Dutch Girl

by Robert Matzen

  “I am gladly sending you all a message. The last two months I have been in Gestel and have lived more closely than any other Dutch woman with the hostages from day to day. My husband has fallen with Gestel’s first hostages. Some of you have known him, but most of you have not. I sincerely hope that you will all return home safely again, but if this is not the case, and if God also summons you in the way He has done with my husband, then in your last hours He will give you the same power of dying with courage that my husband was allowed, so that he went his last way with his head raised, knowing that the Father’s house awaited him. God bless you all.”

  The letter was read before the many hundreds of death candidates now crowding the facility. All were in shock that the Germans had actually carried out such a murderous act, and all wondered about their own fates now that the man who had given them strength, van Limburg Stirum, was dead. Meisje’s letter was tacked up to a fence and read over and over by nearly everyone, and they copied down portions of it and noted her address.

  A flood of letters from hostages and wives of hostages came back to the Beukenhof, including one from Robert Peereboom in which he detailed Otto’s final days and his remarkable dignity and courage.

  Meisje said in a letter to the wife of another hostage: “Just because you, as a hostage wife yourself, wrote to me in my great grief, did me so much good. I feel so closely connected to the Dutch hostage wives and still consider myself as one of them. Wholehearted in their love and sorrow, in their mercy and in their hope for the early return of their husbands.” Of Otto she wrote:

  “God has given me a very heavy cross to bear where I always try as much as possible [to honor] the life of my husband, whom I loved above all else. To see and think of his steps, his peace, his glory, for him all is well and he is in the safe haven. He has gone quietly and courageously—perhaps some anxiety or fear of death; he was allowed to give his life for his queen and his country, and I must try to follow his example and courageously bear this great suffering. Once we see each other [again], there will be no more worry and tears.”

  Radio Oranje announced the murders of Otto and his comrades and Queen Wilhelmina expressed her shock and sorrow. But she also ordered her people to take no action now, but to wait. Prior to the executions, Radio Oranje had warned the Germans that anyone participating in the murder of hostages would pay for their crimes at the conclusion of the war.

  The executions failed to bring the Dutch people into line. On the contrary, as one German officer noted, “The last possibilities of understanding between the occupying power and the Dutch have been lost.” Even the fence-sitters among the Dutch, those wishing to find peace with the Germans, expressed outrage at the killing of these wonderful, innocent men.

  Among the Germans, particularly Rauter and the men who had carried out the executions, a strange paranoia set in. The select group that knew the whereabouts of the site, those who had fired the shots and their officers, returned to the fatal place two and three times a day to make sure no one had managed to find it and recover the bodies. They stumbled upon no people in that desolate location and saw no signs of disturbances. But they kept going back, and back, and back. For months. What they didn’t know was that the head gamekeeper of the family-held parcel of land in question, Marinus van Heerebeek, had heard voices the morning of 15 August. After a stealthy approach he saw in the distance many Green Police scattered through the forest. Van Heerebeek’s one thought was that they were searching for petrol that he kept buried in cans in these woods in case of an emergency need. But the moffen were nowhere near the petrol, so he departed not knowing what was going on. Later he heard the sharp crack of a single volley—the sound carried for miles.

  When van Heerebeek heard of the execution of the five and remembered what he had seen and heard in his forest, he put two and two together. He went on an early morning excursion to the area where he had seen the soldiers. As an expert woodsman, he identified terrain that looked like it had been disturbed and made mental notes of the exact location.

  The action to execute hostages had been a grand miscalculation by Seyss-Inquart, Rauter, and Christiansen. They had committed a war crime that would haunt them down the road, and it was now clear that no one among the oppressed would forget the five who were buried in the forests of Goirle. Their hearts would continue to beat inside every loyal Dutch man and woman. Long Live Oranje!

  12

  The Secret

  “There’s a curious thing about pain,” said Audrey. “In the beginning, it’s an enemy, it’s something that you don’t want to face or think about or deal with. Yet with time it becomes almost a friend. If you’ve lost someone you love very much, in the beginning you can’t bear it, but as the years go by, the pain of losing them is what reminds you so vividly of them—that they were alive. My experiences and the people I lost in the war remain so vivid for me because of the pain.”

  With news of Otto’s death, with word that his remains had been buried where he had fallen and that there was no way to learn where that was, the van Heemstras felt it was time to band together. Ella packed up the belongings of her children and the three of them moved from Jansbinnensingel 8A in Arnhem Centraal three miles to the northeast, up the road to neighboring Velp and the house that the Baron had just rented, the Villa Beukenhof at Rozendaalselaan 32.

  Moving to Velp wasn’t an easy decision for Ella because Audrey’s walk from their apartment in Arnhem to the Muziekschool was a pleasant fifteen minutes. Now she would face a tram ride down the road connecting Velp and Arnhem to reach the Muziekschool, but in terms of daily living for the family, Ella thought it better to be close to the baron and Meisje now, under the circumstances, and Velp, while described by locals as a village, was a fine place to live. It included a two-story hospital called Ziekenhuis Velp as well as the sturdy Rotterdamsche Bank building with its gingerbread tower, a fine post office, and many shops. There were also two hotels—the Park Hotel and the elegant Hotel Naeff with its garden restaurant. In walking distance of the Beukenhof was everything Ella, Ian, and Audrey would need. Even dance was possible because the Johnny van Rosmalen Dansschool was located just a minute by foot down the street from the Beukenhof at Rozendaalselaan 18.

  Personal factors besides the shocking death of Otto had forced Ella’s move. With the Germans tightening their grip on the Netherlands, with rationing becoming more severe, with more people arrested, with the Jews being ever more cruelly oppressed, and now with the executions of innocent civilians, the population was rising up against everything that represented the Reich and the moffen. Any citizen, even a baroness, who had been seen with Germans since the occupation began was now treated by the majority with suspicion. Even though her relationship with Herr Oestreich had ended, and she was through supporting the Nazis as of the past winter, to Ella’s shock she learned that a list of “people not to be trusted” had been published in the local Resistance newspaper, Oranjekrant. Right there in black and white was the name Baroness van Heemstra, Arnhem. Ella’s inclination was to go to Velp to be with Meisje anyway, but the increasing wariness of the neighbors on Jansbinnensingel nudged her in the direction of the baron and relative safety. In short, Baroness van Heemstra needed a fresh start.

  Ella also had her daughter to consider. She was moving into adolescence; she was quieter and more irritable; her features were maturing; she was no longer Adriaantje in any sense. She was Audrey now, and the death of Otto had wrenched from this emotionally wounded girl yet another man whom she looked up to. Thanks to the Nazis, Audrey was traumatized.

  In a decision long overdue, Ella resigned as patron of the Arnhem String Quartet. The Kultuurkamer was wielding ever more power and influence as 1942 wore on. Not only Jewish musicians in the Arnhem Symphony had been dismissed—anyone who made anti-German feelings known was shoved out. Ella also stopped working in the kitchen of the Diaconessenhuis with its staff of German-born workers in a hospital that tended many wounded German soldiers. She resigned from her posi
tion at Pander & Zonen since one of the founders, Henk Pander, was a member of the NSB and now was making not only furniture but also aircraft to support the German war effort. Such things about Pander & Zonen had been common knowledge for the duration of the occupation, but now they became important to Ella’s personal situation and her decision that she was finished with the Germans.

  Despite the tumult of the times, Ella remained single-minded in giving Audrey everything necessary so that she could continue to immerse herself in dance. With Audrey and Ian, another introvert, now living in the villa with their grandfather, mother, and aunt, Ella could see that both children were more isolated from friends than ever. A favorite pastime for the van Heemstras became evenings at Castle Rozendaal where the Baron and Baroness van Pallandt greeted them with warm affection. This castle was like a big and worldly brother to what the van Heemstras had known at Zijpendaal. Besides a fourteenth century turret with walls fifteen feet thick, there was a hunting lodge, an orangery, a grotto, a gazebo, and a man-made cascade with rococo walls of seashells.

  The titled van Heemstras could be comfortable with the titled van Pallandts. Ella said, “They [her class] differentiate very much between people and people. They belong to an entirely different world to the ones they do not know.” So within the fortress Rozendaal and its grounds, the van Heemstras felt they could relax.

  Audrey the nature lover was back in heaven during visits to Castle Rozendaal, and yet inner loneliness remained. “I was growing up with people much older than myself,” she said. “I was going to dancing school every day with my little satchel. In it were my sandwiches and my music. I was studying and dreaming of Pavlova and Diaghilev. To all intents and purposes I had been cut off from the world of youngsters my age because the war had made me a prisoner not just physically but mentally, never allowing me to peep out to see what was really outside.”

  Around her, the life was slowly being sapped from the Dutch people. In January 1942 their silver coinage had been replaced with coins made of zinc. In March coins made of nickel were taken away, and those of bronze in April. By the time the possession of all such metal coins had been outlawed, wise Dutch households were hiding their old coinage for better days.

  In May Jews had been ordered to wear a yellow star outlined in black and bearing the word “Jood” on the left breast of their clothing—even the children. Restrictions on the Jews grew harsher by the day.

  Rationing for all civilians kept growing stricter in concert with the Russian campaign, which had entered its second year. As progress remained slow for the German army over a massive eastern front, moods of the occupiers in Arnhem had turned dark and then darker still.

  All too early for German soldiers in the east, the Russian winter set in, again, and then an unexpected Soviet military maneuver caused the entire German Sixth Army—the same army that had overrun the Netherlands two-and-a-half years earlier—to become cut off at Stalingrad. Dutch families listened to updates regarding the battle for Stalingrad on Radio Oranje, and there was ardent support for the Russians in most quarters, even though the far-flung battles and endless need for resources for those beleaguered armies would mean deepening hardships at home.

  As 1942 became 1943, another unusually cold Dutch winter set in. Meisje was there; Otto wasn’t. He would have been the resourceful one once the coal reserves were exhausted—and it went so quickly this year. All houses in Velp were permitted to heat only one room, and with no coal for furnaces, firewood meant survival. Picket fences and trees all over town disappeared.

  As the holidays approached—holidays that made Otto’s absence all the more painful—a new experience brought the war even closer. Audrey was used to planes roaring over because Fliegerhorst Deelen, the German fighter base, was located just a few miles due northwest of Velp. But most mornings now she began to hear a new sound, a deep, echoing drone of many motors high overhead. On some mornings, condensation trails could be seen in a broad unbroken ribbon of white in the blue sky, always appearing in some variation of west to east. On the clearest of days, dots were visible high above, big clusters of them arranged in intricate patterns, although more often than not clouds or fog hung over Velp, and only the ghostly noise signaled all those big planes flying over. Radio Oranje confirmed that the planes four miles high in the sky were American bombers, B-17s and B-24s, taking off from bases in England and on their way to bomb cities in Germany.

  For Ella, the appearance of the American “bomber stream” merely confirmed the inevitability of the outcome of this war. American planes flew over nearly every morning in January and February 1943. At first dozens, then a hundred at a time to pound German cities into rubble. The RAF had been bombing at night, and the Dutch had grown used to hearing their planes fly over after dusk. The Americans had been fighting for a year in the Pacific against the Japanese and in North Africa against the Germans, but now they had entered the war in northern Europe. These were the same Americans that Hitler had felt confident in disparaging back before the invasion of the Soviet Union had become a stalemate and then a disaster. To think that the charming man with the bright blue eyes she met in 1935 had led the world to this. Back in the days of the Parteitag in Nuremberg, Ella would never have believed that Hitler’s army, so proudly on display at Zeppelin Field, could ever be beaten. Now the impossible had been rendered possible: The encircled German Sixth Army surrendered at the end of January. Hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were captured in the freezing cold.

  In so many ways the situation for Ella in Gelderland was impossible: under occupation, slowly being bled dry of resources, the climate brutal and no way to heat the home, with three children to worry about—one of whom was an onderduiker—and a widowed sister, and an elderly father. Alex was off playing a shell game, living here and there, finding work where he could but lying low so the Germans wouldn’t conscript him or ship him off as forced labor. The last word Ella had was that he had relocated to Oirsbeek, a town in the middle of Dutch nowhere, down near Belgium. This year Ian turned eighteen, and now she would be worrying about the Germans snatching him too. Audrey was still dancing with the professional class; she had passed two years of steady progress with Marova, and, oh, what a beautiful dancer she was becoming.

  On 6 February 1943, Audrey performed in a lavish program at the Schouwburg featuring the musicians, chorus, and dancers of the Muziekschool. The performance drew raves from patrons and the press. Said the Arnhemsche Courant, “Dance was the main course…. Only four pupils performed, but because of the talent and diversity in what they offered, it did not feel like a shortcoming. From this youthful and already well-trained dance group shone a charm that remained fascinating without interruption. The majority was solo, which made it easier to see where certain strengths lie with each of the pupils. Above all else, Audrey Hepburn-Ruston, with her graceful posture and movements, again gave the finest performance of the evening; she seems to be averse to a classicist, which more clearly gives her dance something very special.” By now, it wasn’t only Audrey with her original choreography earning call-out attention. She shared the press with Irene Grosser, Elisabeth Evers, and Hannie Perk because, said Louis Couturier of the Courant, “The Arnhemsche Musiekschool has come into a phase by steady development that has all the signs of a heyday.”

  Two weeks later the troupe performed again at the Schouwburg in an evening of dance honoring another school in Arnhem. “In the first part of the evening the professional class of the Arnhem Dansschool under the direction of Winja Marova came into the limelight, about which class we have already been writing extensively these days,” reported Couturier. “The co-stars—the dames Audrey Hepburn-Ruston, Hannie Perk, Irene Grosser, and Elisabeth Evers—assuredly confirmed the good impression that this class has made in its recent appearances.”

  Audrey was simply having the time of her life developing dance routines that, with Marova’s encouragement, ranged from classical ballet to the realm of interpretive dance.

  Even at th
e age of thirteen she took herself terribly seriously as a dancer. One winter morning after a decent snowfall, Dick Mantel, a neighbor boy from across the street on Rozendaalselaan headed toward a local hill dragging his sled. He spied Audrey, who was a year older, outside and asked her if she wanted to go sled-riding with him and his friend.

  Audrey gasped. “Oh, no! I can’t risk having something happen to my legs!”

  She was still all about dance. Dance allowed her to look past Uncle Otto, Germans, and the lack of food in her stomach. “I wanted to be Margot Fonteyn,” she said, “and a choreographer as well, but life happened differently.” She continued to shoot up in height now, and her feet were growing. She said, “I was an Amazon. I was taller than most of the boys in my class.” As she approached her fourteenth birthday, she had already grown past the ideal height for female European ballet, a hard and fast 165 centimeters or roughly five feet, three inches. At the rate she was growing, she would surpass all limits for serious consideration as a ballerina.

  “I never was a raindrop, though I was dying to be,” said Audrey. “I was a ‘boy.’ I had to lift up the little girls because I was so tall.” She would always feel this way about herself, conscious of her great height, big hands and feet, flat chest, and awkward facial features. Later in life she would say in frustration, “I didn’t just make up my complex!” It had very real roots in her mind.