Many of the events in which Audrey performed were staged in the home of homeopathic physician Dr. Jacobus T. Wouters, who lived in a large villa at the corner of Ringallee and Bosweg in Velp, not far from the home of the van Heemstras. Wouters wasn’t a member of Velp’s inner circle of physicians, but his willingness to host a series of black evenings proved his patriotism. Ella also hosted at least one illegal black evening at the Beukenhof, during which her daughter danced.
The Resistance events were high risk, with danger always present. “Guards were posted outside to let us know when Germans approached,” said Audrey, who reported that “the best audiences I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance.”
They had reason to be cautious because lives depended upon it. Evil lurked in Velp. It had arrived with top Nazis like Seyss-In-quart and Rauter and the basing of national SD operations inside the Park Hotel. Audrey passed close by this evil in downtown Velp one day, and what she heard stayed with her for the remainder of her life. She was walking with her mother along Hoofdstraat past the Hotel Naeff. At the intersection with Vijverlaan, just four blocks from the Beukenhof, they waited for traffic to clear by the venerable Rotterdamsche Bank, a brick and stone building with a turret on the corner. Audrey looked up at the bank, the city’s most solid structure, which the Dutch security police had commandeered to hold political prisoners. She said she heard “the most awful sounds coming out of this building. It was then explained to me [by my mother] that it was a prison and perhaps people were being tortured. Those are things you don’t forget.”
By now, every life in Velp had been affected, if not outright ruined or taken away, by the German or Dutch Nazis. Village doctors enjoyed some degree of immunity, but not so the local religious leaders. Pastor J.A. Schaars of the Catholic Church, one of the most charismatic men in Velp, had been arrested in 1942 and was now in a concentration camp. Reverand Adriaan Oskamp of the Reformed Church was also arrested and sent to a camp. Father J.H. Campman, who had worked tirelessly for the Resistance until he was captured, died in a concentration camp. These were the village leaders, and all had been forced out by the Germans—which only spurred on the activities of Dr. Visser ’t Hooft and his companions in the L.O.
One of their most important efforts arose out of the air war and the Allied bombing campaign against Germany that was bringing down so many heavy bombers and their crews over Holland. The Velpsche L.O. helped many American and British fliers to evade capture as they went “on the lam,” armed only with a service .45 and an escape kit that contained a silk map of Europe, a translation card of key Dutch and German phrases, and some Dutch coins. Upon landing, if he didn’t break a leg or a back, each individual airman was responsible for avoiding capture. The Dutch Resistance did what it could to keep the airmen, most of them aged nineteen or twenty, hidden from the Germans. If all went well, they would be delivered into the Dutch Resistance network and spirited south over the “Freedom Trail” through the Pyrenees Mountains and into northern Spain.
In a 1951 interview with Sidney Fields of the New York Daily Mirror, Audrey tossed off the fact that her role with the Resistance had included “running around with food for the pilots,” referencing the Allied airmen shot down over the Netherlands during the 1944 bombing campaign and hidden by the Resistance in and around the village before being moved south. Dr. Visser ’t Hooft sent her at one point during this period to take a message, and perhaps food, to one of the downed fliers. Her qualifications were simple: She spoke English fluently whereas other young people within easy reach in the village did not. Many versions of the story exist, a story that originated with Audrey herself when she told it to American writer Anita Loos. The most reasonable interpretation is that as a fifteen year old—still young enough to be deemed “safe” by the German Green Police—she sought out this flier, likely a fighter-pilot who had been shot down and now hid in the woodlands just north of Velp. He must have been quite close to the village because the Germans decreed that no civilians could trespass in the forests of the Veluwe, which lay just beyond Rozendaal. The reason: Deelen Air Base sprawled across the edge of the Veluwe north of Arnhem and Velp. For any Dutch civilian, venturing near this complex meant death, so Audrey must have been closer to Velp when she made contact with the fugitive.
By this point in the war, hundreds of Allied airmen had been shot down over the Netherlands, mostly from B-17 or B-24 heavy bombers on their way to or from Germany. Audrey, through her work for Dr. Visser ’t Hooft, would have been at least vaguely aware of the activities of the local Resistance to funnel these fliers south through local towns and cities to Belgium, where they would be handed off to the underground network.* Her task here and now, completed in mere minutes, helped to keep that machinery running.
After delivering the message to the flier successfully—Go to this place, say these words, and the people will help you—she saw Green Police approaching. Another fifteen year old might have crumbled at this moment. Not the Dutch girl; not the dancer with the iron will and self-discipline to fight to the top of Arnhem ballet. Audrey kept her wits and began picking wildflowers in the rough countryside. When the Germans in the green uniforms reached her, she remained silent and sweetly presented her flowers to them. After the soldiers checked her Ausweis, she was allowed to pass.
Something along these lines must have taken place because Audrey described the events—British man in forest, message delivered, flowers given to soldier.
“Every loyal Dutch schoolgirl and boy did their little bit to help,” said Audrey. “Many were much more courageous than I was.”
But it seemed to Ella that the situation was becoming more dangerous by the day. As August 1944 wore on, she put a plan in action to take Audrey from Velp and move farther west, away from the German border. The Hague seemed like a good place to relocate. There were many van Heemstras there and perhaps they were better connected to the black market. Maybe they could help Audrey put on some weight and regain her health; maybe there was even a way for Audrey to return to dance in another part of Holland. Who could say in wartime what was the best decision? But Ella’s gut continued to tell her: It’s time to go.
*See the story of Clem Leone of the 445th Bomb Group in Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe.
17
Het Vaderland
“I don’t think you ever forget anything, totally,” said Audrey in May 1990 as UNICEF’s ambassador. “But life, and especially time, gives you a way to deal with it, to live with it. I have a good cry every so often, like everyone else.”
The inhabitants of the Beukenhof arose on 15 August 1944 to a somber anniversary: It had been two years since the murders of Otto, Schimmelpenninck, and the others in the forests of Goirle at the hands of the oppressor. Two years! How could it be so long already since this optimistic, loving, and jovial man had been alive and enriching all around him?
Late in the morning they heard the drone of heavy bombers on their way to Germany, except this time there was something different about that sound. Nothing one could quite put into words, but, different. Hearts of all, including Audrey, must have skipped a beat when the air-raid siren began to wail in Arnhem and then the siren in Velp. Distant muffled thumps signaled anti-aircraft cannon shooting at something in the sky. Thump-thump-thump went the guns on the ground with supreme energy. The first deep booms that answered from the planes overhead rattled the floor underneath their feet, and then came a furious chorus of explosions—detonations as constant as pounding on a kettle drum. It was a few miles off and so the van Heemstras and their neighbors ventured outside to see what went on.
The group wandered to an open spot of sky away from the cover of the beech trees, and the day’s action became apparent: Formations of Allied bombers were releasing their deadly loads on the Deelen Air Base just over the high ground to the northwest, up in the Veluwe. The pounding went on for a quarter hour as the orderly, dark-colored dots in the sky, American Flying Fortresses and Liberators, fl
ew through clouds of exploding flak and released bomb loads on their target. All the while, swooping and swarming groups of Allied fighter planes glided by in formations of four over and under the bombers to engage the German fighters that had been launched from Deelen before the pounding began.
Dogfights broke out between British Spitfires and Focke-Wulf 190s, and they chased each other up and down across the blue summer sky. A puff of smoke meant a plane had been hit, and the viewers murmured or gasped and a parachute would or would not appear. Life and death came that fast up there in the topaz blue.
It was fascinating spectacle. And then came the rain—bits of metal and gunpowder fell onto the spectators from the heavenly battle, gritty remnants of the flak bursts that had been sizzling hot way up there and by now had cooled and become souvenirs for the children. All the young ones stood mesmerized at the magnificent air ballet without quite understanding that boys of eighteen and twenty and twenty-two were living and praying and dying high above.
To the adult Velpenaren, the weight of the world pressed down or was lifted, depending on one’s loyalties. The NSBers—the German lovers—understood that this strike on Deelen meant the vault of safety they had lived within for four years was finally threatening to collapse. For the Oranje Dutch it meant liberation in the air, literally in the air above, dreamed of for so long and a possibility since D-Day. For those who were once pro-German and now the opposite, like Ella, standing there watching history in the sky over Deelen meant siding with the only possible future she could enjoy with her children. The time of the Germans was ending; the time of the Allies was still to come.
On 26 and 27 August the bombers returned and hit Deelen again. The first time it had been big four-engine planes with heavy bombs to plow up the runways. These new attacks were made by nimble medium bombers and fighter planes with rockets to target the barracks and hangars that had been so cleverly disguised as Dutch farm buildings. For so long that ruse had worked but today it didn’t matter. Up went everything the British pilots could see.
By the end of August 1944, it had become clear to Ella that she must implement her plan to spirit Audrey away from Velp. The war was closing in fast. It could be seen growing closer every day in the form of German soldiers meandering up Hoofdstraat from Arnhem and on toward the German border forty miles farther on. The moffen came with shoulders slumped under the burden of their equipment and the oppression of an enemy army that had come ashore in Normandy and fought like tigers every day ever since. It had been relentless. Many of these men had faced the Russians, and they never expected an enemy as ferocious in the west. The Führer had said the Americans were soft, that they couldn’t fight—well, that Patton fellow was dangerous.
The Germans were trudging up over the Arnhem Road Bridge from Nijmegen and points south, their only thought to get away from the mighty, well-equipped, and growing forces that had pushed them out of France. The drivers of half-tracks and tanks coming up from Arnhem had adopted the annoying habit of turning left off Hoofdstraat and parking under the protective cover of the magnificent shade trees of Rozendaalselaan. There the Germans would rest and picnic. These drivers knew that under such cover the “hunters”—as Dutch civilians called Allied fighter planes—could not see them. Word got passed south down the line that Rozendaalselaan was the safest street between Arnhem and the German border. It also happened to be home of the van Heemstras.
Velp had become, by the end of August, a Wehrmacht hive buzzing with activity. German soldiers swarmed the Hotel Naeff and overran the garden restaurant. All the cafes and restaurants in town served only Germans these days. And it wasn’t just in Velp. Of course they had overwhelmed Arnhem. In Oosterbeek Germans had long ago commandeered the Hotel Schoonoord, but now word had it that the high command had taken over the Hotel Tafelberg, and their support staff had snapped up all the rooms in the nearby Hotel Hartenstein. It was suddenly a good time not to be living in Oosterbeek as Opa once had, in that beautiful villa on Pietersbergseweg that Audrey still remembered from her time there as a six and seven year old. Now the entire area from Oosterbeek east through Arnhem to Velp had become the Wehrmacht base of operations.
There were German regular army soldiers everywhere—desperate, hungry, tired, and scared soldiers so unlike those square-shouldered lads who had marched in on 10 May 1940. They had been a sight to behold, and how could Ella not think back on the glorious Parteitag at Nuremberg in 1935? But most of the 1940 bunch that had rolled through the Netherlands had died in the Soviet Union, and the troops of August-going-on-September ’44 were mere shadows of the glory days. There were older men and younger boys, and they retreated on foot, on stolen Dutch bicycles, hitching rides in horse-drawn carts and on tanks and trucks. Any way to put distance between themselves and the advancing Allies seemed to be a good way. They looked so weary, in some cases dragging their weapons, in others carrying no weapons at all.
Whatever control Ella had had over life within occupation in earlier times—back when the German officers kept control of all their subordinates and thereby kept mother and daughter safe—was now gone. At the Beukenhof, with only the baron and Meisje and Audrey living there and with Germans traipsing up to the top floor and their radio set, who and what was to stop those soldiers parked on Rozendaalselaan from pushing their way in and taking what they wanted? No one in the Reich command would know or care at this point. With her perfect ear for German, Ella heard the grim tone of the conversations of those soldiers: The western front was collapsing. The high command was a bunch of fools. There was nothing to return to at home because the bombing day and night had left Germany a wasteland. These men were fighting now only for each other and their own survival. They appeared to be a mob and anything might happen.
Ella knew that Audrey had experienced too much already, and Ella dared not imagine Audrey touched by a German soldier.
“I was awfully young,” Audrey would remember later. “I was younger than most fifteen year olds mentally, if you like. I was brought up that way. I wasn’t exposed the way young people are today. I had a totally different background. I was very young in my behavior.”
It was a good thing now that Audrey had stopped attending Marova’s classes. How could Ella have allowed her daughter to make the commute by tram under these conditions when it couldn’t possibly be safe? Nothing was safe these days. No one and nothing.
Some families in Velp and Arnhem were packing up their key belongings, filling bottles with water, squirreling away a little food, getting ready for a hasty escape because of the attention British and American fighter planes would be giving to that writhing, snaking German column of beaten men that grew ever longer.
At the end of August Ella sent off wording for a newspaper advertisement that ran on Saturday, 2 September, as a boxed classified in The Hague’s German-controlled newspaper, Het Vaderland. Under the heading “Twee Ruime ZIT SLAAPKAMERS,” the ad asked for two bedrooms preferably with sitting rooms in the banking district of The Hague for a woman with daughter. The contact information read: E. Baroness van Heemstra, Rozendaalselaan 32, Velp.
Why did Ella run this ad with her father and sister settled in the quiet and out of the way village that had been spared any ground fighting? And why now? Ella had a feeling, a very strong feeling, that she should take Audrey and go. She was an intuitive woman and she believed in signs, in gut feelings, in magic, and in what even then was called the supernatural. Every instinct told her that something bad was coming and that she shouldn’t waste a single moment. If they were going to escape, now was the time.
18
If, If, If
The German high command didn’t really believe any longer. Honestly, how could they? The Führer was a wreck of a man, deafened, crippled, and scarred emotionally from the assassination attempt led by a battle-hardened nobleman, Colonel von Stauffenberg. After the 20 July bombing at the Wolf’s Lair in Prussia, Hitler had become obsessed with loyalty from his generals at the expense of what was happening in his t
wo-front war. Worse, he had long ago shown himself to be, at heart, a corporal, a battlefield message carrier, and not a military strategist. After the recent purge of “traitors” that had cost so many lives in high command, morale among the officer corps had hit bottom. It didn’t benefit any German general to maintain friendships in times like these, and yet they did. Many of these men went back decades with one another, and they were human after all. Friends were friends. Many, perhaps most, of the high-ranking officers knew the end was near and came to the realization that now, they were fighting for their country, and for each other, and to the devil with Hitler.
Here it was September. France and Belgium had been lost, and Field Marshal Walter Model studied his maps on a table in his headquarters at the Hotel Tafelberg. Out his window he could see wooded, quiet, elegant Oosterbeek. He had chosen the Tafelberg over other hotels in the resort village because its tree cover would keep any snooping Allied reconnaissance planes away.
Model controlled a large portion of the men on the western front, and from his Oosterbeek headquarters he could follow the retreat of German forces that had been mauled across a broad front. He figured that here in the eastern Netherlands a good ways from the front, he could establish a rallying point. Among the units needing a rest were the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions under the command of Gen. Wilhelm Bittrich. These battle groups had fought valiantly at several key points in Normandy and helped to stem the tide of the invading 2nd Army. There wasn’t much left of either unit now, with both divisions seeing 16,000 men whittled down to about 6,000 in the past couple months. His once mighty tank column was now down to about thirty of the big tanks in all, many of them the biggest of all, the Tiger. After the tanks rolled into the Arnhem area from the front lines, the idea was to send some tanks back to Germany for refitting and keep some near Arnhem so they could head south to tangle again with the Allied 2nd Army along the border with Belgium.
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