“You know, from an early age she was outgoing, laughing, playing, acting. My grandfather called her ‘Monkey Puzzle,'” said the actress’s youngest son, Luca. Dottie speaks to Robert Matzen, author of Dutch Girl, a chronicle of Hepburn’s life. In an interview with “The Youngest Hero in History,” he talked about his life during World War II.
“Audrey’s mother decided that England in general, and Kent in particular, was not the place for Audrey because of the imminent threat of German forces suddenly sweeping across France and invading England,” Matzen said. say.
Van Heemstra withdrew her daughter from boarding school in England. They moved to a mansion in the Netherlands, where Audrey enrolled in a dance school and took the more Dutch-sounding name Adrianche van Heemstra (she later changed her last name to Hepburn when she began acting). ). Her mother still respected Adolf. Hitler believed that he would never invade “her” country.
“Moving to the Netherlands was not like going home. She couldn’t speak Dutch. She was teased by the new kids and went to school in the Netherlands without understanding a word. I had to go to school,” Dottie said of her mother’s experience in the Netherlands.
Hitler invaded and occupied the Netherlands in May 1940. “The Eastern Front was a furnace from which resources could not be scraped together fast enough. The Germans needed food and clothing for their troops, and all that was taken from the Dutch.” other occupied countries,” Matzen says of the situation.
Hepburn’s uncle, Count Otto van Limburg Stirm, took a principled stand against the Nazis. In 1942, a resistance group attempted to blow up a German train near Rotterdam. Van Limburg Stirm was not involved, but was arrested because he was a prominent anti-Nazi figure. Nazi agents chased him and four others into the forest, shot them to death, and dumped their bodies in an unmarked grave. Hepburn loved her uncle as a father figure, but was devastated by his uncle’s murder. “It became a national incident and an incitement to the Dutch people,” Matzen said.
Her family was well off, but the Nazis diverted food and resources from the Netherlands, and Van Heemstra’s family starved. When Hepburn turned 15, she was ordered to join the Nazis. Kulturkammerjoin an artists’ union, or give up dancing in public. She chose to give up performing.
