Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (5 page)

A prominent attorney whom the Baroness had persuaded to join the
Resistance movement, the elder van Heemstra was arrested by the Nazis for
blowing up a train carrying German soldiers. In a public display of barbarity,
he was placed before a firing squad in the town square and executed along with
five other Resistance fighters.

The Baroness was distraught over her loss, but she continued to fight.
Even after her brother’s son Frans was arrested, she still held meetings in her
basement and encouraged her friends and neighbors to sabotage the gestapo. But
when her nephew was then executed by the Germans, she went through a harrowing
night questioning her own motives.

She cried for hours,“ Audrey recalled. ”I had never seen my
mother display emotion before, let alone cry. But she seemed to get out her anguish
a little by wailing uncontrollably. That’s a funny way to say it, right?
Wailing is, by nature, uncontrollable. But I was so used to seeing my mother in
charge, taking care of things, making them right. To see her lose her senses
frightened me beyond measure. I made up my mind I would take care of her from
then on. And I realized almost intuitively that the best way to do that would
be to let her think she was taking care of me, that she had to be strong to
make sure I would pull through.“

So began a lifelong pattern of appearing weak so that others might be
able to feel superior. Audrey would do anything in order to insure a connection
with others, because she often didn’t feel quite at home with herself.

During the war years in
Arnhem
,
her imagination worked overtime at concocting a fantasy life that completely
supplanted her real one. For days on end, she lived only in her mind, seeming
not to notice that food and water were running out and that the dwindling
supplies were becoming contaminated. “I guess I began to resent food
around this time,” she said.

“That’s a strange thing to say about food—‘I resent it.’ You eat
it, don’t eat it, like it, dislike it. But resent it? I actually got angry with
it for being so difficult to come by and tasting so awful. I decided to master
food; I told myself I didn’t need it. I could sense it caused my mother great
pain not to provide my brothers and me with the well-balanced and beautifully
served meals she was used to, so I felt I could eliminate her problem by
denying I missed the good things we used to eat. Of course, I took it to an
extreme. I forced myself to eliminate the need for food. I closed my eyes to
the fact that I was starving.”

The protracted nature of the war made matters much worse. “There
was this overriding sense that the Occupation would he over very fast,”
Audrey recalled. “Nobody could conceive of the long, slow, drawn-out
tragedy of war inflicting its indignities every day. No matter how depressed
people became, we all believed it would be over tomorrow. Every miserable day,
we still thought it couldn’t go on like it was. So part of me thought to myself
I wasn’t starving, I was fasting to end the war.”

Yet life became inexorably more difficult. At the Arnhem School of
Music, where Audrey was studying, all composers who were not German or Austrian
were banned from study. Jewish teachers were fired. The German language became
mandatory. Any remnant of Dutch nationalism—a pendant, a pin—was forbidden.

Audrey became a quiet rebel. While she seemed to acquiesce to Nazi
rule, she worked ceaselessly to raise money for the Resistance, sometimes
giving donation-driven ballet recitals in the homes of sympathizers to meet her
own self-imposed quota.

In a curious way, dance functioned as a useful trade in those dark
days. In her mind, Audrey was pirouetting to save lives. It elevated an
idealistic young woman’s artistic avocation into an important, patriotic duty.
There was no applause. The sound of hands clapping would have been too
dangerous. Figuratively speaking, performing arabesques was now a mission of
resistance. If she wasn’t completely hooked on a life in the theater before the
war, the days of deprivation forced Audrey to recognize that art also had a
profound healing power. It fed her soul.

Because her Dutch was still rudimentary, it became too dangerous for
Audrey to continue her classes at the school in
Arnhem
. Her difficulties with what the
invaders assumed was her native tongue would raise all sorts of questions about
her lineage. According to her mother, several generations back she had a Jewish
ancestor. The Baroness had always been extremely proud of her mixed heritage,
but the specter of Nazism made her much less vocal about her genealogy. She
began to fear for her daughter’s life.

Audrey began to study alone at home, with a tutor coming in once a week
to drill her in mathematics. The subject bored her until the teacher started to
use practical applications to help spark her interest.

“I have always had a reputation for being frugal—less kind people
might call me cheap. But my interest in building up a nest egg goes back to
those days in
Arnhem
when I learned that money can grow, just like trees.”

As she was learning more about personal finance, her mother and the
rest of the van Heemstra clan were becoming progressively more impoverished.
When civilian food rations were restricted, and more and more Nazis began
bunking down at the
Arnhem
home, the Baroness decided to move her family to a more modest house on the
outskirts of town. She hoped it might be possible to grow some vegetables and
raise a few chickens to feed Audrey and Jan.

A year earlier, the older of Audrey’s two half brothers, Alexander, had
been taken away to a German labor camp near
Berlin
when he refused to join the Nazi
Jugend, or youth movement. Audrey was so
distraught over the separation from her brother that she refused to talk about
him, or even mention his name.

“When I was little, Alexander had introduced me to some wonderful
adventure books, most memorably Kipling, and I would often bring his ‘Just So
Stories’ into the basement and pretend he and I were characters.

“I developed a tendency to retreat to a fantasy world when life
wasn’t going my way. Although I never talked about Alexander to my mother or to
Jan, I talked to him all the time. I promise him I would never marry if he
returned safely and that I would take care of him, cook and clean, for the rest
of my life. Can you imagine how desperate I was?” Audrey recalled. “I
also made bargains with God. For a quiet thing, I was chattering in my head all
the time.”

Yet such anguish paled in comparison with the atrocities she witnessed
every day during the German Occupation.

“On a fairly regular basis, although I can’t tell you how often
because I’ve blocked it, I would see families being taken away, jabbed by
rifles until the babies would be screaming and the mothers begged to be killed
if only their children could be set free. They would be loaded onto wooden
train cars, thrown in there sometimes with such force you could hear the bones
break,” she said.

“There was very little air to breathe. You could hear people
gasping. The sound of that was so frightening, I would begin to gasp, too. I
developed asthma soon after, and no matter how many doctors tell me it’s not
connected, I know that my breathing problems were influenced by those poor
souls I didn’t even know.

“The families always looked so downtrodden, no matter who they
were. I saw the baker, a jolly man, so hunched over when he was being taken
away that he was half his real size.

“The women were the ones who were usually carrying more. I suppose
they just couldn’t bear to leave behind the family mementos—photographs, a
small silver frame. One woman was fingering a set of expensive buttons. It seemed
to me she was planning to sew them onto a new coat for her husband when they
got to their destination. Everyone seemed to try so hard to maintain dignity.
But the spouses were often separated at the station. Of all the tragedies, this
one struck me the hardest: that people who loved one another, families, could
be pulled apart when they needed each other most.”

Audrey developed a sense of outrage at man’s inhumanity to man that
would remain with her for the rest of her life. She also learned in these early
years that she could offer the most help in intolerable situations by quietly
trying to change them. “I was never a screamer,” she said. “I
always got the most accomplished by acting docile and sweet. I always looked
like such a good little girl, and I always used that image to my
advantage.”

After seventy Dutch schoolchildren, some of them her friends, were sent
to prison for attempting to blow up Nazi cables and gas lines, her efforts in
the Resistance movement redoubled. While her mother continued to pose as a
pro-German Dutch aristocrat, Audrey became increasingly aware that she could
accomplish wonders if she played up her naive schoolgirl persona, complete with
a feigned indifference to the tragedy around her.

It was a stellar performance. Here was a child who ate only a few
leaves of endive and a potato a day, and who skipped merrily through the town
square as if she had not a care in the world. Inside her worn-out shoes,
however, were coded messages for Resistance workers. On the pretense of playing
in the fields, she often veered off into the woods and shared her potatoes with
the pilots of Allied planes who had been shot down in her area. Bouncing a ball
higher than usual, she would use its landing as an excuse to go into a
neighbor’s yard and boldly hand him some anti-Nazi pamphlet which explained how
he could aid the cause.

In 1942, Audrey tested her acting abilities to the limit and gave what
she always considered to be the performance of her lifetime. Her mother had
sent her on a dangerous mission to make contact with a British paratrooper who
had safely landed in the forest on the outskirts of town. Her command of the
English language made her a highly prized messenger.

After she had fulfilled her duties, she saw out of the corner of one eye
a German soldier coming toward her. Out of the corner of the other, she saw the
paratrooper squat behind a rock. “It was all a matter of seconds,”
she recalled.

“But I knew I must appear carefree. That was the word: carefree.
I’ll never forget it. So I bent down and picked a clump of daisies immediately;
I pulled so hard I got them by the roots. But I thought they would add to my
look. By the time the German got close, I had my head in the flowers and was
pulling the petals out one by one. When I pretended to see him for the first
time, I smiled casually, as if I were distracted, but I certainly didn’t look
frightened. I offered him the bouquet. He took it, patted me on the top of my
head, and I hopped away.”

Closer to town, she winked at a street sweeper. That was his signal
that he would have an Allied soldier to hide in his home that night. She winked
again and smiled and skipped away.

She would not be so carefree for long.

Chapter 5

In 1943, Audrey’s world diminished and became more desperate. The dangerous
game she was playing as a participant in the Resistance became more tenuous as
the Germans tightened their stranglehold on
Arnhem
.

Approximately one in ten Jews living in the
Netherlands
was aided by a Dutch
compatriot in finding a hidden shelter or fake identity. Anne Frank was only
one of thousands of brave unknown souls who used every ounce of strength to
survive, and sometimes did not.

Audrey continued her secret work in the Underground, and because her
fluency in English was so useful, she found herself at the forefront of the
Resistance effort. She was also adept at forging signatures on identity cards,
able to imitate a flowery, cursive hand as well as a messy scrawl. She would
carry these important documents to the people whose lives depended upon them in
the soles of her shoes, in a false bottom in her bicycle basket, sewn into the
lining of her coat.

“Life then was a struggle, but it was also very rewarding,”
she recalled.

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