Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait (6 page)

“I loved the subterfuge. What child wouldn’t? Of course, the work
was frighteningly dangerous, but I never thought about it at the time. That’s
the beauty of a child’s perception. I can recall lots of whispering. It seems
all we did was whisper and make funny hand signals and eyebrow lifts and
scratches on the head, touching the left meaning something different from the
right, and a tap on the cheek meaning something else entirely. At the time, the
signals were indelibly etched on my brain. I felt like I could never forget
them. Of course, I did.”

But the naive excitement of a girl living the pages of a spy novel was
tempered by an increasingly bleak mood in the van Heemstra household. The
Baroness was suffering from a severe depression, one that would recur
intermittently for the rest of her life. Distraught from the moment she had
learned that her son had been sent to a Nazi labor camp in
Germany
,
Audrey’s mother was nearly catatonic after two years went by and there was
still no word about Alexander’s fate. She became totally aloof from Audrey and
Jan, investing all her dwindling energy in fighting the enemy and privately
mourning the loss of her son. Her cover as a Nazi sympathizer was beginning to
wear her down even further. She began to hate the effort it took to lie. Lack
of food had also reached a crisis situation.

“Jan was the most hungry,” Audrey recalled. “That was
clear. He’d sometimes hold his stomach and cry for food. I couldn’t stand
another minute of it. I suppose Mother was hungry, too, but she was too sad to
notice. I, on the other hand, was sure I wasn’t hungry. I thought I had that
one beaten. The only thing I knew was that I had to take care of them, so I
devised this outlandish plan to make money.”

In the middle of the Occupation, with a blanket of gloom beginning to
suffocate all of
Europe
, Audrey decided to
give ballet lessons. She would take a trolley from her temporary living
quarters in the countryside to the town square, where she’d walk a few blocks
to the Arnhem Conservatory of Music. The decrepit tutu in her satchel shared
space with a pair of ballet slippers so worn and patched, they resembled heavy
quilted material rather than delicate satin. Her students were young girls much
like herself, stuck in
Arnhem
for the duration of the war. Some were Nazi sympathizers, some resisters.
Audrey didn’t care: They would be paying her to teach them to dance.

Although they looked up to Audrey for her stoicism in the face of
disaster and her finely tuned ballet technique, some of the cattier members of
the class must have made snide remarks about her painfully bony look. Audrey
was totally emaciated.

Her standard starvation diet of lettuce, an occasional potato, and an
awful bread made of peas got even worse when that food ran out. Audrey would
live on tulip bulbs and water until she could secure potatoes again. She
weighed less than ninety pounds, she was continuing to lose weight, and she was
exhausted.

“Everybody was painfully thin, at the
School
of
Music
and everywhere else in
Arnhem
,”
she said. “I wasn’t alone. But since I was leading the class, I had to
repeat certain movements at the barre over and over for some of the slower
students. I had just performed a series of plies, when I felt all the blood
rush to my head and then—blackness!

“When I came to, one of the janitors was chastising me about not
eating. I can still see his wagging finger, not pointing with recrimination,
but with love. He took me into a large supply closet, brought down a box from
the middle shelf, and took out a red ball of
Edam
cheese.

“ `I was saving this for a real emergency,‘ he said. `Well, you
are it!’

“Just a small piece revived me; I tried some more but became sick
to my stomach. My body chemistry had changed during the years of deprivation,
but my mind was also playing tricks. `If there is no food,‘ I had said to myself,
`then I’m not going to need what I can’t have.’ It was one of my first attempts
at mind over matter, and at the time, I thought I was doing a great job.”

In fact, malnourishment forced Audrey to stop dancing for a while.
There would be no more
Swan Lake
or
Nutcracker to transport her into that
place of serenity. She still continued to act as a courier for the Resistance,
but the Nazis had stepped up their efforts to catch spies, and Audrey lived in
a perpetual state of anxiety.

Her trepidation was warranted. Despite years of beating the odds, on a
quiet summer day in 1944 Audrey faced the monster she had so luckily avoided
for so long. The gestapo had been beefing up its efforts to provide Germany
with slave labor, and on that day in Arnhem was rounding up women to cook and
clean in military camps and prisons.

>From a half block away, Audrey saw friends and acquaintances being
forced at gunpoint to get into trucks that would take them to places worse than
hell.

“There was a girl I knew in passing from the library at the
Conservatory. She had a red scarf tied around her head. She was standing in a
group of women—all ages—huddling, it seemed, against the intrusion of the
German soldiers.

“The red scarf! I used to see that scarf next to her books all the
time when she was studying. It was a comforting, familiar sight. Now I saw her
being pushed with the butt of a rifle into a truck. A woman with a limp, whom
the Nazis did not take, was trying to pull back this girl. I presumed it was
her mother. In those few seconds, I wished the girl would give her mother the
scarf.

“I did not want that red square of pretty material to wind up a
ripped and soiled rag in a labor camp. Tears came to my eyes. If I think about
it now, I was grieving for the loss of this girl, this human life. But that was
too much for me to acknowledge at the time. I just wanted the scarf to be safe
and sound.”

The Nazis had other ideas. As Audrey was watching the girl she knew in
passing being taken away, a gruff officer hit her in the small of her back with
his rifle. In German, he commanded her to follow him to a new group of women
being assembled in the same spot from where the others had just been driven
away.

“As we walked, he right behind me, with his rifle sticking in me,
I tried to keep my head held high, with dignity. I kept my satchel on my
shoulder, refusing to drag it and look beaten. But I noticed all the
shopkeepers, the street cleaners, the bus conductors, they all looked at the
soldier with utter contempt. Their hatred was obvious, and useful. I knew then
that no matter what happened to me, we would win—in the end, we would
win.”

As she joined a few other women at the site, her captor and all the
other Nazi soldiers but one left to gather more victims for enslavement.

“The soldier left behind was extremely young, self-conscious. He
seemed ill at ease around girls, even one as scrawny as me. At one point, he
put down his rifle against a lamppost, pulled a tobacco pouch from his jacket,
and began to roll a cigarette. He was all thumbs. He was concentrating hard not
to spill the tobacco and make a fool of himself.”

It was Audrey’s only chance. She took it.

The
emaciated young teen with arms and legs so bony she was painful to look at, who
suffered from anemia, edema, and the preliminary stages of anorexia nervosa,
ran for her life. She rounded a corner before the awkward young soldier even
realized she was missing, and then she fled down an alley. Toward the end of
it, she ran down a few steps and forced open the door to an abandoned cellar.

Inside,
she found a few empty crates, lots of yellowing and decaying newspapers, and
the constant sound of scurrying. “Rats were everywhere, it seemed, but
they were my only company, so I made up my mind not to be afraid.”

Audrey
remained in that cellar prison for nearly a month. “‘That’s what I was
told, anyway. I have no real concept of days passing during that time. I was in
and out of consciousness, I guess. I had a few apples in my bag, and a little
bread; that was my food. I tried to sleep a lot to avoid the hunger pangs. But
in the times I was awake, I would try to hum some music in my head. I wouldn’t
make a peep, but I would try to hear violins and pianos and the beautiful sound
of the cello. The war had made a prisoner of my body, but my mind was my own.
And even in those circumstances—especially in those circumstances—I wanted to
enchant it.”

When
the sound of gunfire got closer, Audrey decided to leave. “I can’t really
explain that decision, except to say that hearing the sound of guns at least
lets you know you are alive!”

Barely
able to walk, she slowly limped out of the cellar dungeon and made her way
home. She is not sure how she did it.

Her
tearful reunion with her mother left the Baroness speechless. “She was so
certain I’d died that it was hard for her to comprehend the sight of me. I know
I looked like a ghost anyway! A yellow ghost.”

Audrey
had contracted hepatitis during the three-and-a-half-week exile, and suffered
from the withering effects of jaundice. She also began wheezing while in
hiding, and her breathing difficulties were later diagnosed as asthma. Her
metabolism, always speedy, would now never adjust itself. And she would, in
later life, always refuse to eat during stressful times.

“I
associate food with happy times, primarily because those times when I was
unable to eat were so miserable. I guess in some convoluted way, I’m afraid if
I eat when I’m sad, I’ll be feeding the sadness,” she said.

The
period before liberation and the end of World War II was an especially desolate
one for Audrey. She had exchanged her private dungeon for a familial one—she,
her mother, and Jan fled to their basement when the Battle of Arnhem began.

By
late summer 1944, American and British forces had liberated most of
France
and
Belgium
. It was
time to push closer to
Germany
.
Arnhem
, on the
Rhine
, was chosen as a perfectly situated city behind
enemy lines in which to drop thousands of airborne troops to begin recapturing
territory.

In
early September, the Baroness heard rumblings among her underground Resistance
circle that something was about to happen.

On
September 17, more than eight thousand soldiers from the First British Airborne
Division, the famous Red Devils, were parachuted into a three-square-mile area
to try to take control of the road bridge at
Arnhem
. The Germans were ready for them.

“The
noise of the first landing was unlike anything I had ever heard,” Audrey
recalled. “You could hear the screams, the sounds of the brave Allies
being killed while they were still in the air. We were in the basement, and it
sounded like there would be so many bodies when we finally surfaced that we’d
be unable to walk for fear of stepping on them.”

The
Baroness took in other townsfolk who were afraid to stay in their homes nearer to
the bridge. On the day after the initial invasion, nearly forty people were
sleeping on the floor right beside the van Heemstras.
Arnhem
itself looked like nothing less than
an extremely active slaughterhouse. Mangled bodies, some still tangled in their
parachutes, lay everywhere, while evacuees from the west arrived in record
numbers, hoping to find refuge.