Dutch Girl Page 5

  Prominent Dutch ballet master Irail Gadescov, former head of the Nederlandse Ballet, presented his troupe from the fledgling Arnhemsche Dansschool. Their spins, leaps, beating of the feet in the air, costumes—all of it mesmerized Audrey, as did the next performance by noted ballerina Winja Marova.

  Also that evening, locally renowned pianist Gerald Dekker performed pieces by Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff. Then violinist Douwe Draaisma, director of the Arnhemsche Muziekschool, performed three pieces that had been composed by Austrian-born Fritz Kreisler. On this magic evening when Audrey felt the full force of her important family, when she could communicate only with those who knew English and took the time to speak it, she was simply swept away by dance and music. Soon she would be asking her mother’s permission to resume her ballet lessons, this time at the Muziekschool, which had just relocated to Boulevard Heuvelink near the Schouwburg in central Arnhem. Ella, desperate to draw out her introverted daughter, accepted the idea with enthusiasm.

  As a member of the Dutch aristocracy, Ella, Baroness van Heemstra, established herself in Arnhem culture. She became patroness of the Arnhem String Quartet. She also joined the board of directors of the Muziekschool and aimed to enroll Audrey in its Dansschool at the first opportunity.

  During the spring of 1940, the “Sitzkrieg,” or “phony war,” was in full effect. The German army stood pat, licking wounds inflicted by the Poles in a month of battles. The French braced for attack along a sturdy defensive barrier, the Maginot Line, and England prepared for an air war and invasion by the Wehrmacht. Alex Quarles van Ufford, eldest of Ella’s children at nineteen, joined the Dutch army, which didn’t concern Ella terribly, even with all the drilling of troops and digging of trenches around Arnhem. Ella held firm to her belief that if and when the Germans did make a move against France and England, Holland would be sidestepped, as it had been in the Great War.

  By now, the full immersion of “Edda” in the Dutch language had made her passably conversant and no longer quite the laughingstock of either the Tamboersbosje school or Christian Science Sunday school. Even at age ten, she was capable of displaying a stubborn fighting spirit: “I knew I couldn’t just give up,” she said later. “I was forced to learn the language quickly. And I did. Considering what was to happen to me later, it was a useful basic experience.”

  On another occasion she painted a forlorn picture of shy Edda in a new country: “When I first got home, I cried a lot. I was whining while I ate chocolate and did my best to master Dutch. I didn’t have much distraction. I learned that language because I had nothing else to do.” But those who knew her in Arnhem during the war years would state her command of the Dutch language was “inadequate,” and in written form “terrible.” They confirmed the girl’s own assessment that her accent was “horrible.”

  It didn’t really matter to Adriaantje how well she could write anyway, because she remained as uninterested in school as she had been under the Rigdens. A classmate found her “quiet, apart,” and described the girl Edda as spending a lot of time “sitting and dreaming.” She would gaze out the window and sketch what she saw. All her life she would surprise friends and family with this ability to see and sketch in a natural, heartfelt way. All she needed was a pencil and paper, and magic resulted.

  Meneer van Loon of the Tamboersbosje said, “She did not like normal school life, but everything that went beyond routine and spoke to her fantasies interested her.” She longed for escape from this unexpected Dutch world that had ensnared her. Even with her new understanding of the language, she didn’t have much to say to those around her. “I was all stilted and shy,” Audrey would put it as an adult. In the sense that she minded her own business, she fit in well in a country where most people did the same.

  The months ticked by in 1940 with France and England trembling at the threatened menace of Hitler’s Germany. In April the Führer surprised the world again: He did not attack the Maginot Line. Instead, he ordered his armies north around mainland Europe to invade Denmark and Norway for Scandinavia’s precious iron ore reserves. Hitler must steal the many natural resources he lacked. After all, his country simply wasn’t that big, even with all the territory he had grabbed in the 1930s.

  To listen to radio reports coming out of England, the world was slowly coming apart, but the Dutch didn’t see it that way. “Dutch civilians were in denial over what was happening in Europe, even after Hitler’s invasion of Scandinavia …, which was not preceded by any declaration of war,” said Robert Kershaw, author of A Street in Arnhem. “Holland, unlike northwest Europe, had missed the devastation of 1914–18. An illusion of safe neutrality persisted.”

  In England, the famed Sadler’s Wells Ballet of London sought to take advantage of what remained a quiet time on the mainland. As artists, they thought it their duty to spread a message of peace through dance and planned a goodwill tour to Holland, Belgium, and France that would begin in early May. The slimmed-down company featured six principal dancers, including headliners Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann, and a corps de ballet of eighteen female and ten male dancers, all under the direction of forty-one-year-old ballet legend Ninette de Valois. On 6 May they performed in The Hague; on 7 May at Hengelo in the northeastern corner of the Netherlands near the German border, where they faced unexpected and hate-laced anti-English hostility. On 8 May they headed south to a much friendlier Eindhoven; and on 9 May they traveled back north and arrived at the Stadsschouwburg in Arnhem, which until recently had been considered the “backward east of the lands” in terms of the arts in general and ballet in particular. It was Ella, Baroness van Heemstra, who greeted the company on arrival.

  Since the December ballet performance that had reignited Adriaantje’s desire to dance, Ella had been looking for opportunities to keep her daughter interested. Ella asked for and was given responsibility for handling the appearance of the Sadler’s Wells company in Arnhem in another attempt to draw out her troubled, withdrawn child.

  But Ella couldn’t think only of Audrey this day. Just in the past week, the fabric of “safe neutrality” that the Dutch people had relied upon had begun to unravel.

  The journal of Annabel Farjeon, a member of Sadler’s Wells corps de ballet, described the sights she saw from moving trains and buses as the tour wound its way into Arnhem: “Hundreds and hundreds of miles of barbed wire covered the land between these towns in deep, tangled layers. The green acres were grayed over by the filigree of wire, which was bound along fences and peered out of the pale waters of half-submerged fields.” Every piece of landscape the dance company encountered foreshadowed war, including “giant, twelve-foot blocks of cement with iron spikes sticking out in all directions” that marked every roadway intersection. Farjeon reported in her diary seeing masses of Dutch soldiers with fixed bayonets, military and civilian construction crews building fortifications, and endless checkpoints that the company’s two buses had to pass. In point of fact, the Dutch had been a warrior culture for centuries, primarily fighting for their expanding Indonesian empire. But in 1940 their technology was old, laughably so, when measured against that of the Third Reich next door.

  After safely arriving in Arnhem to the welcomes of a Dutch baroness, Farjeon and two others from the company wandered from the theater down toward the Arnhem Road Bridge, the magnificent steel span erected over the Rhine in 1935. As they strolled toward the bridge, they passed on their left a beautiful villa and next to it the brick van Limburg Stirum School; next to that stood another schoolhouse that had once been the villa of Burgemeester van Heemstra of Arnhem.

  Then they strolled up onto the bridge deck. Farjeon said, “Along the river [to the right] stood opulent houses with gardens down to the water, where wealthy Dutchmen retired for their well-fed old age, so we decided.” The spot on the bridge where they stood, surrounded by stately villas and row houses, would become the point of focus for the entire world four years later when the structure became a bridge too far.

  The principal dancers of the tr
oupe—Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann—were given a more elegant private tour of Arnhem. “In the afternoon sun we stood on the bridge looking towards Germany,” said Fonteyn. “‘The frontier is only half an hour in that direction,’ said our guide. ‘Half an hour by car or ten minutes by tank!’ said Helpmann.”

  By now, Ninette de Valois had decided that the tour must end that night and the company would head straight west toward the North Sea as quickly as possible without ever entering Belgium or France.

  Late on the spring afternoon of 9 May, thoughts of war receded as the groups of English sightseers returned to the Schouwburg, but only after Farjeon and her friends spent time lost in the maze of narrow, winding streets of central Arnhem.

  A few blocks away in the van Heemstra apartment, Adriaantje was dressing for a night at the ballet. “For the occasion, my mother had our little dressmaker make me a long taffeta dress,” she said. “I remember it so well. I’d never had a long dress in my life…. There was a little round collar, a little bow here, and a little button in the front. All the way to the ground, and it rustled, you know. The reason she got me this, at great expense—we couldn’t afford this kind of thing—was that I was to present a bouquet of flowers at the end of the performance to Ninette de Valois, the director of the company.”

  That evening Ella and her daughter enjoyed prime seats to watch the Sadler’s Wells company dance two ballets, Horoscope and Façade, headlined by the dazzling raven-haired Margot Fonteyn, then nine days shy of her twenty-second birthday and already a star in the ballet world. The Arnhem Symphony Orchestra accompanied. At the conclusion of the performance, Ella handed Adriaantje a bouquet to present to de Valois, which the girl did with a curtsy. She would later mention with pride that she was on stage at the same time as Fonteyn.

  “I remember walking onto the bright stage, with the pretty ballerinas and their costumes,” she said.

  Annabel Farjeon concluded her journal entry by saying, “After the performance there was supper and again those dull dull speeches that officials love to make.” Chief among these speeches was that of Ella van Heemstra, who recited in English for the company and in Dutch for the locals in attendance, which accounts for Farjeon’s double use of the word “dull.”

  Audrey reveled in what she called her “first late night,” and then the company loaded costumes and equipment onto their buses and headed back to The Hague. Five days past her eleventh birthday, Adriaantje had shared a stage and a meal with three of the most famous figures in modern ballet, de Valois, Fonteyn, and Helpmann. It was a life-changing experience and in a matter of hours there would be another. The next one, however, was anything but pleasant.

  5

  The Unthinkable

  The blackest day in the history of the Netherlands began for Adriaantje when her mother burst into her bedroom on the third floor of the apartment building on Jansbinnensingel. Ella knocked aside clouds of beautiful ballet dancers as she swept to the windows and scraped open the curtains. It was Friday morning, a school day.

  “Wake up,” she said. “The war’s on.”

  Audrey would look at this moment as “the second-worse memory I have after my father’s disappearance.” But this was how the no-nonsense baroness settled scores in her own mind. She had been adamant that it was best to bring her daughter home to Holland because it would be safe. And it was all right for Alex to join the Dutch army, because Holland was neutral and would remain so. The how and why of Germany’s conquest of France and Belgium didn’t matter—Germany would simply go around Holland, because that was the gentlemanly way, and Ella knew firsthand that Adolf Hitler was every inch a gentleman.

  Except that this morning planes thundered overhead heading west from Germany, and an ongoing rumble of explosions crashed in the distance. Ian was up already and agitated by the goings-on as he shuffled into the room and peered out his sister’s window into the gathering dawn.

  Ella now faced a hard truth: The Wehrmacht Sixth Army had crossed the border, violating agreements that had held firm all the way back to 1914. Motorcycles, trucks, and tanks flowed in before first light, at around four o’clock. Luftwaffe planes began to overfly in ones and twos and then in large formations.

  Adriaantje had slept through the thunder of distant explosions, when the Dutch army had detonated the road and railroad bridges at Nijmegen ten miles to the south, and somehow also seemed to miss the rocking detonations when the Arnhem Road Bridge and nearby railroad bridge went up with thunderous booms at about the same time just a mile away from the apartment. It was the same bridge Margot Fonteyn and Annabel Farjeon had walked upon half a day earlier.

  In the ears of the van Heemstras, a siren wailed nonstop. The family radio clicked on, and after its tubes warmed up, a man was already talking in an excited voice. Usually programming didn’t begin until eight o’clock, but then this wasn’t a usual morning. The alarmed announcer told of paratroopers spilling out of planes near Gouda, and Delft, and north of Wijk bij Duurstede, and in the Betuwe—the broad plain south of Arnhem and the Rhine.

  All across the Netherlands, people were leaning their ears near radios. West of Arnhem in Utrecht, Cornelia Fuykschot, a girl just a year older than Adriaantje, saw the fear and anger in her parents’ eyes as the announcer spoke. “He never stopped!” she said of the grim reports. “It went on and on and on!” The German army was suddenly everywhere.

  In eastern Netherlands Dutchmen and their families close by the German border received confirmation of what they already knew and yet couldn’t believe: invasion. The overflying planes that rattled pictures on mantelpieces and plates on tables were German planes, and now it would be up to the Dutch army. Every Dutchman knew of the army because all had put in two years of compulsory service. It was a small country but a proud one, and the people were tough. Oh yes, quite tough.

  In Arnhem, the siren had finally stopped and in the distance the van Heemstras heard a pop-pop-popping sound, sharp and far off. Then came a rattle of what would soon be recognized as machine-gun fire, and it went on for a quite a while. Ella knew that bullets were flying in anger and Alex was out there somewhere with the army and possibly under fire.

  In the distance, the sounds of battle overlapped into a din. As the children and their mother looked down at the street below, the announcer warned, “Citizens are ordered to remain in their homes with shutters closed. Stay away from the windows because the enemy fears Dutch snipers and is shooting into windows where there is movement.”

  The order to stay away didn’t dissuade the children; it attracted them. As Audrey would admit years later, “Naturally, we all peeped out.”

  Adriaantje had a view from her bedroom window onto Jansbinnensingel, the street heading one way east, and across the beautiful lawn and fountains, Jansbuitensingel, heading west, revealed a cloudless sky that was brightening by the second from gray to blue. They were the most picturesque boulevards in all Arnhem.

  This particular morning, dust from the detonation of the bridges hung in the air, and pedestrians milled about on the sidewalk, most of them looking up at the sky. Above, at high altitude and low, twin-engine planes flew over in great formations. The window panes rattled with the vibrations of all those aircraft. In the distance came the chilling sound of sharp booms—they would learn soon enough that this was anti-aircraft fire from batteries of Dutch cannons aimed skyward toward the invaders.

  Another ten year old, Sid Baron, lived far to the north on a Frisian farm in Opende. Baron summed up the fears of all youngsters the age of Adriaantje and Ian: “Would I survive?” he wrote. “For how long? Would we get bombed? Would my little brother get killed, too? My sisters and parents? I was afraid.”

  In central Arnhem the van Heemstras could now see a curious parade. People with suitcases and bundles moved along both sides of the boulevard, from right to left, east to west, with many holding white flags. They looked to be wearing layers of clothes and carrying all they could besides. Some pushed wooden carts. Some were families,
with one or two or three on bicycles and others struggling to keep up on foot. All moved with nervous purpose, their heads bowed in a long, sad, silent march that went on for part of an hour. Every single person carried all he or she could—suitcases, bundles, boxes, briefcases, papers, framed paintings and photographs. There was a horse-drawn cart heavily loaded down and a little later, another.

  Once more the streets grew quiet and still. Ella, Ian, and Adriaantje waited and waited as the siren came and went. Then they saw their first German soldiers: Just three, dressed in gray, came riding down the street on bicycles. They had guns strapped on their backs, gray helmets, black boots, and they scanned the city nervously as they pedaled past. The gaze of one of them swept along the line of buildings and raked the apartment windows.

  The observers couldn’t know that these men had a right to some nerves. They were part of the SS Der Führer Regiment that had crossed the River IJssel five miles to the east at Westervoort on rubber rafts against heavy fire from the Dutch Army—the sharp popping sounds Audrey and Ian had heard earlier. This action had been the first ground combat of the battle for the Netherlands. Now these SS scouts were scanning for snipers or any other sign of resistance. On the eastern edge of Arnhem, they had commandeered bicycles because they had a long way to go and needed to move in a hurry—they were ordered to clear the area ten miles west through Oosterbeek and beyond in preparation for the 207th Division of infantry to march in.

  Adriaantje had expected fighting in the streets, but instead here came nervous men on bicycles. It took another long while for anything further to happen. In the meantime the plane traffic overhead had all but ceased. Then came the invaders en masse.

  “We saw the gray uniforms of the German soldiers on foot,” Audrey would remember later. “They all held machine guns and marched in looking spick-and-span and disciplined.” This show of force, this first impression made by the Wehrmacht, was designed to instill fear into the Dutch population—it certainly had that effect on a girl just turned eleven and a boy of fifteen.