarian in part, it was mostly retaliatory: The Germans were enraged by the cooperation and support given the British by the populace.

The evacuation of Arnhem was brutal in the extreme. The day after the British capitulation, every man, woman and child was forced to leave within twenty-four hours or risk being shot on sight. An exodus of 90,000, with what little they could carry on foot, began at dawn. Most headed north toward Apeldoorn, others south or west. Some 3,000 would die on the way to their destinations.

With its people gone, Arnhem was now ransacked. “Special troops came from Germany to do the looting,” says Vroemen. In good German fashion, “they kept a careful, itemized list of what they stole—clothes, raincoats, underwear, shoes. They sent it all to Germany and said it was ‘a gift from the Dutch people.”'

The Germans had taken over the attic and installed a radio transmitter at Baron van Heemstra's villa in Velp, but Ella and her daughter continued to live there in relative safety, watching the evacuation in horror and doing what they could.

“I still feel sick when I remember the scenes,” Audrey would recall. “It was human misery at its starkest—masses of refugees on the move, some carrying their dead, babies born on the roadside, hundreds collapsing of hunger....
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90,000 people looking for a place to live. We took in forty, but ... there was literally nothing to eat.”
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She was told to drink as much water as she could so her stomach might at least
feel
full.
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Previous hardships in the Netherlands had been monumental, but that last winter of the war—known in Holland as “the hunger winter”—was the worst by far. Starvation deaths were augmented by a tuberculosis epidemic in early 1945, and the demand for caskets could not be met. Life in Holland was at its lowest ebb, but fifteen-year-old Hepburn felt more hope than despair.

“I wanted to start dancing again,” she said, and so Velp's village carpenter was asked to put up a barre in one of her grandfather's rooms with a marble floor. “I gave classes for all ages, and I accepted what was about a dime a lesson. We worked to a gramophone wound by hand.” Some of her pupils lived in the house, and the lessons helped keep their minds off the horror outside. But soon enough, the Germans ordered everybody out: “It was unspeakably hard to turn [them] into the cold night. Even my brother, who was hiding there, had to leave.”
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Her own close brush with disaster came soon after, in March 1945, two months before the liberation, when she was stopped on the street by soldiers with machine guns, rounding up young women to staff their military kitchens. Herded into the group, Audrey and the other sobbing girls were marched toward German headquarters—but poorly guarded.

“I was picked right off the streets with a dozen others,” she said. “As they turned to get more women, I nipped off and ran, and stayed indoors for the next month.”
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Her hiding place was not the cellar of the County Council building, as often reported later, but her own home. By the end of the war, she was in broken health but good spirits:

Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. The liberation of Holland was completed four days later on Audrey's sixteenth birthday, May 4, which also became Holland's official day of mourning for the victims of the war. Arnhem, largely a ghost town, had been liberated a fortnight earlier. “That was the day I learned that freedom has a bouquet, a perfume all its own —the smell of English tobacco and petrol,” Audrey recalled:
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