“I went as long as three days without food,” said Audrey of life in the first quarter of 1945, “and most of the time we existed on starvation rations. For months, breakfast was hot water and one slice of bread made from brown beans. Broth for lunch was made with one potato and there was no milk, sugar, cereals or meat of any kind.”
It was now more than four years since Audrey or any of the van Heemstras had enjoyed a full meal unaffected by rationing and shortages. Up until Market Garden, times were lean and stomachs always rumbled. After the one-two punch of a failed invasion and the railroad strike, the country’s food supply dwindled to nothing. Now, four full months later, Audrey and her family were suffering horribly from malnutrition.
One official report said that by February 1945, more than 500 Dutch people were dying of hunger each week. Across the Netherlands, but particularly in the west, people were succumbing at such a rapid rate that morticians couldn’t keep up. The harsh winter temperatures became a blessing because the weather was so cold that it kept bodies of the dead from decomposing, and they could stay around for a while without fear of epidemic. That, in turn, was all right as there was no wood with which to knock together coffins anyway. The wood was too important as fuel to heat homes for those still living now that coal supplies were gone. Families buried loved ones in a bed sheet when they could spare one, but more often wrapped in paper, like a giant fish, or not wrapped at all.
At the Beukenhof, Meisje and Ella passed their rations on to the baron because those advanced in age were the most vulnerable, and Audrey attempted to pass hers on to her mother and aunt. Once again Audrey gave up the ballet classes that had meant so much to the children of Velp, and to herself, this time because of weakness brought on by malnutrition.
“I was very sick but didn’t realize it,” said Audrey, who came to appreciate later how her mother must have worried. “She often looked at me and said, ‘You look so pale.’ I thought she was just fussing, but now I understand how she must have felt.”
Her biographer Barry Paris, said, “She was also having problems with colitis and irregular periods—possibly endometriosis, common among women dancers and athletes with little body fat—and her metabolism would be permanently affected.”
When Alex returned to Velp to lend a hand in the desperate situation, Audrey described that she and her brother “went into the fields to find a few turnips, endives, grass, and even tulips.” Her diet was so limited to endive during these months that “I swore I’d never eat it again as long as I lived.”
Tulip bulbs became food, and Audrey would mention eating them in descriptions of life at low ebb under Nazi rule during the Hunger Winter of 1944-45. “It sounds terrible,” she said in a 1992 interview. “You don’t just eat the bulb. Tulip bulbs actually make a fine flour that is rather luxurious and can be used for making cakes and cookies,” the only problem being that the remainder of the ingredients didn’t exist to make either cakes or cookies.
Audrey said that by now she suffered from “acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema—swelling of the limbs…. I still have stretch marks on my ankles from where the skin was stretched by the edema.”
In situations of extreme hunger over a long period, the body lacks proteins and minerals needed to regulate the amount of water retained. Water begins to collect first at the wrists and ankles. The fact that this happened to Audrey confirms the seriousness of the food situation in Velp.
“We all had it,” said Annemarth Visser ’t Hooft of hunger edema, “all the children.” But older sister Clan fared worst of all by the end of the Hunger Winter, and her situation became life threatening.
Later studies would simulate the hunger conditions of this winter and paint a bleak picture of its effects on humans. Ever dignified, Audrey would not repeat stories of the darkest family times when it was likely there were outbursts of temper and an intense desire to suffer alone, away from others in the villa. Volunteers in one famous study said, “It was their minds and souls that changed more than anything else.” They snapped at others close by, hoarded possessions, and suffered extreme bouts of depression. Physical symptoms included scaly skin, brownish pigmentation about the face, and blue lips and fingernails. The number of healthy red blood cells plummeted, triggering anemia and contributing to the edema experienced by so many.
A report sent from the Resistance to the Allies in London stated, “As long as hunger and cold rule, those who are in need will follow the law of life, i.e. the urge to stay alive and try to defeat every obstacle in the way. This has to be done by means which are in conflict with normal standards of morality.”
Ella had always bulldozed all obstacles in front of her daughter, and now even she ran out of ways to help. For a while she had been able to trade her possessions for food. Audrey said, “There were no shops, no nothing. Everything was closed. The farmers were not taking any money. The money had no value. It was printed by the Germans. So you paid for things with linens, with a little bracelet, or a ring. That’s how you got turnips or vegetables.” But by now, Ella had nothing left with which to barter.
Audrey looked at herself and knew the seriousness of the hunger edema. “It begins with your feet,” she said, “and when it reaches your heart, you die.” By now it wasn’t just the Dutch who had run out of food. “The German troops, those that were there, were also starving,” said Audrey.
Spring came early in 1945 and with it, finally, the beginnings of a break in the famine gripping the nation. For months the Dutch government exiled in London had been using every means possible—demanding or, as necessary, begging—the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, or SHAEF, to somehow get food to the people of the Netherlands. But the effort was mired in red tape, and besides, General Eisenhower had a war to fight on a front that stretched hundreds of miles; the Dutch would have to wait it out.
As far back as November when it had become obvious where this situation was going, Queen Wilhelmina and her prime minister, Gerbrandy, had sent appeals to many foreign governments asking for help for the people. It was neutral Sweden, cousins of the Dutch, who responded with enthusiasm.
After months working through red tape that included persuading the Germans to permit a flow of food into the Netherlands, on 28 January the first Swedish ships laden with food reached the northern port of Delfzijl bringing flour, margarine, and cod liver oil. But with 4.5 million desperately hungry Dutch citizens to feed, and with the Germans gumming up the implementation process organized by the International Red Cross, more precious time passed before a second shipment reached Delfzijl at the end of February. Due to German interference, this one wasn’t even unloaded until later in March. At best it would take weeks for the food to begin to move as far south as Velp. But did the van Heemstras have weeks to spare? Audrey’s once-plump face had grown thin by now, her eyes dull. Her wrists, knees, and ankles were swollen. She couldn’t sit comfortably because her buttocks had withered away, and she couldn’t get warm no matter how many blankets she wrapped herself in.
The seriousness of hunger edema in children across the Netherlands made the Red Cross effort a race against time. And yet the lack of food was only one part of the suffering of the nation.
“It is impossible to describe what radical and dire consequences the lack of coal is having for the Netherlands,” wrote a Red Cross official, “and how incredibly primitive life has become.”
For the van Heemstras, the lack of heat and electricity exacerbated an already dire situation. But for Audrey, hunger and its consequences overrode everything else. And for all, the war had never left. Audrey lived exclusively in the cellar now with her mother, Meisje, and Opa, their mattresses moved down there. They would make mad dashes up to the toilet off the kitchen or, during heavy shelling, resort to use of a bucket. There was no other choice but to live this way as a war that could not possibly grow more hellish did exactly that.
Audrey would later talk about a particular evening in early March 1945. She said, “We had no food whatsoever, and my aunt said to me, ‘Tomorrow we’ll have nothing to eat, so the best thing to do is stay in bed and conserve our energy.’”
But Audrey loved to tell this story not because of the privation, but because of what happened next, thanks no doubt to Dr. Visser ’t Hooft: “That very night a member of the Underground brought us food—flour, jam, oatmeal, cans of butter.” For Velp, the famine was breaking, and for Audrey, the timing of the food’s arrival after Meisje’s gloomy statement gave the young girl a belief in her own personal luck that she would keep close at hand through a lifetime of struggles. “You see?” she said. “I’ve had black moments, but when I hit rock-bottom, there’s always something there for me.”
Other Gelderlanders would not be so fortunate. After dark on the evening of 6 March, ten miles north of the Beukenhof, between Arnhem and Apeldoorn at a country crossroads known as Woeste Hoeve, four members of the Dutch Resistance lay in wait to hijack a truck they could then use to distribute food supplies to Dutch civilians. When headlights approached, the Resistance men flagged down the vehicle, which turned out to be not a truck but an SS staff car.
The driver rose up over the windshield of the BMW convertible and barked, “Don’t you know who we are?” He drew his luger and the Resistance men opened up on the vehicle with British-made Sten guns. More than 200 bullets shattered the windshield, tore up the doors and fenders, flattened the back tires, and killed the driver. Now the vehicle was of no use for a food heist, and the Resistance fighters fled into the night on their bicycles.
They didn’t know that left behind was SS Gen. Hanns Albin Rauter, head of the Dutch security police and the most feared German in all the Netherlands. This ruthless officer with the dueling scars was on his way toward Apeldoorn from his office in Arnhem when the car came under attack. His aide joined the driver in death, and Rauter lay an hour in pools of blood until finally discovered along the lonely stretch of road. He had bullets in his lungs, shoulder, thigh, jaw, and hand and was scraped off the floor of the car and taken to Apeldoorn. The SD from Arnhem investigated immediately as Rauter, one of the men instrumental in the death of Uncle Otto and his four companions not to mention a mile-long list of other innocent Dutchmen, clung to life in the hospital. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS in Berlin and Rauter’s boss, ordered 500 executions, which Seyss-Inquart thought might set off a general revolt.
Two days after the ambush, 116 political prisoners and captured Resistance fighters from Arnhem and Apeldoorn were trucked to the spot where Rauter’s car had been hit, Woeste Hoeve. All 116 were machine-gunned in reprisal for what had been done to Rauter. But that didn’t end it. The Green Police ran rampant through Velp and spread “moffenterror,” in this case roughing up civilians, making arrests for the most minor offenses, and holding those arrested to act as forced labor. The moff also stole anything of value, particularly food and bicycles. For the Dutch, this was just another cruel act by the occupier because now more than ever, bicycles were needed to reach the food now arriving in town.
It was during this time that Audrey got caught up in the SD’s hostility and retributions for Rauter’s ambushing. She said in a 1988 interview for Dutch television, “I did once witness some men being tegen de muur gezet (set against the wall) and shot for some kind of reprisal. You know how they used to make people stop, and you couldn’t walk on.” She said after the executions the street was opened again.
During these days of Nazi payback she also came closest to entering a nightmare situation that might have killed her. On the streets of Velp, she walked into a Green Police roundup of Dutch girls and women to work in German kitchens. It was the occurrence that always had worried the baron and Ella: a teenage girl walking about during the day in wartime. Green guards herded Audrey and others into the back of a truck at gunpoint.
“I was picked right off the streets with a dozen others,” said Audrey. The truck began to move but then made another stop during the roundup. By now, such German police weren’t the cream of the crop—they were teenagers and old men, the bottom of the barrel. “When they turned to get more women, I nipped off and ran,” she said. Hepburn lore would claim that Audrey hid in a bombed-out building for a month. In fact, she ran straight home to the Beukenhof “and stayed indoors for a month.” Now, even volunteer work at the hospital was out of the question.
No one could guess in what direction the winds of war would blow next. The British had made their way north from Nijmegen through the Betuwe and now sat on the southern shore of the Rhine where they could gaze on the jagged skyline of a destroyed Arnhem. Their shells blasted the city from close range and snipers picked off Dutch citizens forced to dig slit trenches for the Germans. Above, Allied fighters crisscrossed the skies looking for targets of opportunity, including the chance to shoot down V1s headed for Antwerp.
By the day, the final death gasps of war drew closer to Velp. “There was a lot of shooting and shelling from across the [Rhine] river,” said Audrey, “so constant bombing and explosions. And this would go on all night and most of the day; there would be small moments where you’d go up for fresh air and see how much of your house was left, and we’d go back under again.”
The Americans had crossed into Germany to the east. Patton’s Third Army was rampaging through the German countryside and had reached as far as Ludwigshafen. Suddenly, the Tiger II tanks stationed in Arnhem were heard rumbling up Hoofdstraat in the dusk of evening on their way east to answer desperate calls for defense of the fatherland.
Tuesday, 27 March, passed like all the others, to the sounds of war: fighters and bombers overhead, artillery in the distance, occasional bursts of machine-gun fire, and a smattering of thumps from the anti-aircraft batteries. But after midnight it grew quieter.
In the Beukenhof cellar, Audrey could hear only the hum of a fighter plane overhead taking advantage of the clear sky and bright moonlight to look for moving targets. Then came a chilling sound but one all too familiar to the citizens of Velp: A V1 had launched off to the east. As with all such launches, she listened intently for the puttering motor to carry the death machine on past Velp.
Directly overhead she could hear the fighter firing its machine guns; who knew what might be the target? Then, dear God, the evil pulsing of the V1 motor stopped. The plane had been shooting at the V1 and had hit it! But where was the explosion? All knew at once: The buzz bomb was going to come down in the middle of Velp—instincts were keen after so long at the front lines.
Breathless seconds followed in the cellar as the V1 spiraled earthward in a building scream of high-speed flight. Was this the end?
The explosion rocked the earth. Attached to it, the roar of smashing glass sounded all around. Screams joined the cacophony. There had been so many moments like this, where afterward Audrey wondered if the villa still stood above their heads, or if it was ablaze, or if those that had been killed a second ago were friends or family. Out the small cellar window in the sliver of world that could be seen, there were no flames. There was just the deep blue velvet of night. About them grew stillness. The only sound was the lone fighter plane, the villain in this aerial play, heading back toward England in the distant night sky. Yes, that pilot had perhaps saved a detonation in Antwerp, but, oh, what had he done to Velp?
As a leading citizen of the community, the baron rushed out of the basement with the women trailing behind. Yes, there was a curfew but it meant nothing at a time of such desperation. They rushed down Rozendaalselaan and in the night could see a blazing fire beyond the rooflines on Hoofdstraat. It was so close and they were heading right toward it. By the time they reached the village center there was glass everywhere, blown out of every window and storefront.
People ran toward the fire from all directions, and the van Heemstras followed the flow of traffic, rushing across the main street and down Oranjestraat, where they found a scene of utter devastation. As they approached, they saw that all the houses on the right side of the street were gone or reduced to rubble and blazing. Bodies intact and in pieces could be seen littering the street in the firelight. As Audrey took all this in, another V1 puttered over. Everyone ducked on instinct. This one malfunctioned and fell some distance away. The Velpsche fire engine, the one stolen by the moff, would have come in handy this night—except there wasn’t running water to fight the flames anyway. Instead, rescue efforts centered on recovering the dead in the houses not burning, including several children of the family van Remmen.
Steven Jansen lived just a few doors up from the V1’s point of impact. In his diary he wrote, “Searches are conducted for victims under the heaps of rubble. Several are saved. For nine people, no help is possible. The night is endless. However, thirty V1s fly over. At least eight crash down in the surroundings…. Finally, the day breaks.”
But it’s another day of war, with planes menacing the village and artillery exchanges punctuating every hour. And of course there are V1s. But wait…
On 29 March Allied planes flew over Velp with what seemed to be ferocity—fighter-bombers at low level. Waves of them. Then, a ways off to the east came the sound of booms, booms, and more booms, so many and so heavy that the ground trembled. The citizens of the village could only thank God that this time, they had been spared.
Later came word: The V1 launch sites east of the IJssel had been flattened, and at long last the menace of the German terror weapon was at an end, not only for distant Antwerp but for the Dutch in Velp who had lived for three-and-a-half agonizing months under its curse.
Then came more good news. Food! A new wave of shipments from the Swedish rescue missions poured into Velp along with more generous ration coupons: for a two-week period, 2400 grams of bread, 4 kilograms of potatoes, 125 grams of meat, 200 grams of cheese, and 80 grams of oils. It arrived in quantities generous enough, as per the Swedish plan, that no one would have to wait in a line hours long.
The van Heemstras ate a rare meal of substance, and the baron crept across the street after dark to listen to Radio Oranje on the Mantels’ radio set. Allied forces were blazing through Europe and the Germans were desperate—hanging on by a thread. Fear now centered around the possibility of a final battle for Velp that might lay waste to everything, as had happened in Arnhem and Oosterbeek. The German presence in Velp remained strong, and with the tanks rolling through, the planes flying over, and the rockets and shells falling, it seemed likely to the Dutch that nobody was going to make it through alive.