But for some of these marvelous Polar Bears, it would be a last happy day. “Many would be killed in the battle to free Deventer,” said Dick Mantel, who experienced Liberation Day as a boy of fifteen. Deventer sat twenty-five miles to the northeast, and the Germans fought there to the death, as they had in Velp.
At the intersection of Hoofdstraat and Rozendaalselaan, a military policeman with white sleeves directed the buzzing flow of Canadian Armoured traffic. It was breathtaking, all those tanks clattering past the Beukenhof and on up toward Rozendaal and beyond. The men of each one smiled and waved and gave the V for victory sign. They threw chocolate bars and cigarettes to villagers who applauded and shouted blessings in return. But by now Audrey no longer rejoiced. Soldiers had handed the shy girl chocolate bar after chocolate bar and she ate them all. Soon, a stomach that had not known chocolate for years sent the foreign substance back up. And yet, she said, “Filled with such happiness, I could not stay sick for long.”
35
Sorting
“Unfortunately, people basically learn little from war,” said Audrey. “We needed each other so badly that we were kind, we hid each other, we gave each other something to eat. But when it was over, people were just the same—gossipy and mean.”
The gossip in the days after liberation, and most of the meanness, was produced by those among the Dutch who had resisted the Nazi regime and now turned on those who had not. All along Ella had been watched, beginning when she first set foot in Arnhem in 1939, a year before hostilities had commenced. At that time the Arnhem police had been tipped off that she was a Nazi operative, and they began secretly monitoring her mail. People noticed that she had had an NSB boyfriend before occupation began, and after. They saw her staging celebrations for Nazi-endorsed composers at the end of 1941. Those who visited the apartment on Jansbinnensingel witnessed Nazi paraphernalia on display. Several stepped forward to say that Ella and her Nazi boyfriend were inviting people to a cultural evening similar to the Mozart celebration, this one in Düsseldorf. Everyone who read the Resistance newspaper Oranjekrant had seen her name listed as being “Gestapo.” Once the Dutch noticed such things, they weren’t going to forget, even when the suspected collaborator was a Frisian baroness and daughter of a beloved figure like Baron van Heemstra.
Yes, Ella had worries, among them her daughter. Audrey had begun adding weight to her eighty-pound frame even before liberation when the Hunger Winter was broken by the Swedish food shipments. Just a day after the Canadians arrived to free Velp, the food trucks came, “and there were UNRRA crates,” said Audrey of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration efforts. “There were boxes of food that we were allowed to take home, blankets, medication, and clothes. After a few days I remember going to a huge classroom where we could pick out clothes, sweaters, and skirts, and they were so pretty, and how they came from America. We thought, how could people be so rich that they could give away things that looked so new?” After all, she was a Dutch girl, and in and out of wartime the Dutch wore every garment until it had been rendered threadbare. She would always remember the feeling she had when she laid her eyes on those UNRRA crates, and benefited from what was inside them; the experience inspired her participation in UNICEF forty-five years later.
As Audrey was marveling at American clothing, Meisje was retrieving her husband’s beloved Renault from the Besseling family barn, where it had been hidden for the second half of the occupation. In gratitude, Meisje presented Frits Besseling with the 1933 volume Arnhem, zeven eeuwen stad (Arnhem, Seven Centuries Old) adding, “From my husband’s collection.” The vehicle had been important to Otto; now his widow could see it every day.
Across Velp, the healing had begun. Audrey ate and ate and ate. The bloom of health returned with the tulips in May and the ballerina once again danced. “My dream was to wear a tutu and dance at Covent Garden,” she said, “but I never thought I’d make it. I was too tall, and I was far behind because of the war.”
One day past her sixteenth birthday, 5 May, would become known as Liberation Day in the entire Netherlands. By this time all but some of the northern islands were free of Nazis.
Audrey began once again to give ballet classes for local children, among them Annemarth Visser ’t Hooft, whose lessons with Audrey so enthralled her that she embarked on a ten-year career in dance.
For Audrey herself, any ballet career would by necessity be pursued away from poor wrecked Arnhem, but that was for the best anyway. Ella set to work writing letters to one of Europe’s leading ballerinas and ballet instructors, Sonia Gaskell, to see if she might take on Audrey as a pupil. It didn’t hurt to include years of clippings from the Courant praising Audrey’s performances. Gaskell was a Lithuanian Jew who had spent the war as an onderduiker in Amsterdam but after liberation was resuming her full schedule of teaching.
Probably because of the baron’s connections within the hospital community, Ella had been appointed as a manager at the old Royal Dutch East Indies Army Invalids Home, just down the Velperweg toward Arnhem. The large facility had begun accepting British war wounded on a temporary basis—there were so many new wounded because of the final battle to free the country—and Ella took part in their care. Working here was another way she could contribute to the cause, yet she felt oppressed in Velp with the lingering hostile feelings of some of her neighbors.
It was, however, a happy summer for Audrey, who continued to volunteer for Dr. Visser ’t Hooft. Mother and daughter received the best surprise of all in May: “We had almost given up,” she said, “when the doorbell rang and it was Ian.” Her half-brother had survived life in a Berlin factory and constant allied bombing raids to make his way more than 300 miles to reach Velp, most of it on foot.
Alex and Miepje returned to Velp for a joyful van Heemstra reunion, and Audrey became an aunt in July when Miep and Alex had a baby. The dancer was in heaven with a baby to hold and feed and cuddle. “It always boils down to the same thing of receiving love but wanting desperately to give it,” she explained.
But Ella couldn’t be affectionate with a grandchild any more than she could with a daughter. Ella remained single-minded in trying to get Audrey’s entertainment career off the ground by whatever means possible. When a film unit arrived in Gelderland to recreate the battle of Arnhem and Oosterbeek, the production staff naturally stayed in the only fully functioning town in the area—Velp.
“The last time I saw Audrey,” said fellow Velpenaren David Heringa, “was in August-September 1945 when her mother brought her to our house to see if we could introduce her to some bigshots of Gaumont-British, the Rank Organization. We had staying with us the scriptwriter Louis Golding and the director Mr. [Brian Desmond] Hurst.”
The production of the feature documentary that would become Theirs Is the Glory was taking all the time and energy of filmmakers coordinating more than 200 veterans of the 1st Airborne who came back to relive their experiences in the streets of Arnhem and Oosterbeek, aided by war surplus armor, both British and German. The veterans simulated fighting amidst the ruins that were everywhere. Heringa said the production team “could only suggest to Audrey and her mother to continue ballet lessons, and then when things were more normal, to come to England.”
Heringa added, “We all thought Mother van Heemstra a bit pushy about Audrey.” But Ella was only half stage mother; she was also the same stifled performer who had been forbidden by her father from following her dream to act or dance. With the war out of the way, she wanted to do everything in her power to help along her daughter’s aspirations. The talent was there, no question—too many people had been vocal about the fact that Audrey had a certain something and commanded attention on any stage.
But Ella had another reason to approach the movie producers staying in Velp: Her funds had been frozen as an initial investigation was begun about her activities during the war. A quick influx of cash could help fund a move to Amsterdam, where Sonia Gaskell had accepted Audrey’s application to become a ball
et pupil.
At age sixteen and a half, Audrey was beginning to sort out her life even as Ella’s remained a tangled mess. There was lots of sorting going on all across Europe; for example, figuring out what to do with Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who had been arrested in Germany on 7 May, and Hanns Albin Rauter, who had miraculously survived Woeste Hoeve only to be arrested by British officials while still in the hospital. Justice would be swift for the former, who was condemned at the Nuremberg trials and hanged 16 October 1946. SS man Rauter would never leave the Netherlands. He was tried in a special court in The Hague and shot by a Dutch firing squad on 12 January 1949. Such a fitting end for this one in particular, considering the executions of “the five” and the murder of 100,000 Dutch Jews on his watch.
The restless slumber of those five Dutchmen at the southern edge of the Netherlands would end shortly after liberation when head gamekeeper Marinus van Heerebeek led Dutch authorities to the spot of forest where Otto and the other gijzelaars had been shot in 1942. A search of the surface area revealed only a tattered cloth that, judging by the way it had been tied, had served as a blindfold. Test holes dug at the site quickly confirmed that this was indeed the place of execution.
A doctor from St. Elisabeth’s Hospital in Arnhem examined all five bodies. They had been sprinkled with lime to speed decomposition, but the sandy soil had limited its effectiveness, and the doctor saw that each victim had been shot from seven to nine times. Identifications were made, and the families of Robert Baelde, Christoffel Bennekers, and Willem Ruys claimed their loved ones for reburial in Rotterdam.
Not so for Otto Ernst Gelder, Count van Limburg Stirum, and Alexander, Baron Schimmelpenninck van der Oye. Their widows knew that these wonderful men were now with God and felt their earthly remains should stay where they had fallen as a symbol to the Dutch people. On 15 August 1945, the third anniversary of the murders, a service at the site unveiled a large marble monument. Now, finally, the families of the five, including the van Heemstras, could grieve. Long after the war, the five bullet-riddled poles to which the men had been tied, each painted black, remained planted in the earth at the site as a reminder of the men and their fate. More recently, reproductions have taken the place of the original poles, which were moved to a museum. Every year family members and patriotic Dutch men and women troop to the lonely spot by the Belgian border to remember the “death candidates” who had departed the world to shouts of “Long Live Oranje!”
36
Crossroads
“When the liberation finally came,” said Audrey, “I took up my ballet lessons, [and] went to live in Amsterdam. Housing was very, very short at the time; it was a country that lay in ruins. I lived in a room with my mother, in a house which we shared with another lady, a writer.” This was, in fact, the publishing house editor who was working on Anne Frank’s diary.
Ella and Audrey finally made the move from Velp at the end of October 1945. Mother took a job in the recovering food industry, first as a produce buyer and then as a caterer. Daughter began dancing with Sonia Gaskell in her new, state-funded dance school. These were the leanest times of all, the period with Ella’s funds frozen in Arnhem as she still managed to provide for Audrey and herself.
Sonia Gaskell accepted Audrey as a student knowing that the young dancer couldn’t afford to pay for lessons but thought she deserved a chance as yet another hopeful who had been derailed by the war. Not that Gaskell was soft-hearted. She wasn’t. She was a tough, disciplined taskmistress who in Audrey’s case built upon the relentless work ethic that had already been instilled, first by Ella, then by Marova. As Audrey expressed it, the Gaskell way reinforced the dancer’s iron will: “Don’t complain, don’t give in even if you’re tired, don’t go out the night before you have to dance. Sonia taught me that if you really worked hard, you’d succeed, and that everything had to come from the inside.”
Annemarth Visser ’t Hooft would later make her way to Gaskell’s studio and confirm Audrey’s assessment. “I remember she was an extremely strict teacher,” said Annemarth of Sonia Gaskell, “austere and very disciplined and close to the rigid traditional classical forms of dance. She was not easy to please.”
Ella and Audrey would make a return visit to Velp in spring 1946 for the purposes of dance. At the invitation of Dr. van der Willigen and Dr. Visser ’t Hooft, Audrey headlined a benefit for the Red Cross at the N.H.V. building on Stationsstraat. The date was 25 April 1946.
Audrey Hepburn-Ruston’s first public performance since the days of the zwarte avonden was accompanied by pianist Willem Goedhart, who provided music by her old favorites Bach, Chopin, and Debussy.
Rosemarie Kamphuisen attended the recital with her parents. “I remember it was all solo,” she said. “I remember that she made a tour around the limits of the stage, and I see her going around in very elegant positions.”
Rosemarie also remembered the other act on the bill with Audrey, none other than Dr. Visser ’t Hooft and his comedy troupe, for this occasion composed of his fellow doctors and some nurses from the Velp hospital. The doctor himself had written the script and created the act. It was, recalled Rosemarie, “a hilarious presentation of a ‘leg amputation’ on stage. The doctor was in a leading part with an enormous saw, with a separate underleg that fell on the floor and a lot of flowing blood!”
The next day, the Velpsche Courant newspaper reviewer had eyes only for Audrey and remarked on the way the sixteen year old expressed herself through interpretive dance, describing this as “her great gift.” The reviewer likened her performance to “a fresh, bright spring morning” and said, noting that the great Sonia Gaskell was now Audrey’s instructor, “We can expect a successful future for this artist.” At the end of the performance, Audrey was showered with bouquets from all quarters.
One month later Gaskell chose Audrey to appear with another dancer in a performance at the Hortus Theater in Amsterdam. A reviewer said Audrey’s technique wasn’t the best but noted that “she definitely had talent.”
As 1946 gave way to 1947, and 1947 to 1948, Audrey continued to study with Gaskell while on the side she employed her fit dancer’s body as a photographer’s clothes model to make extra money. She also finally got herself a part in a movie. To Ella’s delight, Audrey was cast in a low-budget travel homage to the Netherlands called Nederlands in Zeven Lessen. So dear was film stock to the project that the filmmakers cut Audrey’s impromptu screen test into their feature. They asked her to begin the test on the far side of a busy Amsterdam street, make her way toward the camera while dodging traffic, stop under the camera, which was perched in a second-story window, and smile. The footage, which exists today, shows Audrey gliding with a dancer’s grace, showing just enough leg in her slim skirt to impress the filmmakers and land the role of a KLM stewardess. Her roughly four minutes of screen time in the feature were shot at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, and the experience convinced the dancer that “I am not an actress.” She was wearing her hair curly these days and her weight was up—facts preserved for posterity in Nederlands in Zeven Lessen.
By this time, the Dutch police in Arnhem had opened a full investigation of Ella’s pro-German activities up to 1942. It was part of a countrywide purge of the ten percent of the adult population that had sided with the occupier, and everyone in all corners of the Netherlands began scrambling. It wasn’t a matter of the ten percent maintaining their innocence; all Dutch citizens wanted to prove their loyalty. Friends asked friends to verify every act of defiance against the Reich large and small, from sabotage to stealing food to tearing down a tacked-up German edict. Members of the Resistance sent requests to the United States for letters of reference from American airmen they had fed or sheltered. The worst thing one could be in the post-war Netherlands was a verified Nazi collaborator.
Ella’s vulnerability began in 1935 when she had traveled to Munich with Ruston and met Hitler, then had written about the experience in not one but two British Union of Fascist newspaper articles. Another damning fact w
as that she had worked for Pander and Zonen, which sold furniture, yes, and made aircraft and other equipment for the Reich. Witnesses against Ella included the director and staff of Arnhem’s war hospital the Diaconessenhuis, as well as Arnhem civilians, plus the police detective in Arnhem who had inspected Ella’s mail in 1939.
Finally, on 25 June 1948, Ella was called in to testify under oath, and gave a lengthy statement defending herself against several serious accusations that had been presented to police through sworn statements and also in writing. She admitted to National Socialist activities from 1934 to 1936 but only as influenced by a husband later proven disreputable; their marriage ended shortly after the trip to Germany. She denied having a flag with a swastika in her apartment, as had been charged; she denied any intimate relationship with secret police officer Oestreich or association with German nationals working at the hospital. Her cultural activities came under scrutiny as well, and Ella denied her pro-German activities. She was steadfast in stating she had done nothing against the Dutch at all. In her statement she claimed she had quit her job with Pander as soon as she learned they made German military equipment when in fact she had held that job for two more years. She claimed there was no Nazi paraphernalia in the apartment on Jansbinnensingel other than a paperweight in Ian’s bedroom that may have had a Reich emblem on it, but that symbol meant nothing to anybody. She denied any association with German officers even though she had been seen in their company in public settings. She explained that she had taken the job at the hospital as a favor to her father to improve relations between the German workers and Dutch staff. Her mission had been to improve care to patients, not to further the German cause. Her most significant misstatement claimed that the Mozart celebration she directed had taken place in January 1940 before the occupation, when in fact it occurred seventeen months after the Germans marched in and was very much a pro-Nazi evening for an artist “claimed” by the party.
Dutch Girl Page 27