Dutch Girl

by Robert Matzen

  The dancer had entered into an ugly duckling period, and away from the dance studio and stage of the Schouwburg, she withdrew into an isolation more profound than ever. “I’ve had a complex all my life about being definitely ugly,” she had no trouble admitting to reporters later in life. “I always was improving myself by making the most of myself, experimenting with different makeup and so forth. That was when I was between thirteen and sixteen, an age when you mind so terribly what you look like. I never thought I would succeed.” She said she hated her nose and her teeth and, of course, her big hands and feet. She even hated her square, athletic shoulders. “I’ve always wanted really feminine shoulders that sort of slope down,” she lamented.

  On another occasion she said, “I didn’t think much of my looks. In fact, I thought I was such an ugly thing that no one would ever want me for a wife.”

  Such ideas had already begun to occupy her thoughts when brother Alex married his girl, Miepje, on 11 June 1943 in a quiet and private civil ceremony. The Dutch were remarkable at carving out time away from the war for events like this one. But in the end they knew that the war must drag them back. A little earlier in the year, General Christiansen, military authority in Holland, had ordered all former members of the Dutch Army to be taken to Germany for factory work—the Green Police were already rounding up young men right and left in Arnhem and sending them away. Alex knew this would happen; he was right to remain in hiding for two years and counting.

  In reaction to this order from Christiansen for the men to serve the Reich in German plants, Dutch factory workers decided not to report for work at all; some shops didn’t open, and a general strike challenged German authority. In Velp alone the AKU, Thomassen, and Hermes plants located in the south by the River IJssel remained closed. In response Christiansen threatened to have everyone executed who refused to work. When workers dragged their heels, two factory representatives from Velp, Jan Tjalkens and Bartus Pessink, were taken out and shot—among hundreds who were liquidated in the ultimate strike-breaking action.

  Great numbers of men in their prime were sent away—all those born in 1921, then 1922 and 1923. As many as possible “dived under” and joined the ranks of the onderduikers who were being sheltered secretly in homes, hospitals, and other buildings across the Netherlands. And every day the actions of the Dutch citizenry were directed by Radio Oranje in London.

  Seyss-Inquart saw the possibility that the country he had been ordered to control by Hitler himself might be close to open revolt. “No better acknowledgment could have been desired of the immense influence emanating from London,” wrote Dutch historian Louis de Jong, “than the subsequent panicky decree of May 13, 1943, in which Seyss-Inquart confiscated all radio receivers, amplifiers, and other accessories, an estimated total of about one million sets.” Only members of the NSB got to keep their radios.

  It was likely in this sweep that the baron was betrayed and his radio set confiscated, because soon he was visiting neighbor Jan Mantel—Jan was a radio salesman before the war and had since become a member of the Resistance—to listen to Radio Oranje at eight o’clock every evening. Sometimes Audrey would go with him to the Mantel home, but stay discreetly near the front door watching for the Green Police. Every visit to the Mantels came with a cover story about why any of the van Heemstras would be outside the Beukenhof past curfew. The best excuse of all was the time young Dick Mantel suffered from scarlet fever and a concerned Baron van Heemstra visited him faithfully.

  Like a curtain descending, the situation was becoming nightmarish. Protestant and Catholic Dutch saw mass deportations of Jews from Arnhem, Velp, and other areas of Gelderland to the Westerbork Transit Camp in the northeast of Holland. It was said that from there, the next stop was the Auschwitz concentration camp. The Protestant and Catholic Dutch citizenry now became horrified observers as their Jewish countrymen and women and their children were rounded up at gunpoint and sent away.

  Then there were the barest of glimmers, as when Allied forces invaded Europe in Sicily and then Italy. It was very far away, but still there were now American and British boots on the ground in Europe led by two leaders the Germans seemed to fear: American General Patton and British Field Marshal Montgomery.

  Overhead, the American bombers flew on every decent-weather day and the British every night. At the end of July, the Tommies hit the northern German city of Hamburg with incendiary bombs in a nighttime raid, and the Americans followed up the next day with general purpose bombs. After repeating the process the next night and day, a firestorm consumed central Hamburg. More than 40,000 Germans died, including 5,000 children.

  The Germans had firebombed the Dutch in Rotterdam in May 1940, and now the favor had been returned by the Allies. Dutchmen were now rounded up wholesale and shipped at gunpoint to Germany to act as replacement workers for those killed in Allied bombing raids. Among the masses of Dutchmen rounded up was Audrey’s big brother, Ian Quarles van Ufford. “I saw my older brother dragged away to a Nazi camp,” said Audrey. Ian, now nineteen, eventually ended up in a Berlin munitions factory.

  Ella found the toll exacted by the Germans to be much too high. First Otto and the van Heemstra cousin Schimmelpenninck, and now Ian had been removed from the family.

  Ella began to look into ways she could contribute to the Dutch Resistance movement, which helped downed Allied fliers to evade capture, conducted acts of sabotage, and sheltered Jews and other onderduikers. But the Resistance members took a wait-and-see position and wondered if Ella’s conversion to pro-Oranje was genuine.

  Audrey kept her own feelings about her mother’s past locked away. Audrey had never been pro-German—their sensibilities had always been foreign to her. She was a little girl when they marched in; she hadn’t witnessed her mother’s days as a lipstick Nazi. She had seen Herr Oestreich at the apartment many times, but he had never been a friend. All Audrey knew about the Germans was that they caused hunger and grief. They killed people for no reason and left empty spots at the table that would never be filled again. That was the Germany Audrey Hepburn-Ruston knew. She respected and loved her mother, and for as long as Audrey lived she would never be able to come to grips with her mother’s political beliefs of before the war and during its early phase. It’s possible, even likely, that Audrey and her mother never discussed the issue. It was a part of Audrey’s wounded self that she kept hidden during her years as a Hollywood star, not because she feared what such information would do to her career, but because it was family business, her mother’s business, and not anyone else’s. It was a secret she guarded all her adult life and took with her to the grave.

  Through the years, writers covering her noted her private nature. Martin Abramson writing for Cosmopolitan in 1955 mentioned “her aloofness toward people she doesn’t know.” One of her publicists said in 1959, “Interviewers are enchanted with Audrey, as long as the talk is about acting. But when the questions get personal, she changes the subject. Her private life is her own. Period.”

  One reporter in 1954 during the Broadway run of Ondine even brought up with Audrey the subject of “pryers and probers” and how she dealt with them. “It’s hard work really,” she responded. “Harder than preparing for a play. You keep giving performances all the time.” And in 1991 a newspaper reporter called her “fiercely private and shy.”

  She had good reason to keep her distance from people; she would never change.

  Part III:

  Resistance

  13

  Soul Sister

  New York, New York

  2 June 1952

  “I didn’t know what I was going to read,” said Audrey. “I’ve never been the same again.” She had first run into Anne Frank quite by accident in 1946. No, it wasn’t an accident, not the way it turned out. It was fate—there was no other explanation—that she and Ella had left Velp and were living in Amsterdam below the apartment of a publishing house employee who was working on this soon-to-be released, strange wartime dagboek of a young Jewi
sh girl. It carried the title Het Achterhuis, translated literally as “the house behind,” with an official translation of The Secret Annex. The editor knew of Audrey’s wartime experiences and saw some similarities between the manuscript she worked with day by day and what she had heard from the van Heemstras. She said of the manuscript that Audrey “might find it interesting.” Oh, that didn’t begin to capture the reaction of seventeen-year-old Audrey Hepburn-Ruston to the power of the entries of her contemporary, Anne Frank. They were written in Dutch by Anne to a fictional friend named Kitty.

  The Frank family, including Anne’s father Otto, mother Edith, and sister Margo, had fled their Frankfurt, Germany, home in 1933 after Hitler’s ascension to power. Anne was four years old when the Franks began a new life in Amsterdam. Her father ran a successful business until after the German occupation, and when Margo Frank received a summons to appear before the Nazis in July 1942, the family went into hiding. Anne’s diary described their experiences as onderduikers living in a secret part of her father’s building from 1942 to ’44.

  “There were floods of tears,” Audrey said of that first encounter with the writing of Anne Frank. “I became hysterical.” As a resident of Amsterdam, she had been so moved that she became one of the first pilgrims to Prinsengracht 263 to experience the secret annex. Now here it was, six crazy years later. Audrey no longer lived in a one-room flat in Amsterdam; she had just completed the run of Gigi on Broadway, U.S.A., and now ran around her New York apartment packing for a trip to Rome where she would begin production of William Wyler’s Roman Holiday.

  This Dutch girl, the one who was a dancer and couldn’t act, the one who didn’t like her looks, had taken Broadway by storm. Everywhere she went in America, people fell in love with her unusual looks and quiet, humble manner. With the performances, social engagements, interviews, photo shoots, and appearances associated with a successful Broadway show, there would be times her mind shook free of memories of the war. But all that changed in a heartbeat today.

  Today she learned that the American edition of Het Achterhuis was about to be released. For U.S. audiences it had been retitled Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt had been so impressed with it that she had agreed to write an introduction that would prepare readers for the impact of what they were about to experience.

  Hearing about the release of Anne Frank’s diary knocked Audrey for a loop all over again, bringing back all the connections that one teenager’s words had made for the other. Audrey and Anne were two dark-haired Dutch girls who had been born in countries other than the Netherlands. They were less than six weeks apart in age—Audrey born 4 May 1929 and Anne 12 June 1929. Ella’s birthday was also 12 June. Separated by a distance of just sixty miles, Audrey and Anne had experienced the same war with all its milestones, from German occupation to the battles for Britain and Russia to the bombing of Berlin to D-Day—as followed by both girls with their families on Radio Oranje. They experienced the same Nazis in all their brutality. And Anne had even known of and commented upon the executions in Goirle when she wrote from the Franks’ hidden rooms: “Prominent citizens—innocent people—are thrown into prison to await their fate. If the saboteur can’t be traced, the Gestapo simply put about five hostages against the wall. Announcements of their deaths appear in the papers frequently. These outrages are described as ‘fatal accidents.’ Nice people, the Germans! To think that I was once one of them too!”

  All any of the van Heemstras could manage in the years after Otto van Limburg Stirum’s death was to look straight ahead and never back and to go on living. But here came a thirteen year old forcing Audrey to feel it all again. “If you read the diary,” she would say to a reporter later in life, “I’ve marked one place where she says, ‘Five hostages shot today.’ That was the day my uncle was shot. And in this child’s words I was reading about what was inside me and is still there. It was a catharsis for me. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I’d experienced and felt.”

  In retrospect Audrey contemplated the fact that she and Anne had entered adolescence as one and experienced the dawn of womanhood. They struggled through changing relationships with parents and felt the sting of strict parental rules. They both loved ballet and there were likely times when they practiced dance at the same moment—Anne quietly to pass time in hiding, Audrey at the Muziekschool. They imagined adulthood together, longed for love, and feared that they would never get the chance to enjoy either as they existed day to endless day in the shadow of the swastika.

  Here the parallels stopped. Anne recorded her last entry on 1 August 1944, and three days later the Gestapo and Green Police discovered the Franks and four companions who had lived with them for twenty-five months. All eight were sent to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz, where seven would die. Only Otto Frank, Anne’s father, lived to the end of the war.

  From the heights of Broadway fame in a New York City apartment, packing fine clothes, pausing to eat any food she desired, Audrey could retrace her steps back to the beginning of August 1944 and what she was doing on those summer days. She had given up dancing by then because the food shortage had become acute, but in general, life was still life. The tram still ran from Velp to Arnhem and the Muziekschool still stood. August was just before the Airborne came and brought the September awfulness, but somehow, while Anne hadn’t made it through, Audrey had.

  The haunting of Audrey Hepburn by Anne Frank wouldn’t end with publication of the diary in America. This slim book would become a best-seller, then a hit Broadway play. The world had become fascinated by the doomed girl; so had Hollywood. In 1958 filmmaker George Stevens would offer Audrey the role of Anne Frank in the film version of her story to be made by Twentieth Century Fox. Audrey was, by this time, one of the most sought-after actresses in Hollywood, and she paused for another read of the diary from cover to cover.

  “I was so destroyed by it again that I said I couldn’t deal with it,” she explained, struggling to put her feelings into words. “It’s a little bit as if this had happened to my sister. I couldn’t play my sister’s life. It’s too close, and in a way, she was a soul sister….”

  There were too many reasons she couldn’t make the film. Audrey always looked younger than her age, yes, but by then she was almost thirty—how could she be asked to play a girl of fifteen? And as tough as she was, she simply couldn’t go through the ordeal of the Nazis again—and this time not live to the end. Nor could she dream of taking a salary to portray Anne Frank or participate in a Hollywood production of this of all stories, however well intentioned it would be. There were devastating ironies, like the fact that Anne idolized movie stars from the far-flung dreamland of Hollywood. She pasted their photos clipped from fan magazines on the walls of her room in the secret annex to make life more livable. Anne had remarked that those in hiding with her “never fail to be surprised at how accurately I can list the actors in any given movie, even after a year.” And that’s just what the other Dutch girl had become—an international movie star. Then for Audrey there was one last unthinkable possibility: What if all this delving into wartime Amsterdam led the press to her mother’s story? Or the fact that Audrey had danced for German audiences? Nothing good could come from any of that.

  As a courtesy, Audrey agreed to meet Otto Frank and his second wife, Elfriede, in Switzerland—it was Otto who had taken possession of the diary after it was discovered, and it was Otto who worked through his own pain to arrive at a place where he could see his daughter’s work as a miracle that could be important to the world. This beautiful, intense man whom Audrey described as having been “purged by fire” looked into her eyes and asked—begged really—for her to agree to portray his daughter in a film. After what she described as “the most wonderful day” and a visit that lasted through lunch and dinner, she had to tell him a sincere and heartfelt “I can’t.”

  Audrey would go on to experience a full life—career, marriages, childre
n, and a fame she never really accepted or understood. Anne had had none of that. Anne’s ambition was to survive the war and turn her volumes of diary entries into a book that she herself named Het Achterhuis. She imagined that the book would make her famous, and it did, selling thirty million copies in seventy languages.

  Late in her life Audrey would ultimately accept her strange relationship with soul sister Anne Frank and use Anne’s words to raise funds for the cause held so close to her heart, UNICEF. In 1990 she took Anne on the road for a series of readings from the diary in four U.S. cities. The needs of the world’s children had necessitated that she find the strength to face Anne. “Now, I’m very happy to read her words,” said then sixty-year-old Audrey of her lost sister and her immortal writings. “I’m thrilled to do it because I think it’s something very important. They’re very deep and they’re pure because she was a child and she wrote them from her heart. I think it’s a lovely opportunity to relay her thoughts again. Her spirit.”

  So there Audrey was, swathed in Givenchy and serving as UNICEF’s Goodwill Ambassador for these readings that were accompanied by firebrand forty-five-year-old composer Michael Tilson Thomas, who had written music for the passages to be played by his Florida-based New World Symphony Orchestra.

  “I was never cut out for public speaking,” Audrey said of this tour with Anne Frank. “My mouth gets dry and my hands get clammy. It’s exhausting.” But she did it, reading among others her very favorite passage, one not about imprisonment or gloom or Nazis, but about life and hope: “I wonder if it’s because I haven’t been able to poke my nose outside for so long that I’ve become so crazy for everything to do with nature. Nearly every morning I go to the attic and from my favorite spot on the floor, I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree on whose branches little raindrops glisten, like silver, and at the seagulls as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists, and I may live to see it—this sunshine, these cloudless skies—as long as this exists, I cannot be unhappy.”