Dutch Girl Read online

  Of the magic of these performances Tilson Thomas would say that only Audrey Hepburn could have been his partner on such a journey with Anne because both Dutch girls knew that war, and that Netherlands, and that sisterhood. He said, “To hear the fine delicate phrasing she gives…with the music providing the fabric, it’s as if you were listening in to Anne Frank herself.” Both Audrey and Michael knew in their hearts that Anne was with them in spirit.

  From first reading and through the end of her life, Audrey went day to day with Anne her delicate secret shadow. The knowledge of Anne’s life and death took its toll on a woman who had never gotten over the ordeal of the Nazis, the executions, and the Jews, not only in Arnhem and Velp, but across the length and breadth of the Netherlands where all but a fraction of the 105,000 who were sent away had perished. She had been there among them and seen too much with her own eyes, including friends who suddenly, mysteriously disappeared never to be seen again. “I tell you,” she said, “all the nightmares I’ve ever had are mingled with that.”

  Thinking about the Frank family or any of the Jews in the Netherlands could always produce a shudder and suddenly the years would peel away and there it would unfold, all over again.

  14

  Just Dutchmen

  “I have memories,” said Audrey. “More than once I was at the [Arnhem Centraal] station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon.”

  It’s no coincidence that visits to cemeteries in Arnhem and across Holland reveal many dates of death on tombstones that read 10 May 1940. The day the Germans invaded, distraught Dutch Jews committed suicide because they sensed doom but didn’t have the energy or the money or the opportunity to flee their homeland. They saw no way out and for them a future under Nazi occupation meant slow death, so why not spare the torture and end it now?

  A report commissioned in 1950 by the Netherlands State Institute for War Documentation noted thirty suicides in The Hague alone, with similar numbers in other cities, towns, and villages across the country. A report in 1946 looking at “the various methods of suicide (or, in the case of young children, of murder) most commonly employed concluded that ‘most of these Jews took an overdose of veronal, though gassing, hanging, shooting, wrist-slashing, and injections of morphine were also used.’” The report alluded to an “epidemic of suicides.”

  Jews had been part of the fabric of Dutch society for centuries. Since the reign of Queen Wilhelmina began before the turn of the twentieth century, all faiths were welcome in her realm. Yes, by the mid-1930s she had grown wary of accepting Jews like the Otto Frank family who were fleeing Nazi Germany because she wanted to avoid Hitler’s attention. Above all, the neutrality of the Netherlands in the Great War had lulled most Dutchmen into a sense of security that was shattered when the German Sixth Army marched in on 10 May. Those Jews that Audrey had seen trudging along the twin boulevards Jansbinnensingel and Jansbuitensingel that dark day of invasion were heading to port cities where they begged and pleaded to find passage on ships headed to England. Some got out safely; most were turned away and ended up back in their homes because there was nowhere else to go. All attempting to leave the Netherlands had to contend with the fact that they were hemmed in to the north and west by water and to the east by Germany. Escape south into Belgium or southwest into France was impractical because the Nazis were there too. It then became a matter of waiting at home for the inevitable.

  To the Nazi occupation government, a Dutch citizen was considered a Jew based on having at least one grandparent who was “known to have been a member or temporary member of the ‘Jewish community.’” At first the administration of Seyss-Inquart seemed to be treating the Dutch Jewish population with far more lenience than their counterparts in Germany. Seyss-Inquart was making no reference to Jews, and for a number of months they were considered “just Dutchmen.” Yes, as early as July 1940, Jews were forbidden in the Dutch Air Raid Precaution, or ARP, Service. But then life went on as before until October, when Jews were forbidden from all civil service positions. When university professors and their students protested, they too fell under the administration’s scrutiny. Soon all businesses had to register whether they had a Jewish owner or partner. The answer to the question “Who is a Jew?” grew much more granular, and all people in this category were recorded. From there, the situation grew increasingly grim. Soon Jews were being openly discriminated against and barred from theaters and other public places.

  In February 1941 for the first time, Jews were confronted and beaten on the streets of Amsterdam as they had been for years in Germany. The attacks were organized and carried out by the Dutch SS, known as the WA, and by the NSB, the Dutch Nazis. The reaction by the Dutch mainstream was instant: Citizens on the street defended their Jewish brethren, fighting back and bloodying the attackers. More than bloodying them; the defenders frightened and humiliated the WA and NSB thugs. Hanns Albin Rauter, head of the SS in the Netherlands, responded with furor and unleashed terror raids in Amsterdam that arrested hundreds of Jewish Dutch citizens between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. The Dutch countered with a general strike in support of the city’s Jewish population on 25 and 26 February 1941. The ruling authority then dissolved all municipal councils to short-circuit future plans to disrupt public services.

  So it escalated through 1941, as the ruthless Rauter worked in concert with Himmler toward the systematic annihilation of the Jews in Holland. In May 1942 it was required that Jews wear the yellow Star of David on clothing. They were forbidden to ride in trains and required to surrender their bicycles and automobiles to limit the ability to travel. Then the registrations of Jewish Dutch from eighteen months earlier were put to use rounding up individuals to be sent as forced labor in work camps and families to be deported at a rate of 600 people per day. It was around this time, July 1942, when the Franks went into hiding in Amsterdam. Audrey had just turned thirteen in Arnhem and the stroll from the apartment on Jansbinnensingel to the Arnhem Centraal Station was just two blocks.

  “I’d go to the station with my mother to take a train and I’d see cattle trucks filled with Jews,” she said, describing it to a British reporter in 1991 as “the worst kind of horror. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on the train. I was a child observing a child. I don’t know how much longer it was before we knew what was happening—sooner than you did in Britain. Then I realized what would have happened to him.”

  In interviews later in life she recalled time and again the horror of what she witnessed in Arnhem: “I saw families with little children, with babies, herded into meat wagons—trains of big wooden vans with just a little slat open at the top and all those faces peering out at you. And on the platform were soldiers herding more Jewish families with their poor little bundles and small children. There would be families together and they would separate them, saying, ‘The men go there and the women go there.’ Then they would take the babies and put them in another van.”

  Soon, van Heemstra neighbors and family friends disappeared. Favorite shop owners, musicians in the orchestra, dance students, were now gone. From the summer of 1942 through 1944, more than 97,000 Dutch Jews were shipped to Transit Camp Westerbork seventy miles north of Arnhem. From there 89,000 were sent on to their deaths in Auschwitz or Sobibór in Poland—including Anne Frank, her mother, and sister. From the beginning of the war to the end, almost 105,000 Dutch Jews died at the hands of the Germans.

  “Don’t discount anything you hear or read about the Nazis,” said Audrey. “It was worse than you could ever imagine.” What would Otto have thought about the injustice of it all? Of man’s inhumanity to man? He had been the eternal optimist, and this was a new and terrible world.

  But all was not lost for the Jewish population of the Netherlands. Somewhere around 30,000 Jews became onderduikers, taken in and hidden by the largely Protestant pop
ulation who shared more than their homes and ever-tightening rations. The daring Dutch also risked machine-gunning if they were found hiding Jews. In the village of Velp alone, about 600 Jews were onderduikers. A few were rooted out and shot or sent to Westerbork, but in the end, most survived thanks in large part to a band of stubborn and ultimately compassionate Dutch civilians who simply wouldn’t let the Nazis win.

  15

  Warmest Praise

  Audrey was all about dancing as 1943 wound down. “It’s good discipline and sheer drill,” she explained of the rigors of ballet. “When you dance you must keep fit—go to bed early, get up early, drill, drill, drill.”

  She certainly wasn’t up on the politics of war, but when she returned home on the tram from Arnhem and the Muziekschool, she couldn’t help but learn of the latest bit of intrigue in Velp. Buildings and villas were being confiscated by the Green Police seemingly at random. But there was nothing random about their actions—the SD had moved their national headquarters into the Park Hotel on Hoofdstraat, just four blocks from the Beukenhof. The Germans now expected invasion by Allied armies from England on the coast of France, and were moving their offices inland to the east, closer to Germany. Velp with its beautiful villas and other infrastructure—a sturdy bank, luxury hotels—became a safe harbor for the ruling administration. In short order, Velp, the home of Audrey Hepburn-Ruston and her family, became the most important place to the Nazi occupation government in the entirety of the Netherlands.

  Arthur Seyss-Inquart commandeered a home on Parkstraat, the next street over from Rozendaalselaan. Now the number-one Nazi in Holland, the man most responsible for Otto’s death, was a neighbor to the van Heemstras just yards away.

  Hanns Albin Rauter, the ruthless SS man with the dueling scar, took over one of the finest red brick villas in Arnhem at Velperweg 101, just across the city line from Velp.

  Eviction from a home built with loving care after a lifetime of dealings in the East Indies would always begin with a pounding at the door by the Green Police at any hour and then a demand for the departure of the citizens living there. But, oh, by the way, leave your furniture and dishes behind. It was a new sword of Damocles hanging over van Heemstra heads as around them more than a hundred villas were claimed by the occupiers. It became a situation so dire for the population that a new evacuation agency was established in Velp to find housing for those displaced from its finest homes. And every hour the baron, Meisje, Ella, and Audrey feared the dreaded knock on the door of the Beukenhof or a phone call from their landlord, the Reformed Church, to say they must vacate.

  German soldiers’ pounding at the front door did finally come, but it wasn’t to confiscate the structure; it was to place a radio monitoring station in the attic, which meant a steady stream of Wehrmacht soldiers tramping up and down the stairs whenever the need arose.

  With so many Germans commandeering seemingly anything of value in the village, Meisje decided to stash Otto’s Renault sedan and found help from F.J. “Frits” Besseling, a member of the Resistance who worked at his mother’s flower shop on Hoofdstraat. Besseling concealed the Renault in the barn behind his parents’ home where this unusual onderduiker remained in safety, hidden under straw.

  Just as relentless as the aggressions of the Green Police were the missions of the American Air Forces in the skies above, and by now Fliegerhorst Deelen, the German fighter base just up the road from Velp, scrambled fighters often to intercept American bombers at 20,000 feet. Deelen also launched fighters to go against British formations at night. By late 1943 the daylight hours often featured burning American B-17s and B-24s falling all over the Netherlands from brutal air battles that covered dozens and hundreds of miles. Surviving air crews would abandon their crippled planes by parachute and float to earth to be picked up by the moffen or sheltered by lion-hearted Dutch civilians.

  Friday, 19 November, had begun like any other, quiet at first then with the roar of an American formation heard at late morning through low, dense cloud cover. The Allied planes must have been flying directly over Velp because at midday the batteries of big 88mm German anti-aircraft cannon in the entire area began to thunder skyward, aiming at the planes flying over. The Diogenes command bunker at Deelen used radar to track the planes through the clouds and feed coordinates to fire control. Boom-boom-boom went the German guns, punching up through the cloud cover, in a twenty-mile radius of Velp. To ears at the Beukenhof, it was a cacophony like nothing Velp had experienced.

  Deelen’s fighter aircraft scrambled next and dogfights broke out; it couldn’t be seen but it could certainly be heard as high-rpm engines roared, climbed, dove, and fired machine guns above the cloud deck.

  Then, the van Heemstras heard a booming explosion nearby. Black smoke wafted skyward just north of the Beukenhof from the direction of Castle Rozendaal. The family’s thoughts immediately went to the local kin, the van Pallandts. The Velpsche fire brigade sped north toward the scene, followed shortly by the Arnhemsche fire brigade. The van Heemstras were shocked and saddened to learn that the ancient castle, their favorite destination for day trips, had indeed been hit by an American incendiary bomb, which had been jettisoned by a crippled B-17 heavy bomber that was trying to lighten its load. The German press reported gleefully that the 100-pound bomb fell through the roof of the castle and exploded in living quarters between the main building and coach house. In other words, the Allies were the real enemy here.

  By some miracle, Baron and Baroness van Pallandt, their family, and their staff escaped with their lives, but the phosphorus in the bomb ignited centuries-old timber, and up went a large portion of the family’s living space along with priceless artwork and mementos. The event reminded all inhabitants of the Beukenhof that no one was safe from the war, even on a day that had started out lazy and quiet.

  For the van Heemstras, the Christmas holiday came and went. The baron and Meisje attended services at the Reformed Church in Velp South on Kerkstraat. Ella still practiced Christian Science alongside Audrey in Velp with their friends the Heringas. Said David Heringa, “Her mother the Baroness van Heemstra came to our house in Velp to practice reading the Scriptures and the Science of Health, the Christian Science Bible. She and my mother or father changed being first and second readers.”

  Churches had become the last refuge for the people of Velp to renew their strength when facing another brutal week, and another winter without enough heat and with a dwindling food supply. There weren’t even tires for the bicycles anymore—what bicycles that hadn’t been stolen by the Germans, that is. Civilian motor cars were a distant memory by now because there simply wasn’t petrol to run them. There hadn’t been for a long time.

  But for Audrey, through it all, there was still dance, even if the war exacted a running toll. “It was almost impossible to buy tights or slippers,” she said. “As long as there were any old sweaters to pull out, my mother would re-knit my tights. Sometimes we were able to buy felt to make slippers, but they never lasted more than two classes.”

  The slippers and costumes were still performance-grade for events at the Schouwburg. On 8 January 1944 the Dansschool performed its most lavish “dansavond,” or dance evening, yet with the star pupils of its professional dance class taking the stage accompanied by the Arnhem Symphony. Winja Marova headlined, performing sections of Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite. Audrey soloed the Danseuse de Delphus by Debussy, then shared the stage for a Bavarian Rhinelander dance with Elisabeth Evers, the latter aligning with the edict to focus on German culture.

  Audrey was given the concluding number of the evening as the lead soloist, dancing to La Danza by Rossini. Hannie Perk and Katy de Jongh also earned praise in Louis Couturier’s Courant review. It was an evening of such popularity that encores of the entire program were held in various venues, including at the Schouwburg on 31 January and again on 14 February.

  At one of the performances, the baron had a bouquet of bloemen handed to his granddaughter with a card that read, “I want to bestow my wa
rmest praise on Adriaantje, who today performed so poignantly and graciously.”

  This grand series of encores for the winter recital proved that, despite a late start in dance and her gangly height, Audrey had arrived as a dancer of promise and become an Arnhem celebrity. And yet the war was closing in from all directions, including and now especially from above, and the winter 1944 performances would serve as her last hurrah in the footlights of the Schouwburg for the duration of the occupation.

  In the third week of February 1944, the U.S. Eighth Air Force, composed of heavy bombers and the fighters to protect them, found an unusual stretch of good winter weather over Europe and launched Operation Argument, an attempt to knock out the German aviation industry. Before the Allies could invade Hitler’s “Fortress Europe,” they had to neutralize the Luftwaffe, and a week was devoted to the task of sending hundreds of bombers against the German aircraft-manufacturing industry. On 20 February the target was the German city of Brunswick. That morning, anti-aircraft batteries again opened up. In a country as flat as the Netherlands, with wide-open skies overhead, the anti-aircraft shells booming up from the ground and bursting high in the sky among the seemingly endless procession of bombers produced a terrifying spectacle. Debris from the exploded shells rained down on Velp and its citizens for hours.

  Two days later on 22 February, Allied fighters staged attacks on the German anti-aircraft cannon in the area. Bombs and rockets deluged Arnhem, and more fell to the south in Nijmegen, where fires blazed and black smoke rose so high in the sky it was visible in Velp at a distance of ten miles. Civilians simply weren’t used to bombs so close, but as Audrey had said, the war had to draw nearer before it could end.