Dutch Girl Read online

  Diana Mitford said, “It goes without saying that I saw on these occasions a very different Hitler from the man possessed by demonic energy who had changed the face of Germany.” She confided in her autobiography, “The truth is that in private life he was exceptionally charming, clever and original, and that he inspired affection.”

  Ella was over the moon to meet Hitler and witness a Germany reborn, not only the military formations and the swastikas but the amazing autobahns and thriving factories. But as Ella would learn a little later, Joseph’s trip to Germany with the BUF was more than a sightseeing tour. It was a means to an end—a stepping-stone.

  Soon after Joseph and Ella had gathered up their children in Oosterbeek and returned to Brussels, Joseph walked out on his family to the horror of both mother and daughter. One story had Ella walking in on Joseph in bed with the nanny; another had the baron ordering Ruston out of the family and threatening prosecution for draining bank accounts; still a third had Queen Wilhelmina urging her friend the baron to shut up Ella because a Dutch baroness had no business being mixed up in Nazi shenanigans. Whatever happened, there seemed to have been a scene—something shocking that broke up the family for good.

  Audrey would claim that the trauma of it turned Ella’s hair gray overnight, which may have been a child’s viewpoint as her mother lost interest in coloring her hair. Ella’s emotional investment was clear, and she refused to give up on a partner who may indeed have been unreliable all along. In the autobiographical novel she wrote later in life, she alluded to Ruston when she wrote of a character who was speaking of Ella. The character wrote that Ella would “be terribly loyal to the man she loves. And if she should be disappointed in him, if she should know him to be different to what he appeared to be, if she should be warned against him by others, I would expect her to say, ‘I know, but I still want to believe in him.’”

  To her daughter and others, Ella was shown to be far needier than anyone would have suspected; friends feared she would kill herself. Years later, Audrey said of her mother: “She cried day in, day out. I thought that she never would stop.” Seeing such heartbreak in a mother whose strength she had never questioned left Adriaantje, at age six, “terrified. You say to yourself, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’ The ground has gone out from under you.” Audrey would always call it the most traumatic event of her life.

  For the little girl, the abandonment would have ramifications that rippled through her time line, not just for weeks or months but for all the succeeding decades. Audrey said, “I’m not afraid to say something of that feeling has stayed with me through my own relationships.”

  Time and again in interviews when she was a Hollywood star and then a UNICEF ambassador, Audrey would return to that theme, when her father walked out on a six-year-old girl: “I think it is hard sometimes for children who are dumped,” she said. “I don’t care who they are. It tortures a child beyond measure. They don’t know what the problem was. Children need two parents for their [emotional] equilibrium in life.”

  Ella groped to gather the shattered pieces of herself. But she retained her avid interest in Nazism, hinting that she hoped reconciliation with Joseph remained possible because he made her a complete person. She threw herself into planning a return to Germany with the Mitfords for the 1935 Nuremberg rally in September. With Joseph relocated to London, he made it known that he wanted his daughter to be educated in England, and so Ella decided to take Adriaantje to a private school in Elham, a village in county Kent south of Canterbury and not far from Dover in the southeast corner of the island. It was a place the Rustons had visited on vacation.

  The decision blindsided an already-fragile child. Alex and Ian, now ages fifteen and eleven, were shipped off to The Hague to live with relatives. Suddenly, the little girl was isolated with strangers in a different country hundreds of miles from home. She would never quite recover from the shock of the separation; nor would she truly overcome the actions of her mother during the ensuing weeks, months, and years.

  *See the van Heemstra family tree for more information.

  3

  Exile

  As Audrey said later, “I went to a little private school in England as, at the time, we were living in Belgium and my mother thought it was right for me to speak English, being brought up as an English child.” After all, she was the daughter of a British citizen and so British by birth, despite having been born in Belgium. But Audrey’s explanation reinforces the theory that Ella plotted for an eventual reconciliation with her estranged husband. Later, Ella would claim that the separation from Ruston ended her interest in Nazism, but a second article written by Baroness van Heemstra for the BUF proves that the contrary was true. She seemed to consider herself an international citizen with no national allegiances. Yes, she had been born in the Netherlands, but she had traveled the world for a decade, resided in Belgium and England, and loved Germany and spoke its language fluently.

  Ella rented an old brick home called Orchard Cottage on narrow Duck Street just off the village square in Elham, a countryside village dominated by the thirteenth century St. Mary the Virgin Anglican Church, which sat just across the street from the house in which Adriaantje now lived. The church dominated the view from every front window. Before long Ella was off for Nuremberg, where she would sit enthralled at Zeppelin Field and other venues for the annual Reichsparteitag, Hitler’s week-long military spectacle. With emotional deafness she heard proclaimed the new laws targeting Jews, not as German but as “other.” These laws, brought to reality with Ella in attendance, sealed the fate of Jews and the world and made possible all that happened afterward. And her actions here would have a crippling effect on her daughter as well.

  Said Ella of the German army parade: “To watch their boundless enthusiasm as they march past in endless formations, hailing their beloved ‘Führer,’ Adolf Hitler, is one of the most inspiring sights on earth. Hitler has a magnetic and most charming personality, which fully reflects the spiritual aspirations of this mighty people.”

  From Nuremberg Ella traveled north to Munich where Unity Mitford found “Heemstra” encamped inside the Osteria Bavaria awaiting Hitler. Ella sat with her traveling companion and lover, British journalist Michael “Micky” Burn, and with Unity’s boyfriend, Erich Widmann of the SS. Unity wrote in a letter to her sister Diana on 19 September 1935 that “I made them sit in the garden and I sat alone inside” so that Hitler would notice her, and only her, when he arrived. A while later the Führer showed up and invited Unity to join him.

  Of this Munich leg of the trip Ella wrote, “All the time I was there I never heard an angry word, and yet, far from being sluggardly, the people are keen and alert and full of life. They are happy; they are content and fully satisfied to live today for the glory of an ever-better future.”

  For the girl known to Elham residents as Audrey Ruston, and more often as “Little Audrey,” life was anything but colorful or inspiring or happy. Her father had been torn away, her mother was gone, and the North Sea separated her from beloved brothers, Alex and Ian. She was enrolled with thirteen other pupils at a private school in a brick row house on the village square. Four spinster governesses oversaw the curriculum: head-of-house Alice Catherine Rigden and her sisters, Norah Mabel, Maria Amelia, and Blanche Henrietta.

  Music and English teacher Norah Mabel Rigden formed a special bond with the little girl in exile from mainland Europe, and both subjects, music and English, would coalesce into the foundation of a Hollywood career almost twenty years later.

  The rented home on Duck Lane was owned by the Butcher family, and it was Mary Butcher who cared for Adriaantje while Ella remained on the Continent. From the front door, the schoolgirl had but to turn right, then right again at the square, and she arrived at school in thirty seconds—which came in handy given the often dreary rains and fog influenced by the English Channel just five miles south and the North Sea not much farther east. Not that Adriaantje looked forward to rushing to school. She didn’t enjoy t
he process of education; she never would.

  “I liked the children and my teachers,” she said in an interview at the time of Roman Holiday, “but I never liked the process of learning. I was very restless and could never sit still for hours on end, learning things. I enjoyed learning the subjects I liked—I always loved history and mythology and astronomy—but I hated anything to do with arithmetic or that sort of thing. School in itself I found very dull and I was happy when I was finished.”

  Peggy Baker, slightly older than Audrey, lived next door on Duck Lane and said the new girl “seemed fairly lonely, especially during the long school holidays.” The fear of abandonment caused by her father’s departure was also on display for Baker: “Our gardens were next to each other and she was always calling out my name.” During this period—late 1935 and early 1936—Audrey put on weight and soon became a sad and introverted, moon-faced girl, already tall and now heavy, with a habit of biting her nails and complaining of blinding headaches. And the asthma showed up occasionally as well; it was never life threatening, but always a concern.

  Divorce proceedings commenced and through that period, Ella remained low-key. After publication of her late September 1935 article in The Blackshirt entitled “At Nuremberg,” she didn’t communicate again publicly about National Socialism. From the perspective of the baron and the van Heemstra family, Dutch citizen Ella was behaving recklessly and making a spectacle of herself. Yes, the baron was pro-German and had courted German business while governor of Suriname. Yes, the Germans were first cousins of the Dutch, and the van Heemstra home in Oosterbeek sat near enough to the German border. But by 1937 stories abounded about German brown shirts and SS assaulting Jews on the streets of major cities. All Europe worried about Hitler’s military buildup and the expansionism that could result. The beautiful, positive impression that Germany had made through August 1936, when Berlin hosted the Summer Olympic Games, was mutating into something malevolent after the Olympic torch had left the Reich.

  Records don’t track Ella’s progress from 1936 to 1938, although she boarded the boys for a year with the Cohen Stuart family at Beverningkstaat 38 in The Hague. Despite the lack of available information about this period in Ella’s life, details that are known about 1939 and 1940 indicate that she still engaged in pro-German activities and relationships.

  Residents of Elham remember Baroness van Heemstra coming to visit her daughter for two or three weeks at a stretch, sometimes with one or both sons, and the more Adriaantje saw her mother and brothers, the better the growing girl handled her time in the English countryside. By now she had joined the local Brownie troop, and in 1937 at age eight participated in a production of Humpty Dumpty, playing one of the king’s men. She was at this time still taller than the others, sporting a pageboy haircut and prone to bouts of overeating.

  As she got a little older and saw her brothers more often, she loved playing with Alex, Ian, and Peggy from next door in ruins of the local brickworks. In Audrey’s reminiscences about this period, she never mentions visits by her father; he must have made some or she wouldn’t have been sent to England in the first place or spent so much time there over a four-year period. But her father had been and would continue to be a shady character. On the pretense of working for the European Press Agency, he traveled extensively on behalf of the Third Reich and engaged in money laundering among other activities outside the law. In practical terms Adriaantje’s father had become a full-fledged German agent who caught the attention of MI5, the British intelligence service. When he became aware that MI5 was on to him, he dropped out of sight.

  The eight year old must certainly have heard the name Hitler in conversations among adults. But as Audrey always said, “A child is a child.” This child had had another new influence enter her life and take it over: Norah Rigden had gotten the Ruston girl interested in dance.

  “I fell in love with dancing,” said Audrey later. “There was a young dancer who would come up from London once a week and give ballet classes. I loved it, just loved it.”

  Said Joan Hawkins, a schoolmate of Adriaantje, “If anything singled her out it was the ballet lessons she used to go to in Folkestone.” It was a drive of a few miles from Elham south over narrow country lanes to reach the much larger Folkestone, a harbor town on the English Channel where the Belgian girl received dance lessons from the London ballerina.

  In May 1938 Adriaantje turned nine and Joan Hawkins attended the birthday party Ella threw for her daughter in the village hall. “What I chiefly remember,” said Joan, “is a tape that the mother stretched along the wall, to which were pinned little gifts; and the baroness led us up, one by one and blindfolded, to grope for our present…, but I always felt she steered each child toward the gift she wanted him or her to have. She was quite manipulative that way.”

  That summer Ella took her three children on a two-month trip to Italy. “They visited their friends Colonna,” said Luca Dotti, Audrey’s son. Photos show the three youngsters at an airfield where they flew in biplanes with Don Mario Colonna, Duke of Rignano, who “would tragically crash that summer in July.”

  The photos show Adriaantje looking happy. At Elham she had friends and dance lessons, along with a relationship with her mother that showed signs of healing and at least sporadic visits from her mercurial father. All the while, Europe quaked every time the growing German empire flexed its muscles. Germany had announced an Anschluss, or union, with Austria in March 1938; in October German troops crossed the Czech border and reclaimed the Sudetenland; in November Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass,” began open war against Jews inside Germany. In March 1939 with German troops on the doorstep, the remainder of Czechoslovakia surrendered.

  Seeing these signs of trouble for Europe, Ella applied for a Dutch immigration permit for Audrey—one less thing to worry about in the future. By now Ella had relocated from Brussels to her parents’ villa in Oosterbeek and had brought Alex and Ian back as well. All stayed in the roomy villa with her youngest sister, Arnoudina. It had become urgent for Ella and her five siblings to be close to their mother, who was confined to bed and had been gravely ill for months. Elbrig, Baroness van Asbeck, Ella’s mother and Adriaantje’s grandmother, died at age sixty-five on 28 March 1939.

  After the passing of the elder baroness, her widower husband Baron van Heemstra—Adriaantje’s opa—sold the Villa Roestenburg in Oosterbeek to the Kristensen family. It had been the home and woodlands near the Tafelberg where Adriaantje and her brothers had played so lustily earlier in the decade. The baron now moved four miles east to rooms he rented in Castle Zijpendaal, a three-story, eighteenth-century brick palace in the wooded hills above Arnhem in Sonsbeek Park. The baron’s daughter (and Ella’s older sister) Meisje and her husband Otto, Count van Limburg Stirum, also moved into a set of rented rooms in Zijpendaal to keep the baron company.

  Zijpendaal, or “de Zijp” as all called it, offered a favorable location for the baron’s business and social interests in Arnhem, along with eye appeal for a titled family. The elder van Heemstra was chairman of the board of the local hospital, Diaconessenhuis, and also involved in a number of charities. The baron believed firmly in the societal obligations of Dutch nobility to help those less fortunate and instilled in all his children similar principles. Family ties to the ruling House of Oranje also remained strong—Ella’s younger sister, Marianne, Baroness van Heemstra, became a lady in waiting to Queen Wilhelmina’s daughter, Princess Juliana.

  An era had ended—the van Heemstras in Oosterbeek—and another had begun, with Ella now joining her father, three of her sisters, and her brother in Arnhem. By Adriaantje’s tenth birthday in May, the divorce of Ella and Joseph was final, and Ella moved into a one-story, brick row house with the boys at Sickeszlaan 7 on a hill just off Sonsbeek Park above Arnhem Centraal. Ella began to entertain the idea of relocating her daughter from county Kent to Sickeszlaan as well, but Adriaantje had grown to love her ballet instruction, and so Ella resisted the move.

 
; Then in August, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty that freed Hitler to attack Poland. He did so on the first day of September, and a few days later, Poland’s ally Great Britain declared war on Germany. Bombs could be falling on England at any moment, and Adriaantje was located in Kent on the general flight path of German bombers heading for London. In a panic Ella made contact with her ex-husband, who agreed it was best to return their daughter to the Netherlands. Ella reasoned that her country had been off-limits to the Germans in the Great War a quarter century earlier. She had met Hitler and believed she knew this man—he would never send men under arms into such a peaceful, neutral place.

  With Ruston’s agreement, Ella petitioned the British government to allow Adriaantje to travel back to the Netherlands. By the time red tape was cleared, it was 14 December. Ella arranged by phone for Adriaantje’s caretaker, Mary Butcher, to pack the girl up and take her to the train. Schoolmate Joan Hawkins was surprised to see her friend wearing traveling clothes and climbing hastily into a car to be driven away. There wasn’t even a moment for a good-bye, and the next time Joan saw Audrey, it was on the silver screen.

  Butcher took the girl straight to the station in Folkestone and put her on the train to London. There, father met up with daughter and he escorted her to Brighton Hove and Worthing Joint Municipal Airport, which had begun servicing KLM flights with the declaration of war with Germany.