History's Youngest Heroes: Audrey Hepburn’s Teenage Resistance

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Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed-from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be honest.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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In a village in the Netherlands, it was Adriansha von Haemstra's 13th birthday, the 4th of May, 1942.

Her family were celebrating when the telephone rang.

Her mother picked it up.

Adriansha knew something was wrong.

The party stopped.

Everything seemed to slow down.

Ariancha's aunt Misia was on the line.

In a panic, Misia explained there'd been a knock on her door that morning.

Her husband Otto answered and was confronted by two members of the Dutch security police.

They had a warrant for his arrest.

They gave Otto 20 minutes to pack a bag.

Otto gathered some belongings, reassuring Misia that everything would be all right.

Then the police bundled him into a car and drove away.

Nazi Germany had invaded and occupied the Netherlands two years earlier, in May 1940.

At first, the occupiers took a relatively soft-touch approach.

It was called the Velvet Glove.

Even so, they had begun to meet resistance from the Dutch population.

And to counter that, the Nazis rounded up 1,000 of the leading male figures in Holland.

They were mayors, they were lawyers, they were professors.

They rounded them all up and put them in a prison in southern Holland.

One of them was Uncle Otto, who was this district attorney and pretty vocally anti-Nazi.

Adriancha's mother hung up the phone.

Adriancha adored her uncle, and the news was devastating.

The events of that day would stay with her for the rest of her life, and it would be a truly extraordinary life.

The girl then known as Adriancha von Heemstra would become a Hollywood superstar, Audrey Hepburn.

First, though, she would undergo a different transformation from a shy schoolgirl to a supporter of the Dutch Resistance, doing everything she could to undermine the Nazis.

For BBC Radio 4, I'm Nicola Cochlin, and this is History's Youngest Heroes: Rebellion, Risk and the Radical Power of Youth.

Audrey Hepburn's Teenage Resistance

Luca Dotti is a graphic designer based in Rome.

He's also the younger son of Audrey Hepburn.

One of the most frequent questions I get is that

how much we talked about Hollywood with my mother.

And they're very surprised that instead of talking about Hollywood,

she spoke a great deal more about the war.

Audrey was born in Brussels in 1929.

She lived with her parents, Dutch Baroness Ella van Hemstra and British-Austrian businessman, businessman, Joseph Hepburn Rustin, along with two stepbrothers from her mother's first marriage.

Even as a little girl, you know, she was extrovert, laughing, playing, acting.

My grandfather called her monkey puzzle.

She had these two sort of wild, crazy young people parents.

Robert Mattson has written about Audrey's second world war experiences in his book, Dutch Girl.

They started to just dump Audrey here and there and go off on these adventures.

These adventures involved trips to Britain, where Ella and Joseph made friends in far-right politics.

In London, they were drawn to Oswald Mosley, leader of the violently anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists.

Ella wrote an article for the BUF's magazine and what she saw as the glories of Nazi Germany.

Hitler was to Audrey's parents a rock star.

and they went and met with Hitler in Munich in 1935.

But their passion for fascism wasn't enough to keep Ella and Joseph's marriage together.

When Audrey was six years old, Joseph walked out.

He would later be arrested as an associate of foreign fascists and spent the war in British prisons.

That was the worst trauma my mother experienced, losing her father in such a brutal way and that as well, I believe, is something that she carried through

her life and her career.

Audrey watched her own mother weep inconsolably after her father left.

She claimed the shock of the separation turned her mother's hair grey overnight.

Audrey was packed off to a British boarding school.

On the 1st of September, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

Two days later, Britain declared war on Germany.

Audrey's mother decided that England in general and Kent in particular was no place for Audrey because of the looming threat suddenly that the Germans would storm across France and launch an invasion of England.

Audrey's mother moved to her family estate in Arnhem in the Netherlands.

It was close to the German border.

Yet Ella still believed that Hitler was a gentleman, and therefore the Germans would never invade her country.

Ten-year-old Audrey was summoned back to her mother's side.

Moving to Holland was not moving home.

She couldn't speak Dutch.

She had to go to a Dutch school without understanding a single word with children who made fun of her.

Every day on the way home from school, Audrey cried.

She was desperate to find something to brighten her days.

When she had been in Britain, she had discovered discovered a love of dance.

She persuaded her mother to enroll her in a dance school in Arnhem.

Through dance, she could dream, she could fly, she could forget.

It was the way that she escaped reality.

On the 9th of May 1940, the Saddlers Wells Touring Ballet Company stopped in Arnhem.

Audrey watched the legendary ballet dancers Robert Heltman and Margot Fontaine perform on stage and was entranced.

Afterwards, she was allowed to present them with bouquets of flowers.

That night, as she fell into bed, she felt happy for the first time since moving back to the Netherlands.

That is, until her mother woke her up at four o'clock the next morning saying, wake up, the war is on.

The Germans crossed the Dutch border and rolled straight into Arnhem.

Not only were their planes flying directly over Arnhem taking German paratroopers west, but the Arnhem Road bridge was blown up by the Dutch army to try to stop the German progress.

The bridge at Arnhem was a key crossing point on the River Rhine.

Audrey's house was just a quarter of a mile away.

In an interview with NBC decades later, she recalled the site of the German invasion.

I was behind the curtains and I saw these German tanks come in for hours, marching, driving.

And Holland Holland fell after five days because it's a small country with a small army and they fought very bravely but there was no way of holding back the German army and all of that is history now.

At first, for privileged families like the hamstrs, life under Napti occupation was not disrupted very much.

It was spring, the flowers were out, shops were open, people cycled round as usual.

Yet gradually, the road signs were changed to German.

Red flags with swastikas appeared.

Police in green uniforms arrived in greater and greater numbers.

The British-sounding name Audrey Hepburn Rustin stood out.

So Audrey, already known as Adriancha in her family, began to use her mother's Dutch surname, Von Hemstra.

Her mother changed her own English-sounding first name, Ella, to Eda.

Soon.

Things began to change at school too.

Propaganda was extreme.

Even the mathematics were taught in a Nazi perspective.

When Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the so-called velvet glove period of occupation came to an end.

The Eastern Front was a furnace that you could not shovel resources into fast enough.

The Germans needed food for the troops, they needed clothing for the troops, and it was all taken from the Dutch and the other occupied countries.

With the Nazis requisitioning food, Dutch people soon began to go hungry.

The German occupiers even started to dig and transport fertile soil away from the Netherlands.

Anger against the occupation grew, and the Dutch resistance burgeoned.

In a striking act against Nazi occupation, one resistance group tried to blow up a German train in Rotterdam.

Audrey's uncle, Otto van Limberg-Sterum, was arrested.

Count von Limberg-Sterum had taken a principal stand against the Nazis, but had not been involved in the attempted bombing of the train.

Nevertheless, he was a prominent citizen.

The Nazis felt they must make an example of him.

The Nazis took Otto and four others, put them in a truck, drove them to the wilds of southern Holland, deep into the forest, and shot them by firing squad, dumped the bodies in unmarked graves and drove away.

The Nazis intended this brutal act to send a message to the Dutch.

Fall in line.

But it had the opposite effect on the Netherlands and on Audrey herself.

With her own father out of the picture, her uncle Otto had become a second father to her.

It became a national incident, you know, an inciting point for the Dutch people.

Appalled by these killings, more and more people joined the Dutch resistance.

Faced with acts of sabotage, the Nazis cracked down on anyone they could connect to the resistance.

Audrey's mother moved the family away from Arnhem to the nearby village of Velp.

Yet the situation was about to get much, much worse.

I'd go to the station with my mother to take a train to the next city, and I'd see cattle trucks filled with Jews.

I remember so well a little boy, little blonde.

When my mother to explain all this to me, we did then not yet know that they were going to their death.

We'd been told they were going to be taken to special camps.

As Audrey turned 15, the Nazis were turning Velp into a stronghold.

They moved their national headquarters there and took over every institution.

She was ordered to join the Nazi Culture Kommer, the Nazi Union of Artists.

She had to either do that or give up performing publicly.

Audrey preferred to give up performing publicly.

To keep her spirits up, she taught dance to children.

It wasn't easy.

Like everyone else, she was weak from lack of food.

She and the children danced in cold, empty classrooms.

In the spring of 1944, Audrey volunteered at the local hospital.

She met a senior doctor who happened to be the father of one of her dance students, Henrik Wisser de Hoft.

He was looking for an assistant.

You know, he just needed somebody to do odd jobs for him and be his nurse's aide sort of thing.

Audrey started to work with him.

She had no idea that Wisser de Hoft, like so many of the doctors in Velp, was part of the Resistance.

All these doctors were leading these double lives, working for the Resistance by night and handling patients by day.

The Resistance found shelter for stranded Allied airmen.

They forged identity documents.

They carried out acts of sabotage.

Visser de Hoft was one of their leading figures.

He saw potential in Audrey as his new assistant.

But before he could reveal his resistance plans to her, there was a problem to address.

Her mother, Ella von Heemstra.

Audrey's mother had been labeled by the Dutch resistance as a Nazi and a collaborator.

Though she publicly distanced herself from her early Nazi sympathies, Ella von Heimstra's past admiration for Hitler still made her notorious.

The murder of her brother-in-law, Uncle Otto, opened Ella's eyes, in a sense, to what was really going on.

And then it became a matter of loyalty to the family.

Despite her mother's past politics, Wisser de Hoft wanted Audrey's help.

And for him, this was a calculated risk.

This was a girl that he decided he could trust.

Wisser de Hooft needed to support thousands of people hiding from the Nazis all across Holland.

There were like 600 Onderdijkers in Velp.

These are the hidden ones.

They were Jews who were in hiding, or or they were like Audrey's older half-brother, Alex, had been in the Dutch army, and he was in hiding throughout the war, so he didn't have to serve in the German army.

Feeding these people was expensive.

Visser de Hoft was looking for ways to raise money.

On the 23rd of April, 1944, Audrey made her way to a suburban house, occupied by resistance guards.

There was the risk of being caught and being shot in that moment.

Inside the house, Audrey entered a blacked-out room.

They would close all the blinds, put paper on the windows, make absolute silence, close the lights, just a candle as the only source of light.

Audrey changed into a costume her mother had made.

Her friend took a seat at the piano.

Audrey walked into the center of the room.

There would be a piano playing softly, and she would do her dance routines.

And the public would watch my mother to raise money for the resistance.

Audrey performed a short ballet.

She said, the most beautiful audience I ever got was totally silenced.

At the end of the show, money was collected for the resistance.

As the months went by, these performances became more frequent.

In the evenings, Audrey tuned a forbidden radio to the BBC.

She listened to the news, wondering how soon the war would end.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of Your Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

Listen to Your Dead to Me now, wherever you get your podcasts.

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be hurt.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

On the morning of the 17th of September 1944, Audrey was at church.

Over the sound of hymns, she heard the whirr of engines.

They hear planes overhead.

Paratroopers start to come out of the planes.

Audrey ran outside and looked up.

Thousands of Allied troops were floating down on parachutes.

This

was Operation Market Garden.

It was Field Marshal Montgomery's idea that we could end the war with a master stroke, which was to drop a curtain of Allied paratroopers all along the Netherlands, this corridor through the Netherlands, drive a British armored column up to Arnhem.

and seize the Arnhem Road Bridge.

The British had realized there were few German troops defending the strategically vital route.

A parachute dropped behind enemy lines could begin to liberate the Netherlands.

When British first airborne hit the ground, the Dutch poured out onto the streets.

They took their Dutch flags from hiding.

They screamed and yelled and embraced the liberators, and for a little while it looked like this absolutely was the liberation of Holland.

Unfortunately for the Allies, two heavily armored Nazi divisions were regrouping in the area.

For Audrey and her family, the war was now literally on their doorstep.

She was suddenly in the middle of the German staging area for the response to British First Airborne.

There were tanks rolling through, there were tanks parked in front of their house, there were Germans everywhere.

And soon there were captured British paratroopers coming past Audrey's house.

Audrey is suddenly bandaging wounded civilians as Arnhem burns in in the night.

The battle went on for nine days.

Audrey and her family hid in the cellar as the fighting raged outside.

When they emerged, the town had been ravaged.

Worse, though, the Nazis had won.

The Netherlands were still occupied.

Walking through what remained of the town, Audrey passed a building where the Nazis were beginning to carry out reprisals.

She heard the terrible sounds of pain and shouts and screams.

Then she realized that it was a place where the Germans tortured and killed the Dutch, the resistance, or anybody they deemed as an opposer.

Devastated by what she heard, Audrey vowed to do more for the resistance.

She believed very much that there is a struggle between good and evil, and you have to take sides.

In the autumn of 1944, the skies over the Netherlands were filled again with Allied aircraft.

British and American bombers flew east over the Netherlands to attack Germany.

Their route took them over Audrey's family home.

There was an airbase located right near Velp and the fighters would scramble from there, knock down Allied planes, and these flyers would come floating to Earth that needed help.

Visserte Hoft sent Audrey to the woods near Velp with a message for one of the downed airmen.

Unlike most Dutch teenagers at the time, Audrey spoke perfect English.

She found an airman and retrieved the message from her sock.

It showed a meeting place and gave code words.

She had gone into the woods, delivered a message to a flyer, came out of the woods and was stopped by the green police, the Dutch Nazi police.

Audrey saw the police approaching from a distance.

She didn't run.

Instead, thinking quickly, she bent down and started to pick wildflowers.

As the Nazis approached, she smiled and said, Well, I was picking flowers for you, you know.

She handed them to

the soldier and charmed him and got out of it.

After this incident, Audrey began to carry messages for the resistance regularly.

She folded pamphlets and newspapers into her socks and shoes.

On her bike, she delivered them around town.

The Germans didn't take children seriously.

Just get out of my way, kid.

You know, that kind of thing.

The Dutch were practical enough to see that the children, because they weren't suspected of anything, could be the ones who did these vital things for the resistance.

Throughout 1944, Audrey continued to deliver messages.

But life became harder.

The food shortages took a toll on her health.

All around you, people are dying,

people are being taken for prisoner, kidnapped,

people disappear, people are starving.

Audrey's mother sent her into town to try and find any food she could.

As she walked between shops, she's taken in by German troops and shoved into a truck.

There are just two possibilities.

Either it's a labor camp, either it's it's a pleasure camp.

I still have this terror,

you know, for my mother,

for my daughter, not for, but I see my daughter in my mother, that, you know, when I send her to a shop to get some eggs, you know,

and then, you know, imagine there's a German track that takes her on, and that could be it.

You know, this is the

tragedy, if you want, part of the heroism

of

living through war.

But because of shock, loses completely track of time and space.

And I don't know if it's 48 hours, maybe it's even more.

But she doesn't realize that she's hiding

under a building and she comes back home and her mother obviously was absolutely sure that she was either deported or dead.

And my mother didn't remember a thing.

Throughout the winter of 1944, the snow fell.

Survival was its own form of resistance.

By February 1945, it was reported that 500 Dutch people were starving to death every week.

Like so many others, Audrey's family were painfully short of food.

October to March, five months of no food, no heat, because there were no coal supplies.

The people of Velp were

tearing apart picket fences to burn them for heat.

Audrey scoured the countryside for anything they could eat.

Going into the fields to dig up tulip bulbs that they could grind into a powder and tried to bake it and eat it.

By that spring, Audrey was badly malnourished.

She was suffering from anemia, jaundice, and edema.

Outside her family home, the war intensified.

Hand-to-hand, street-to-street, tank and infantry battle.

With ferocious fighting right outside their front door, Audrey and her family hid hid in the cellar with the lights off.

Three weeks later, on the 16th of April 1945, it finally grew quiet.

Everybody was petrified because they were not used to this silence.

Audrey smelt tobacco.

It had been impossible to get cigarettes for much of the war.

The locals had to make their own with oak and beech leaves.

This smell.

was quite different.

Like a message from another time.

She climbed the stairs from the cellar.

Opening the door onto the garden of their house and looking down the muzzles of five machine guns.

Because she was surrounded by Canadian soldiers who had just liberated Velp.

The Canadian soldiers facing her were smoking real cigarettes.

They also had their guns pointed right at her, ready to shoot.

Immediately, Audrey started speaking in English.

She remembered that the Canadian soldiers let out a great yell, and one shouted, Not only have we liberated a town, we've liberated an English girl.

The war was over at last.

For Audrey, though, the traumatic memory stayed with her, and she couldn't get over the tremendous shame of her mother's Nazi sympathies.

So there was a strong bond.

But at the same time,

there was this great

razor blade between them.

There was a point where she said to me that she never

forgave

her mother for being a fascist.

Audrey's instincts were honed to a very fine point by the war and everything that she went through.

And she had so much experience to draw upon that she could put herself into these various characters.

Audrey won a scholarship to Ballet Romber in London.

She reverted to her British name, Audrey Rustin Hepburn, soon simplifying that to Audrey Hepburn.

For all her talent though, it became clear she would never have the stamina to become a prima ballerina.

She had suffered from malnutrition too badly during the war and her constitution had been permanently damaged.

Instead, she began to focus on acting, with small roles in West End theater and films such as The Lavender Hill mob.

In 1953, Audrey had her first Hollywood starring role in Roman Holiday opposite Gregory Peck.

The film was a massive critical and commercial hit.

Audrey Hepburn won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

It set off a superstar career that saw her become an icon.

By the 1980s, Audrey was taking on very few screen roles.

Interviewers always wanted to ask her about her life in the movies.

Audrey didn't care for that.

Instead, she wanted to talk about the Second World War and her later work for UNICEF.

These days, Luca Datti looks back on his mother's quiet contribution to wartime resistance with pride.

Of course, we

always

have this

romantic, cinematic

idea about the war, you know, of these great actions and

great people taking great risks, superhuman risk.

But the resistance and the erog part is

it's like a way of never giving up

doing your side.

Next time, and history's youngest heroes.

A charismatic young man attracts a band of followers after denouncing his family fortune and devoting his life to the poor.

The decisions he finally makes about how his life is to fit together makes him a person that changes other people's lives.

Saint Francis of Assisi, Teen Rebel.

From BBC Radio 4, I just remember shouting and screaming, get off my sister.

Life as we know it can change in an instant.

I was just punching frantically.

I wasn't going to let it take away my sister if I could help it.

A single transformative moment.

I heard this engine sort of go past and I was like, what is that?

And Mum had looked up into the rearview mirror and she went, oh my god, he's here.

I'm Dr.

Sean Williams and this is the programme that explores the most dramatic, personal and poignant stories from the very people who've experienced them.

I always passed it there and said, hi, John.

Hi, John.

You've got to find some joy in the sorrow, you know.

You've got to find some joy.

Subscribe to Life Changing on BBC Sounds.

Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed: from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg brothers.

Listen to You're Dead to Me Now, wherever you get your podcasts.