Audrey Hepburn’s Birthday Present
The Liberation of Holland
On Friday, May 4, 1945, living at her grandfather’s villa at Velp with a host of refugees as house guests, Audrey Hepburn turned sixteen. She and her mother, both near to starvation, had heard of the radio reports that said the Allies were on the brink of liberating occupied Holland. But Audrey’s birthday passed without any sign of liberation. And then, the next day, Audrey received a belated birthday present. At 8:00 a.m. on May 5, the tanks, jeeps and trucks of the 1st Canadian Army began rolling into German-occupied Holland. At last the Netherlands was again a free country. Audrey would later say that she whooped and hollered and danced with joy. Standing in the crowd watching the Canadian troops pass by as they advanced into occupied territory, she wanted to kiss every one of them.1
Sixteen-year-old Audrey was five feet six inches tall, but she weighed ninety pounds. Her starvation diet over the past seven months left her afflicted with anemia, jaundice and asthma. But with the Canadians came food. Truckloads of food and candy and cigarettes and things that the Dutch had not seen in years. Simple things like salt and sugar, which had become beyond luxuries in their absence from Dutch tables; they had become the stuff that dreams are made of. The next day, Audrey sat down to the most luxurious breakfast she could remember—oatmeal from the Canadians coated with sugar, also from the Canadians. Audrey cleaned her bowl. It was delicious but so rich that her system couldn’t cope with it—the meal made her violently ill. But Audrey didn’t mind. She would never forget that first meal as a free person once again.2
Several days later, the Canadian troops stationed in the area would set up a gasoline-powered electric generator in the village square at Velp, hooking it up to a movie projector. Audrey and her teenaged friends joined the rest of the people who packed the square that night to watch the first Hollywood movie screened in the town in five years.3 Audrey never could remember which movie it was. Everything was too exciting, too heady. A good feed, a movie, and the gift of freedom. Now that was a heck of a way to celebrate a sixteenth birthday.
On May 4, John Eyking, a Dutch child living in the coastal village of Beverwijk, northwest of Amsterdam, saw packages tumble from the belly of a Flying Fortress that zoomed by overhead. Eyking’s father had a market garden where he had grown tulips, daffodils and hyacinths before the war, but he had sown it with grain, vegetables and fruit following the German occupation. The family had a few farm animals, too, and these were herded every night into a barn, where, since the start of the Hunger Winter, family members had taken turns standing guard over them with pitchforks to prevent their being stolen.
Now packages fell into the Eyking garden from the passing B-17. When the family ran to them and opened them, they found that the packages contained luxuries such as margarine, sugar, condensed milk and candy. Only months prior to this, the Dutch Resistance had set off a bomb in Beverwijk. Aimed at killing a German general when he passed in his staff car, it missed its target, but it had destroyed another military vehicle. In reprisal, occupation troops had dragged ten Dutchmen at random from their Beverwijk homes, lined them up against a wall, and shot them.
John Eyking’s father, terrified that he would be shot if it became known that he and his family had eaten this American contraband that had fallen from the sky, had the family members hide the food from the air drop, promising them that they would enjoy a liberation feast the day the Germans in Holland surrendered. And that was just what they would do several days later.4