Incendiary bombs were dropped on The Hague. Nazi troops tore through Audrey’s town of Arnhem, looting and despoiling as they pleased. The Germans threatened to bomb every Dutch city until they were demolished until Holland surrendered. The Dutch military, though terribly outnumbered, fought back anyway, but they were no match for the conquering horde, and were forced to surrender. After five days, Holland capitulated. It would be occupied by the Nazis for five very long years.
Young Audrey watched her Jewish neighbor being herded into trucks, men into one truck, women into another, babies into another. “We did not yet know that they were going to their death,” she remembered.
One early winter day, Audrey was walking along a city street when three truckloads full of German soldiers toting rifles stopped suddenly. The soldiers ordered all the girls in their sight to line up and get in the trucks. Audrey did as she was told knowing the girls were heading for military brothels. As the trucks drove off, Audrey kept saying the Lord’s Prayer to herself in Dutch. Then the convoy stopped unexpectedly. Some soldiers jumped out and began abusing some Jews. Audrey said: “I remember hearing the dull sound of a rifle butt hitting a man’s face. And I jumped down, dropped to my knees, and rolled under the truck. I then skittered out, hoping the driver would not notice me, and he didn’t.”
In 1942, Hepburn’s uncle, Otto van Limburg Stirum (husband of her mother’s older sister, Miesje), was executed in retaliation for an act of sabotage by the resistance movement, while Hepburn’s half-brother Ian was deported to Berlin to work in a German labor camp. Hepburn’s other half-brother Alex went into hiding to avoid the same fate. “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,” Audrey recalled.
It was because of the sadistic and brutal way the Nazi occupiers treated the Dutch, that Audrey became determined to work with the Dutch Resistance. An accomplished ballerina by age 14, she danced in secret productions in underground places to help raise money for the resistance. To keep from being discovered, the audience did not clap. As she famously said, “The best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performances.”
It was at these “black performances” where the audiences gave the young performers money and folded message to be stuffed into the children’s shoes and transported the next day to resistance workers. There was little doubt in Audrey’s mind that had she been discovered doing either of these things, a swift execution would have followed.
-Military Myths & Legends: Audrey Hepburn
baratheonpilled
2087
dededos
kianamaiart
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
annaxmalina
