Dutch Girl

by Robert Matzen

  Velp’s V1 problem was a constant threat and just too much to take given the snows and hunger. Then, finally, on the last day of January, the weather broke and a warm front ripped through the area, bringing spring winds and rain that divested the landscape of the snows in a couple of days. Still there was no food. Still the V1s flew over, and the sudden change in temperature seemed to cause more malfunctions in the buzz bombs than ever. On 2 February a V1 sputtered and fell just east of Velp; five days later another came down just a few blocks north of the Beukenhof and four days after that a bit south in the Velpsche Broek. The next day just north again, this time frightening half to death the van Pallandts at Castle Rozendaal, a V1 took off the top of the Rozendaal village school and then slammed into the van Pallandt castle garden and orangery. A week later twenty V1s malfunctioned and fell from the sky in a single night. One of them careened out of control just after launch and blew up a house full of German soldiers in the nearby village of Ellecom. Another fell in Rheden, the next town over from Velp, and injured fifty civilians. It seemed inevitable to Audrey that sooner or later a V1 was going to come down on the Beukenhof—everyone in Velp shared this thought about their homes as the Nazi death machines continued to fly overhead and so often plummeted to the ground.

  But, oh, the hunger was worst of all and becoming desperate. “The last winter, the so-called ‘hunger winter,’” said Audrey, “was the nearest I could come to saying I’ve seen starvation. It was not on the scale of Somalia, but it was pretty bad, too, you know. Children were always rummaging in the dust bins and people were dying of hunger and cold.”

  Six-year-old Ben van Griethuysen was one of the children Audrey described—sent out to farms and told to bring back dust from the mechanisms in the harvesting machines. Ben said what he and his friends found represented “the only thing we got to eat. We didn’t have anything from the outside.” In earlier months scavenging and trading had yielded results for enterprising families, but now there was next to nothing left to supplement the meager ration of bread. Potatoes were gone and now sugar beets were substituted. These coarse root vegetables were despised even by the starving Dutch. Said one, “Until I saw the first load of those monsters lying on the kitchen floor, I never knew that this wood in the shape of a turnip could be eaten.” The only thing that seemed to work was to chop at it until it was more or less mashed and then form it into pancakes or porridge.

  Lines formed at any store where rumors said food could be found. “Sometimes I didn’t even have time to go home and let them know where I was,” said Cornelia Fuykschot, who lived in Utrecht. “If you saw a line, you first joined and then asked what you were standing in line for. Sometimes the people ahead of you didn’t know either.”

  In Amsterdam it was worse. Much worse. “Water rats, which normally stayed in the canals, now climbed the vertical brick walls of apartment blocks in search of food,” said twenty-one-year-old Art Bos. “One sometimes saw a dog’s head and skin in the gutter, people having eaten the dog, either their own or someone else’s. Cats were long gone.”

  It was indeed total war in the Netherlands. To Audrey the sounds of battle, once distant, now didn’t seem quite so far away. It was mid-February and artillery exchanges rattled the earth. She would describe it as “constant shelling.” Tanks rumbled through the village heading toward Arnhem, their bulk often shearing off curbs, street signs, and low-hanging branches of trees. American P-47s and British Typhoons and Mosquitoes zipped low over the rooftops looking for moving targets or attacking German cannon. Often they hit Westervoort just across the IJssel to the south of Velp. Yes, the weather had broken, but the war hadn’t. The war, the dying, the agony went on and on. All the van Heemstras could do was hang on for tomorrow, and then repeat the process and hope for a miracle. Through it all, Audrey’s spirit was unbroken: “We would have great fun talking about what we were going to eat after the war was over,” she said of those dark days of February 1945.

  Part VI:

  Pursued

  31

  A Tree

  Mogadishu, Somalia

  September 1992

  Under the protection of United Nations peacekeepers, Audrey stood with her man, Robbie, in the hot sun gaping at a cityscape of bombed-out buildings. Walls were rubble, roofs were missing. The devastation was vast—worse than anything she had seen in the Netherlands. She scanned the blocks for a building that hadn’t been marred by bullet holes or worse, and she couldn’t find even one. Civil war had broken out a year earlier, and the Somali government of Mohammed Siad Barre had been toppled. Audrey had called him “the most cruel despot imaginable.” Into the void rose factions. Gunmen. Thugs. Two warring tribes now fought for control of the vast city and Audrey’s delegation tiptoed inside that fragile peace.

  The nation’s agricultural sector had been destroyed, and she and Wolders were here to witness the resulting humanitarian crisis. And keep witnessing it. It wasn’t safe to be here, but that was one of the reasons she needed to come—because it wasn’t safe for anyone, especially the children.

  Flying in from Nairobi to Kismayo, she had marveled at the parched red earth. Terra-cotta red. As she saw when the plane came in for a landing, the earth looked like a vast dry lake bed, that blood-red dirt puckered and lying in mounds, and she just knew the sights ahead were going to be bad.

  At a child health care center in Kismayo, she looked about at the starving children of twelve and fourteen. It was only after she left that she realized: There were no small children. No infants. They were the first to go, and there were none left.

  From Kismayo they set out on dusty paths that barely qualified as roads, where graves had been clawed out of barren soil for all the dead. This was why the terrain looked like it looked from the air: There were graves everywhere. It was said that a quarter of a million people had died since the civil war broke out, and now she had proof.

  At Baidoa they arrived in time to see bodies being loaded into a truck, “most of them very small,” she said. At a feeding center there was a courtyard with one tree, and the delegation saw small forms under the shade of that tree, being fed with delicacy by the nurses of the relief agency Irish Concern. Of these children Audrey said, “They were being more or less force-fed—a spoon of something every few minutes—because they can’t drink or eat or don’t want to any more. And what amazes me is the resilience of a human being, that they were still alive, still sitting.”

  She watched a boy of about fourteen fight for breath after breath, and then he just curled up and died. All about her there was profound silence. “Silent children,” she said. “The silence is something you never forget.”

  Sights like these made the war come back in a flood of memories. The bombed-out buildings, the suffering, the starvation. She knew what it was like to be hungry because she had survived the Hunger Winter and so, oh yes, she knew.

  She was tired, and everyone was concerned about her because she seemed especially thin and fragile these days. Sean and Luca had each called before the trip and begged her not to go, something they had never done on any of the other UNICEF excursions—and there had been many visits to dire situations. For some reason her very intuitive sons had sensed something about this trip in particular.

  On the ground in Somalia, it was easy for the memories to yank her straight to the Netherlands, to those final days, to the sheer agony of the bombs and the hunger that ravaged her body and the cellar closing in until she could scream. When she thought about how those days felt, living them from the inside, she knew her duty. She must tell the world about Somalia and make the world listen. Step-by-step as she walked along in the heat and the dust with death all about, she fought the voices in her head that wondered if she had found a situation that qualified as hopeless, if this time there wasn’t any answer at all. “You really have to wonder if God hasn’t forgotten Somalia,” she would dare to say later.

  She thought back to ’45, and that evening when Meisje had said they should stay in bed the
next day because there was nothing to eat. Just stay in bed and sleep. But what had happened next had been a miracle, and she had to keep her heart open for miracles. And she believed people can’t just wait for a miracle; sometimes they have to go out and work like the devil and make a damn miracle. So she had resolved to see what there was to see, all of it, and then go invite the media to press conferences in Nairobi, London, Geneva, and Paris.

  At these press events Audrey tried to find words for the unspeakable. But there weren’t any words to depict what she had seen—at least none that did it justice. “Somalia is one of the worst tragedies ever,” she said. “It has gone over the edge.” But Audrey being Audrey, she felt compelled to speak of the good, of the sailors on the USS Tarawa who had passed the hat and collected $4,000 and given it to Audrey for the children. Or the “oasis in the desert,” an Oxfam settlement composed of people from different Somalian clans who were pulling together and working the land again using tools and seeds from Oxfam and UNICEF. “They all look well,” said Audrey, “and they’re all living together. They have a common purpose: They’re surviving together. Now, is that just a dream? No, it’s fact. It’s there. I think that sort of thing can happen more often.”

  Said Audrey’s biographer Barry Paris, “More than any other, this round of interviews generated an unprecedented amount of international coverage and captivated the world.”

  But the old war was chasing her. The war had been tailing her for the past forty-seven years, a relentless pursuer. She gave energy to eating too much and too little because of the war. She gave energy to keeping the secrets of her mother. She had started smoking to celebrate war’s end and never stopped. Above all, she felt it was her duty as a van Heemstra to walk with children who today faced what she had once faced when cruel warmongers had decided the fate of innocents.

  The war was catching up now and the long, black shadow of its hand reached out. “I’m running out of gas,” she said. And there was still so much more to do.

  32

  The Race

  “I went as long as three days without food,” said Audrey of life in the first quarter of 1945, “and most of the time we existed on starvation rations. For months, breakfast was hot water and one slice of bread made from brown beans. Broth for lunch was made with one potato and there was no milk, sugar, cereals or meat of any kind.”

  It was now more than four years since Audrey or any of the van Heemstras had enjoyed a full meal unaffected by rationing and shortages. Up until Market Garden, times were lean and stomachs always rumbled. After the one-two punch of a failed invasion and the railroad strike, the country’s food supply dwindled to nothing. Now, four full months later, Audrey and her family were suffering horribly from malnutrition.

  One official report said that by February 1945, more than 500 Dutch people were dying of hunger each week. Across the Netherlands, but particularly in the west, people were succumbing at such a rapid rate that morticians couldn’t keep up. The harsh winter temperatures became a blessing because the weather was so cold that it kept bodies of the dead from decomposing, and they could stay around for a while without fear of epidemic. That, in turn, was all right as there was no wood with which to knock together coffins anyway. The wood was too important as fuel to heat homes for those still living now that coal supplies were gone. Families buried loved ones in a bed sheet when they could spare one, but more often wrapped in paper, like a giant fish, or not wrapped at all.

  At the Beukenhof, Meisje and Ella passed their rations on to the baron because those advanced in age were the most vulnerable, and Audrey attempted to pass hers on to her mother and aunt. Once again Audrey gave up the ballet classes that had meant so much to the children of Velp, and to herself, this time because of weakness brought on by malnutrition.

  “I was very sick but didn’t realize it,” said Audrey, who came to appreciate later how her mother must have worried. “She often looked at me and said, ‘You look so pale.’ I thought she was just fussing, but now I understand how she must have felt.”

  Her biographer Barry Paris, said, “She was also having problems with colitis and irregular periods—possibly endometriosis, common among women dancers and athletes with little body fat—and her metabolism would be permanently affected.”

  When Alex returned to Velp to lend a hand in the desperate situation, Audrey described that she and her brother “went into the fields to find a few turnips, endives, grass, and even tulips.” Her diet was so limited to endive during these months that “I swore I’d never eat it again as long as I lived.”

  Tulip bulbs became food, and Audrey would mention eating them in descriptions of life at low ebb under Nazi rule during the Hunger Winter of 1944-45. “It sounds terrible,” she said in a 1992 interview. “You don’t just eat the bulb. Tulip bulbs actually make a fine flour that is rather luxurious and can be used for making cakes and cookies,” the only problem being that the remainder of the ingredients didn’t exist to make either cakes or cookies.

  Audrey said that by now she suffered from “acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema—swelling of the limbs…. I still have stretch marks on my ankles from where the skin was stretched by the edema.”

  In situations of extreme hunger over a long period, the body lacks proteins and minerals needed to regulate the amount of water retained. Water begins to collect first at the wrists and ankles. The fact that this happened to Audrey confirms the seriousness of the food situation in Velp.

  “We all had it,” said Annemarth Visser ’t Hooft of hunger edema, “all the children.” But older sister Clan fared worst of all by the end of the Hunger Winter, and her situation became life threatening.

  Later studies would simulate the hunger conditions of this winter and paint a bleak picture of its effects on humans. Ever dignified, Audrey would not repeat stories of the darkest family times when it was likely there were outbursts of temper and an intense desire to suffer alone, away from others in the villa. Volunteers in one famous study said, “It was their minds and souls that changed more than anything else.” They snapped at others close by, hoarded possessions, and suffered extreme bouts of depression. Physical symptoms included scaly skin, brownish pigmentation about the face, and blue lips and fingernails. The number of healthy red blood cells plummeted, triggering anemia and contributing to the edema experienced by so many.

  A report sent from the Resistance to the Allies in London stated, “As long as hunger and cold rule, those who are in need will follow the law of life, i.e. the urge to stay alive and try to defeat every obstacle in the way. This has to be done by means which are in conflict with normal standards of morality.”

  Ella had always bulldozed all obstacles in front of her daughter, and now even she ran out of ways to help. For a while she had been able to trade her possessions for food. Audrey said, “There were no shops, no nothing. Everything was closed. The farmers were not taking any money. The money had no value. It was printed by the Germans. So you paid for things with linens, with a little bracelet, or a ring. That’s how you got turnips or vegetables.” But by now, Ella had nothing left with which to barter.

  Audrey looked at herself and knew the seriousness of the hunger edema. “It begins with your feet,” she said, “and when it reaches your heart, you die.” By now it wasn’t just the Dutch who had run out of food. “The German troops, those that were there, were also starving,” said Audrey.

  Spring came early in 1945 and with it, finally, the beginnings of a break in the famine gripping the nation. For months the Dutch government exiled in London had been using every means possible—demanding or, as necessary, begging—the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, or SHAEF, to somehow get food to the people of the Netherlands. But the effort was mired in red tape, and besides, General Eisenhower had a war to fight on a front that stretched hundreds of miles; the Dutch would have to wait it out.

  As far back as November when it had become obvious where this situation was going, Queen Wilhel
mina and her prime minister, Gerbrandy, had sent appeals to many foreign governments asking for help for the people. It was neutral Sweden, cousins of the Dutch, who responded with enthusiasm.

  After months working through red tape that included persuading the Germans to permit a flow of food into the Netherlands, on 28 January the first Swedish ships laden with food reached the northern port of Delfzijl bringing flour, margarine, and cod liver oil. But with 4.5 million desperately hungry Dutch citizens to feed, and with the Germans gumming up the implementation process organized by the International Red Cross, more precious time passed before a second shipment reached Delfzijl at the end of February. Due to German interference, this one wasn’t even unloaded until later in March. At best it would take weeks for the food to begin to move as far south as Velp. But did the van Heemstras have weeks to spare? Audrey’s once-plump face had grown thin by now, her eyes dull. Her wrists, knees, and ankles were swollen. She couldn’t sit comfortably because her buttocks had withered away, and she couldn’t get warm no matter how many blankets she wrapped herself in.

  The seriousness of hunger edema in children across the Netherlands made the Red Cross effort a race against time. And yet the lack of food was only one part of the suffering of the nation.