“Arnhem was pretty much flattened” was the way Audrey described it. From her location in Velp, she couldn’t see it happening but everyone heard it all day and into the night. There were booms, booms, a pause, then more thundering blasts that rattled the ground. Bursts of machine-gun fire and the smaller explosions of grenades underscored the tympani.
Bittrich’s attack had raged so long that nothing remained in the area of Colonel Frost’s position. The van Limburg Stirum School lay a pile of useless rubble. On one side de Nijenburgh smoldered in a heap, and on the other the red school had been flattened. All that remained of the Muziekschool were half-standing walls. Hundreds of Dutch residents had been caught in the crossfire of battle, praying they could ride out the storm, until finally, with fires burning unchecked and the central city in ruins, those still alive, like Piet Hoefsloot and his family, rigged white flags and made their way out as best they could.
Frost received leg wounds and was captured, but for the remainder of his life, when anyone around him mentioned the word surrender, he would snap, “We did not surrender.” In his memoir he maintained, “No living enemy had beaten us. The battalion was unbeaten yet, but they could not have much chance with no ammunition, no rest and with no positions from which to fight.” His original orders in England had been to hold on for forty-eight hours until the relief column had arrived from the south. He held his position for twice that length of time, and he hurled curses at the relief column for letting obstacles get in their way—at the time that Arnhem burned, tanks of the British 2nd Army sat just a few miles south of the bridge waiting for the infantry to catch up. The American 82nd and 101st Airborne had done their jobs and captured or built bridges for the British relief column to use as it raced northward and fought its way toward Arnhem. But the grand plan for Operation Market Garden hadn’t been thought through well enough, and time had run out not only for Frost but also for the center of Arnhem.
Bodies of Dutch civilians lay everywhere. Thursday morning an old lady was found by an air-raid warden lying in the garden beside the smoldering wreck of her home, de Nijenburgh. The lady was grand old Cornelia, Countess van Limburg Stirum, Otto’s aunt. She lay scorched and covered in grime and ash. She had been dragged out of de Nijenburgh by her maid after the Germans had warned they were going to set a flamethrower on the villa as part of their operation to capture Frost. Cornelia clung to life by a thread. The air-raid warden and some of the Christian school students managed to get her up to the Diaconessenhuis, the hospital where Ella used to work. There the Countess died two days later.
Just across the way in Velp, the ongoing cacophony unnerved villagers who had lost their electricity that first day and then their water service, and neither had returned. After the Velpenaren had sat out the fighting for the better part of four years, the apocalypse had arrived. When asked if she could hear the battle next door in Arnhem, Annemarth Visser ’t Hooft responded that it wasn’t next door. “It was here! There was nothing but the battle of Arnhem.” Her only solution when it grew too terrifying was to put her fingers in her ears as British and German forces slugged it out. The din carried every second eastward to the ears of the Visser ’t Hoofts as well as to Audrey, Ella, and everyone else in Velp. The sights and sounds of this battle bored into the sensitive dancer’s soul, and they would always echo there for what they meant to humanity and to, as she labeled it, “poor Arnhem.”
It was at times like this that the fifteen year old leaned on the adults surrounding her. Said Audrey’s son Luca, “My mother always told me that in the war, because her father was not there, Ella was her father figure, and Meisje was her mother, which is a strong statement. So I asked her, what do you mean by that? And she said Meisje was the one first and foremost with the kindness. She was the one teaching her how to draw, and to play, and to read—a motherly figure. It was really Meisje who made the magic come alive; you know, what mothers usually did. Ella was about rules.”
As British paratroopers and Wehrmacht and SS troops battled for control of the city next door, Ella was the one to tell Audrey whether she could spend time upstairs or if she had to go to the cellar for safety. It was Ella dictating bedtime. But Meisje was there with cuddles and comforting words at the horrors they were witnessing and assurances that they would make it through. And it was Meisje who would have provided understanding when Audrey feared her career in dance was being bombed out of existence.
The battle they witnessed blazed in three dimensions. Increasingly, day by day, German fighter planes zipped over at treetop level to fire on British positions—the first of the Luftwaffe seen over Velp since before the bombing of Deelen Air Base. The Germans were loath to send their fighters out as ground support, not because they feared losing planes but because so few skilled pilots remained and each was precious.
But even with the danger of stray machine-gun bursts from planes, the battle was not so close by and so immediately dangerous that Audrey and the others had to remain in the cellar twenty-four hours a day. The toilet stood directly above, off the kitchen, so they would skitter up during a quiet moment and then back down again. When they ventured up on Tuesday evening, they had seen off to the west the red curtain of Arnhem burning. The sight of it tore at their hearts, at their stomachs. Grand old Arnhem a funeral pyre. The next day, word reached Velp that one side of Boulevard Heuvelink had been torched or blown to dust, and so Audrey knew the Muziekschool must be gone, and any hope of a career in dance along with it.
But there were more sights. Gazing down their own boulevard to Hoofdstraat, the van Heemstras could see refugees streaming from Arnhem into Velp, a human river at flood tide, unending. The wretched souls looked as refugees always looked, white flags, suitcases and multiple layers of clothing and overcoats and hats and dragging children and pulling hand trucks, carts, bicycles, toy wagons, and whatever else could be used to haul away possessions. Scores, then hundreds, filed by the Beukenhof on their way north through Rozendaal toward Apeldoorn. And streaming the other way, south on Rozendaalselaan and west on Hoofdstraat, the Germans rushed by in trucks and armored vehicles. There were tanks of various sizes including the really big ones, with everything heading in the direction of the poor Tommies.
As each day passed, more and more British soldiers could be seen, small and large groups of prisoners, each looking worse than the last. All the young, battle-scorched faces were visible as the defeated paratroopers shuffled through, many wearing red berets, their hobnailed boots clomping along on the sidewalks and cobblestone streets. These young men made a great show of bravado, group by group, as they passed by, as if captivity were a minor inconvenience, as if they knew they were better soldiers than the men guarding them, but this time the fates had not smiled.
The bravado was due in part to a surprising source: their guards. “It is striking,” wrote Max Hastings, a British historian who studied the history of the SS, “that when the survivors of the British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem found themselves in the hands of the SS, they expected to be shot. Instead, they were treated with the respect due to heroes. According to the SS code of chivalry, these were fellow knights worthy of their highest honor.”
Frost himself confirmed this. “The SS men were very polite and complimentary about the battle we had fought,” he wrote.
Words could not do justice to the sight left behind at the bridge. It was reported the bodies—British, German, and Dutch—lay all about the area, from the bridge to the Muziekschool. The mood in Velp grew hopeless, and the news got even worse. The entire city of Arnhem, every square inch, was in German hands, and the British liberators had been driven back into Oosterbeek village and were under siege, holed up in the houses, villas, and hotels with Dutch citizens again caught in the middle. Yes, the earwitnesses in Velp could confirm—the sounds of battle had indeed changed and grown a bit more distant, but still, as morning turned to afternoon on Thursday, 21 September, heavy explosions punctuated every sentence dictated by rifles and machine guns.
By afternoon that Thursday, four days into the battle, it seemed that all the Germans who had fled from Velp before and during the invasion had now returned. Green Police again roamed the streets and issued an edict that all able-bodied men of Velp must report for ditch-digging duty—those that could be rounded up were marched off to Arnhem to dig mass graves. Then Audrey saw a most unwelcome line of SS Tiger II tanks clatter down Rozendaalselaan and stop, one of them directly in front of the Beukenhof and seemingly as tall. There it sat through the day, as if there were already plenty of tanks in Oosterbeek to take care of the Tommies, and these were extras, placed here just in case of more Allied activity.
Later Thursday, past midday, confusion reigned when the air-raid siren yet again sounded and the heavy drone of airplanes once more rattled the windows of Velp. As had happened days earlier, the anti-aircraft batteries opened up, including some new groups of cannon just brought into the area. What did it mean this time? Up to now, each unfolding of such events had unleashed hell on the Dutch people. This time, the Velpenaren watched a sky battle just off to the southwest, much closer than the previous Sunday, with bursts of flak amid the dozens of Allied transport planes with parachutes spilling out. Suddenly, one of the planes caught fire and fell out of formation, then another, and a third. It was horrible, but still the air was filled with brightly colored parachutes that seemed to be falling on the other side of the Rhine in the direction of the village of Driel. The effect of this new threat sobered up a German presence that had grown both talkative and jovial. Amid much excitement, the tanks on Rozendaalselaan rolled out and turned onto Hoofdstraat heading toward Arnhem, apparently to counter this latest threat. In fact, these paratroopers were Poles who arrived too late to support Frost by attacking the south end of the Arnhem Road Bridge. Instead, the Poles set out to cross the Rhine and join up with the Airborne in Oosterbeek—only 200 would succeed.
The din of the battle raging in Oosterbeek five miles away went on for days. There continued to be no electrical service in Velp, and no running water as about 3,000 men out of the original 10,000 made a last stand in the center of Oosterbeek. Audrey had two familiar points of reference in that village—the big, thatched-roof Villa Roestenburg where Opa and Oma lived next to the Hotel Tafelberg, and Villa Maria, the Monné’s lovely home on Utrechtseweg. She wouldn’t learn their fate until later: In the midst of the battle that engulfed the town, both the homes she knew so well were being cut through with bullet holes. The Hotel Tafelberg had been wrecked but still served as an aid station for injured and dying men. Years later, Audrey’s cousin, Michael Quarles van Ufford, would report that there had been fighting on the family grounds in Oosterbeek.
How far the world had come since 1935 when Ella and Joseph had deposited the children at Villa Roestenburg in Oosterbeek so they could go meet Hitler. Nine years later, on that quiet, treelined street where the van Heemstras had once lived, the battle raged. Its cross street, the Utrechtseweg, saw German and British soldiers fighting for their lives, not just house to house but room to room until the resort town too had been chopped to pieces. Right near the intersection, Anje van Maanen’s aunt had thrown open her windows just a few days earlier to greet the liberators—now all their windows had been shattered by gunfire.
Said one British soldier, “The Germans were spraying the houses; bullets were coming through the roofs and windows, whizzing around the rooms inside and hitting the walls behind us.”
In Velp on Friday, then Saturday, and again Sunday—Audrey heard the air-raid siren, and then the anti-aircraft cannon would open up from batteries near and far. More batteries than ever, it seemed, as more and more flak guns were brought into the area. Then she would see or at the least hear Allied transports fly nearby and parachutes would dot the sky. The locals thought it was more paratroopers joining the battle, but the crews in the planes were trying to drop supplies to the surrounded Airborne troops already on the ground, men who had days ago run out of ammunition, rations, and medicine.
The refugees continued to trudge their way out of Arnhem. The greatest numbers were heading due north toward Apeldoorn, but many sought refuge in Velp or kept on walking up the Zutphenseweg toward Dieren and Zutphen. Some arrived at Velp’s Ziekenhuis seeking treatment for wounds from bullets, flying glass, shrapnel, and splinters as well as cases of dehydration, undernourishment, and shell shock. As the fighting moved farther off toward Oosterbeek, Audrey hurried the three blocks to aid Dr. Visser ’t Hooft and the other physicians as they faced their overwhelming task.
Each day Audrey watched captured Tommies as they clomped through town, audacious chaps who would sing or whistle, and as they passed they would wink at Audrey and other pretty girls of Velp and flash V for Victory signs to the men. By Thursday locals calculated that a thousand captured Airborne had been marched up from Arnhem toward Germany. By Saturday, the estimate had risen to fifteen hundred.
It was clear that the battle to capture the bridge and free Gelderland was going badly and that the Germans were winning. The shooting was continuous and every sign, particularly the emboldened attitude of the moffen in green and gray uniforms as they roamed the streets, indicated that the status quo had returned.
Audrey faced a devastating new world without dance because the Arnhem she knew was simply gone. But in just a few weeks, circumstances would converge and the lack of dance instruction would be the least of her worries.