Since the death of Audrey Hepburn at the beginning of 1993, her story has been told and told again. An Amazon search of books with her name will produce 1,000+ hits. Every aspect of her life has been covered in print but one: the years of World War II when she lived in the Netherlands. There are portions of Audrey’s story of the war that she wouldn’t discuss and portions she felt she couldn’t discuss. As a result, authors invented some situations and interpreted others incorrectly because they had no foundation in the history of the war. I can safely say that most pages about her war years in previous biographies contain errors about her life during that time.
Hepburn’s definitive biographer, Barry Paris, spent a great deal of time and resources in 1993 with the backing of powerful G.P. Putnam’s Sons to tell the Dutch portion of Audrey’s story, and his meticulously referenced work became the starting point for my project. Paris had some advantages in his proximity to the war years—many people involved with the story were alive then who aren’t now. But he also had a big disadvantage: There wasn’t yet an Internet with fingertip access to prime Dutch archives. And because he based his operations in the United States (employing a Dutch researcher to do legwork in the Netherlands), Paris missed the importance of the village of Velp to Audrey’s story. Velp sits just outside the city of Arnhem. That location came to mean everything to the story for reasons you will soon learn.
I love uncovering facts about Hollywood personalities in World War II, especially facts that have been lost over time because of the depth of research required to set the record straight. In the case of Audrey Hepburn, most of that research can be conducted only on the ground in the Netherlands, which is quite a deterrent for American authors. In addition, the adults that fought through and survived the war have passed on; the eyewitnesses are gone. Most vexing of all, some records stateside have vanished, which is a story in itself. These files, which should exist in the archives of the FBI and CIA (known as the OSS during World War II), concern a Dutch national named Ella, Baroness van Heemstra, who was Audrey’s mother. When I began my project and sent my Washington, D.C., researcher after these files, she couldn’t locate them and determined after exhaustive efforts that they no longer exist. Her professional opinion was that they had been destroyed long ago, and this conclusion begged the questions, why would these files have been removed from the record, and who would have removed them? After I spent two years investigating, the answers became evident.
Audrey Hepburn’s father lived under the radar for most of his life, and her mother covered her tracks for activities from 1935 through ’41, so it’s no wonder that biographers shied away from chronicling those years of Audrey’s life or relied on preexisting works. The trail was either cold or had been rubbed out of existence.
Was Audrey Hepburn’s family rich? Was this wealth confiscated by the Nazis? Did Audrey grow up in grand Dutch castles? Did she witness her uncle and others being put up against a wall and shot? Did she perform clandestine dances to raise money for the Dutch Resistance and risk her life to perform other anti-Nazi duties at age fourteen or fifteen? My investigation took many twists and turns and provided surprising answers in the end.
Context is everything in Audrey Hepburn’s war story, so I’ve described the times and the history that surrounded the subject. I was able to locate more than 6,000 words spoken by Audrey about World War II, and in the end I plugged them into the story of the war and the part the Netherlands played in it. And, son of a gun, her quotes made sense, including all those stories she told about the Resistance.
Combat came to Audrey’s world in September 1944, and I made it my goal to recreate for the reader what she experienced over the course of eight brutal months. I wanted those who already love Audrey to know the sights, the sounds, the pain, and the terror felt by this Dutch girl during the occupation and then the battles that would forge Audrey Hepburn into a global force. I wanted the reader to get some sense of what her world was like. She saw so much blood and death before she turned sixteen, yet lived a life of such grace and never admitted what she had witnessed. The war made Audrey Hepburn, and so what she experienced, especially in those final months of conflict, is a story worth telling, day by day and blow by blow.
In some ways it’s a miracle she made it out of the war alive; in all ways this is the tale of a remarkable young girl who would go on to become an icon for peace.
Robert Matzen