by Barry Paris
Wartime reviews of her dance-school performances were, in fact, invariably enthusiastic about Audrey—the embryonic positive publicity of a lifetime. Wrote one critic, in July 1941, of a Marova school performance in the Musis Sacrum theater: “As all of them are just at the start of their dance development, we do not want to mention any names except for Audrey Hepburn who, in spite of the age of only twelve, was noticed because of her very individual personality and performance. She danced the ‘Serenade’ of Moszkowski with her own choreography.”45
A year later, she was singled out again by the Courant: Audrey Hepburn “is only thirteen years old and has a natural talent that is in good hands with Winja a Marova.” And again, in 1943: “She has a beautiful figure, posture [and] gave the most beautiful performance of the evening.”
Such public praise helped brighten her days and her life inside the house on Sickeslaan. It was modest for a baroness, but then the Dutch have always had a wide range of poor nobility. “My mother didn’t have a dime,” Audrey often protested later. “I don’t know why people always think that just because my mother had a title, she was also wealthy.”46
From Sickeslaan, they moved up to a brand-new rental house at 8A Jansbinnensingel, in a sector whose fountains and sculptures are still the jewels of Arnhem. The house was tastefully decorated by Ella to serve both as a domicile and as a showcase for her freelance design business. Audrey and Ella would remain there through the rest of the war, having no contact with neighbors and keeping entirely to themselves. They were so short of funds that Ella also gave bridge lessons to bring in a little extra cash, and felt no shame in doing so.47
Virtually all of the van Heemstra family’s property had by then been confiscated : property, homes, bank accounts, securities and even jewelry. Old Baron Aernoud was barely able to secure permission to stay in his own home, Zijpendaal. Ella’s sister and brother-in-law, Miesje and Otto, who were living with him, had to leave to make room for some Nazi officers. Eventually, the Baron himself was evicted, with permission to join Miesje and Otto in another of his houses in Oosterbeek.48
Due to her British citizenship, Audrey was in some danger of internment, if and when it suited German needs, and Ella warned her ever more fiercely never to speak English in public. The reverse of that dilemma was taking place in England, where Joseph Ruston was among hundreds of pro-Nazi activists—including Oswald Mosley—imprisoned without trial by the government under the infamous Regulation 18b (much as the Americans were interning Japanese), despite a row in Parliament over its legality. Most of them, including Audrey’s father, spent two to three years in London jails before being moved to a detention camp on the Isle of Man. His treatment was severe in both places.
The wife and daughter he had abandoned knew nothing of it.
THE SUFFERING of English fascists, at its worst, was nothing compared to the Nazi crimes against the Jews. Nowhere were the atrocities worse than in Holland where, during the previous forty years of Queen Wilhelmina’s long liberal reign, all barriers between Christians and Jews had been erased. In 1933, when Hitler began his persecutions in earnest, thousands of German Jews fled—and were welcomed—to the Netherlands.
The first major blow to Dutch Jewry came in October 1940, when Jewish enterprises were forced to register, for eventual confiscation. A month later, all Jewish teachers, doctors and civil servants were dismissed. In December, Jews were barred from theaters and, soon, from parks and hotels. When the first physical attacks on Jews began the following February, Gentiles declared a strike in Amsterdam, paralyzing public services. As a result of that act of rebellion, municipal councils were dissolved and their powers transferred to Nazi commissioners.
In June 1941, more than seven hundred young Jewish men were rounded up at random and sent to Buchenwald. Their parents were later informed that the ashes of their sons could be obtained in exchange for “adequate payment.” Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi Reichskommissar of the Netherlands, declared: “We do not consider the Jews a part of the Dutch people. They are the enemy with whom we neither wish to come to a truce, nor to a peace.”
By 1942, Jewish-owned industries and real estate had been “Aryanized.” Most Jews were transported to the larger cities and herded into ghettos. Their household goods were sent to Germany as “gifts to the victims of RAF bombings.” Dutch Jews were now obliged to wear a yellow Star of David with the inscription “Jood” in mock-Hebrew letters. The number of Jewish suicides grew; some also took the lives of their children. About 30,000 went into hiding, assisted by Gentiles with forged ration books.
Both the Catholic and Protestant clergy opposed the madness from the start. Priests were forbidden to say Mass for dead Nazi soldiers. The Dutch Reformed Church urged disobedience to all anti-Semitic Nazi decrees, declaring: “The Jews have lived among us for centuries and are bound up with us in a common history.” Infuriated by such opposition, the Nazis stepped up the arrests and deportations to a rate of six hundred per day. The adolescent Audrey Hepburn was a terrified witness:I’d go to the station with my mother to take a train and I’d see cattle trucks filled with Jews ... families with little children, with babies, herded into meat wagons—trains of big wooden vans with just a little slat open at the top and all those faces peering out. On the platform, soldiers herding more Jewish families with their poor little bundles and small children. They would separate them, saying “The men go there and the women go there.” Then they would take the babies and put them in another van. We did not yet know that they were going to their death. We’d been told they were going to be taken to special camps. It was very hard to understand because I was eleven or so. I tell you, all the nightmares I’ve ever had are mingled with that.49
The people she saw were mostly being taken to Transit Camp Westerbork, some seventy-five miles northeast of Arnhem, a “holding” center before deportation to Auschwitz and other death camps. Among them were some of her neighbors from Jansbinnensingel.50
Non-Jews were victims as well. In May of 1942, seventy-two Dutchmen were executed in a single day for alleged crimes against their oppressors. Scores of others paid with their lives for helping British pilots who were downed over Dutch territory. When Dutch sabotage increased, the Germans announced a new policy of taking and executing hostages if the saboteurs were not turned in.
“The Germans were very good at reprisals,” says Vroemen. “Once they knew they were losing, they were much more brutal to the people in the occupied countries.”
For two years, the van Heemstras had escaped fatalities, but their luck now ran out. After a Dutch underground attempt to blow up a German train, the Nazis took five hostages from different sections of Holland, none of whom had any connection to the sabotage but all of whom had prominent Dutch family names. One of them was Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, an Arnhem magistrate and the husband of Ella’s elder sister, Miesje.
“The Germans thought people with titles were very popular with the population and that they were all connected with the court, which was not true,” says Hako Sixma van Heemstra, a distant relative of Audrey’s and family historian. “The Germans never really knew much about our way of living.”
Uncle Otto was one of Audrey’s favorites. For several weeks, he and the others were held at a monastery in the province of North Brabant. When no one came forth to confess to the train plot, they were taken into the woods and shot on August 15, 1942.51Her uncle had the grim distinction of being in the first group of civilians executed purely for publicity and retribution.
More reprisals followed, some of which Audrey witnessed in Arnhem, until the horror became almost a routine: “We saw young men put against the wall and shot, and they’d close the street and then open it and you could pass by again.... Don’t discount anything awful you hear or read about the Nazis. It’s worse than you could ever imagine.”52
For self-preservation as well as effective insurgency, more and more Dutchmen were going underground, and her brother Alexander now became one of them. He had
no wish to be caught in the round-up of young men—tens of thousands of them—now being “enlisted” to work in the German war industry as forced laborers.
Her younger brother Ian did not escape that fate. He was caught and sent to work fourteen hours a day in a munitions factory in Berlin or—for all his family knew—to his death. Audrey and her mother were beside themselves. After Otto van Limburg Stirum’s arrest and execution, his widow and old Baron van Heemstra left Oosterbeek and moved to a home of the Baron’s called Villa Beukenhof on Rozendaalselaan in the town of Velp. With no other male protection or sanctuary left to them, Ella and Audrey now turned to him in desperation, and he took them in.
Late in life, when an interviewer dwelled on her absent father and “lack of a man,” Audrey bristled: “I had my grandfather and we lived with him; he became the father figure in my life. I adored him. He and I would do very old crossword puzzles, sitting around a little lamp with no heat.”53 She remembered those days in Velp as an endless waiting game. “Had we known we were going to be occupied for five years, we might have all shot ourselves. We thought it would be over next week ... six months ... next year.... That’s how we got through.”54
That, and by resisting the enemy—in whatever large or small ways they could. Resistance leaders and the queen demanded that Dutchmen “must undo all Nazi measures in the struggle for liberation.” But Dutch Resistance was, in fact, quite late in organizing. The prewar leaders had failed to lay the groundwork for any underground espionage or communications network. Yet the Dutch were masters of obstruction when they wanted to be. Once the movement got going, Dutch youth presented an especially united front: Of 4,500 students at Utrecht University, for example, a total of twenty joined the Dutch Nazi party.
In Arnhem, as elsewhere, the Resistance had many levels and was not highly unified, and the roles played by many of its citizens were ambiguous—including the van Heemstras. It is possible, as later claimed, that Ella engaged in some fund-raising for the cause and may have passed along information from certain of her pro-Nazi friends to the underground. But she is nowhere mentioned in the city’s 2,000 archival files on the subject. Local Resistance leaders must have known of her fascist past and would not have considered her very trustworthy.
The far-fetched report that Ella was overtly pro-fascist in order to hide her covert work in the Resistance is debunked by her own daughter-in-law, Alexander’s wife, Miep, who says Ella’s German sympathies were no cover but a kind of fashion that was “in” for a long time before the invasion of Holland: “Ella was very English, but she was also pro-German. A lot of people in the aristocratic class were pro-German. She even went out with a German general, although it’s said she did this to protect her children, as many did. Later on, she became anti-German.”55 David Heringa and his mother, Ella’s Christian Science friends, once dropped by Ella’s and were surprised to find a German officer “who was introduced to us as one of her relations.”56
Many Hollanders still cannot accept the fact that, while some actively resisted the Germans, many—perhaps most—did not. The retroactive outrage against “collaborators” contains much hypocrisy and sheds little light. In Ella’s case, it can only be said that she did what she had to do to survive and take care of her children. As a good Dutchwoman, she could not have held on to her erstwhile Nazi views much after her husband’s desertion and her firsthand experience of the occupation. She certainly never benefitted in any way from her former fascist leanings. The bottom line is that no one really knows what Ella was up to politically—if anything—during the war.
More is known about the activities of her daughter; there was never any doubt where Audrey’s sympathies lay. Resistance work was a sensitive subject long after the war ended. From the heroic to the humble, most Netherlanders wanted to forget and not relive the experience. “Interviewers try to bring it up so often, but it’s painful,” she would say. “I dislike talking about it because I feel it’s not something that should be linked to publicity.”57 In her case, the publicity put forth after she became a star contained some truth and much melodrama.
“Audrey did have contacts with the underground forces,” confirms historian Vroemen after extensive research of her Arnhem activities, “but there was no espionage. She was only twelve or so, after all. And yet it’s true that youngsters had an advantage because they had less fear and more freedom. I was about eleven, by the middle of the war, and could go where I liked. I was mostly interested in stealing things from the Germans if I got a chance. I’m sure Audrey had similar experiences.”58
Chief among the Hepburn legends—and quite true—are her exploits as a courier and occasional secret messenger. Her son Sean remembers that “she told us stories about carrying messages as an eleven-year-old for the Resistance in her shoes.”59 Children often did such things, as Vroemen noted, because they could move about with relative freedom, especially going to and from school.
“Once I had to step in and deliver our tiny underground newspaper,” she said. “I stuffed them in my woolen socks in my wooden shoes, got on my bike and delivered them.”60 The illegal leaflets came from Dr. Visser ’t Hoofd, a general practitioner and Resistance worker in Velp. Regular shoes were tightly rationed and extremely expensive. Her mother once got her a pair of brown lace-up boots that were two sizes two big, in the hope they’d last longer. “I never grew into them,” Audrey recalled, but she made good use of the extra space inside.61
Her performing talents were also put to use for the cause and, equally, for herself. In 1943, the Germans confiscated all radios. Thenceforth, in more ways than one, a girl had to make her own music. “I was left to my own devices,” she said, and those devices drew her more deeply into music and dance, “where one didn’t have to talk, only listen.62 There was a war, but your dreams for yourself go on [and] I wanted to be a dancer.”
Her personal ambition linked up with the Resistance in a series of “blackout performances” that served both as an outlet for the dancers and a fund-raising activity for the underground: “We would literally do it in somebody’s house with locked windows, drawn blinds. I had a friend who played the piano and my mother would run up costumes out of old curtains and things. I’d do my own choreography—not to be believed!”63
They were her own condensed versions of classic ballets, performed behind locked doors with lookouts posted to watch for German soldiers, several times at the home of Dr. Wouders, a local homeopath, and at least once at her own house. “The best audience I ever had,” she said years later, “made not a single sound at the end of my performance.”64 After a silent curtain call, the hat was passed and “the money we made helped saboteurs in their work against the Nazis.”65
They were never caught, and Audrey’s involvement in those recitals continued until late in the war when the lack of food weakened her so much she could hardly walk, let alone dance. “Every loyal Dutch schoolgirl and boy did their little bit to help,” she said. “Many were much more courageous than I was. I’ll never forget a secret society of university students called Les Gueux [The Beggars], which killed Nazi soldiers one by one and dumped their bodies in the canals. That took real bravery, and many of them were caught and executed by the Germans. They’re the type who deserve the memorials and medals.”66
Neither her days nor her life felt heroic. In later years, and with great emotion, she would identify with Anne Frank, whose life was “very much a parallel to mine”:[Anne Frank and I] were born the same year, lived in the same country, experienced the same war, except she was locked up and I was on the outside. [Reading her diary] was like reading my own experiences from her point of view. I was quite destroyed by it. An adolescent girl locked up in two rooms, with no way of expressing herself other than to her diary. The only way she could tell the change in season was by a glimpse of a tree through an attic window. 67
It was in a different corner of Holland, [but] all the events I experienced were so incredibly accurately described by her—not just what was
going on on the outside, but what was going on on the inside of a young girl starting to be a woman ... all in a cage. She expresses the claustrophobia, but transcends it through her love of nature, her awareness of humanity and her love—real love—of life.68
Audrey’s favorite passage in the diary, which she could quote from memory, was written in 1944, just six months before Anne Frank was taken to a death camp:I go to the attic and from my favorite spot on the floor, I look up at the blue sky at the bare chestnut trees on whose branches little raindrops shine, like silver. And I can see gulls and other birds as they glide on the wind. As long as this exists and I may live to see it, this sunshine and the cloudless sky, while it lasts, I cannot be unhappy.... As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know there will be comfort for every sparrow.
Audrey’s comfort came from dance, despite all difficulties and debility. By now it was impossible to buy ballet clothes or shoes, but “as long as there were any old sweaters to pull out, my mother would re-knit my tights,” she said. “Sometimes we were able to buy felt to make slippers, but they never lasted more than two classes.”69 She danced endless hours in shoes that were worn to shreds, finally resorting to the only painful alternative—wooden ones.
By 1944 she was Winja Marova’s star pupil, sufficiently advanced to help instruct the youngest students, one of whom was kindergartner Rose-Marie Willems:
“Ballet was something that belonged to your education, like swimming and gymnastics. [Audrey at fourteen] was tall and skinny, with big hands and feet. Her teeth were a little bit crooked, but her big eyes were really remarkable. She was very serious for her age, and she really tried to make something out of the lessons. They had an old gramophone, and she would clap her hands. I wasn’t always the best-behaved child and once in a while [she] would say, ‘You there in the brown suit. Don’t be so bad! You have to behave better.”’70