05/05/2026
What an amazing story! I never knew.....
In the winter of 1944, a fifteen-year-old girl danced in a blacked-out room in occupied Holland. The windows were covered. The audience made no sound -- not during the performance, not after. Any noise could alert the N***s. Any light could mean death.
These were the "zwarte avonden" -- the black evenings -- secret performances held across the Netherlands to raise money for the Dutch Resistance. The money fed families in hiding. It bought forged documents. It kept people alive.
The girl dancing was Audrey Hepburn.
"The best audiences I ever had," she said decades later, "made not a single sound at the end of my performance."
Born on this day in 1929 in Brussels, Audrey Hepburn spent most of her childhood moving between Belgium, England, and the Netherlands. Her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, was Dutch aristocracy. Her father, a British banker, abandoned the family when Audrey was six. He would spend the war interned on the Isle of Man after being arrested as a member of the British Union of Fascists.
In 1939, with war looming, her mother moved them to Arnhem in the Netherlands, believing it would stay neutral as it had in the first World War.
She was wrong. In May 1940, the Germans invaded. Audrey was eleven years old.
To hide her English-sounding name, she began going by Edda van Heemstra. She enrolled at the Arnhem Conservatory and threw herself into ballet, dreaming of becoming a professional dancer. For a while, life went on -- performances at the city theater, lessons, practice. But the occupation darkened everything. Jewish musicians and dancers disappeared one by one. German officers sat in the front rows.
"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," she recalled years later. "And he stepped on the train."
In 1942, the N***s executed her uncle Otto van Limburg Stirum in retaliation for resistance activities. His body was dumped in a mass grave. One of her half-brothers was deported to a forced labor camp in Berlin. The other went into hiding. Whatever sympathy her mother had once held for the N**i regime died with Uncle Otto.
The family moved to the village of Velp and began working with the local resistance. Dr. Hendrik Visser 't Hooft, the resistance leader, used children as couriers because the Germans tended to ignore them. Audrey, who spoke fluent English, was perfect for the job. She carried messages. She delivered food and instructions to downed Allied pilots hiding in the forests. Once, when a German patrol approached while she was on a mission, she bent down and pretended to pick wildflowers. They passed without stopping.
"We saw young men put against the wall and shot," she said, "and they'd close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. Don't discount anything awful you hear or read about the N***s. It's worse than you could ever imagine."
In September 1944, the Allies launched Operation Market Garden -- the disastrous attempt to capture the bridge at Arnhem. British paratroopers were stranded behind enemy lines. Audrey's family hid one of them in their cellar for nearly a week, bringing him food, knowing that discovery meant ex*****on.
Then came the Hunger Winter. After Dutch railway workers went on strike to support the Allies, the Germans cut off food supplies to the western Netherlands. Starvation spread. Audrey's family ate tulip bulbs. Then grass. Then whatever they could find.
"I went as long as three days without food," she recalled. "For months, breakfast was hot water and one slice of bread made from brown beans."
She developed edema and anemia. She grew too weak to dance. More than 20,000 people would not survive the winter. By the time the Canadians liberated Velp on April 16, 1945, Audrey was near death herself.
Then came the food and medicine, delivered by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration -- the work that would later be carried on by UNICEF after it was founded in 1946. Aid workers set up stations at local schools. Audrey picked out sweaters and skirts that had been shipped from America.
She never forgot what it felt like to be saved.
After the war, Hepburn moved to Amsterdam to study ballet with Sonia Gaskell, then to London on a scholarship with the legendary Marie Rambert. But Rambert delivered difficult news: despite her talent, Audrey had started professional training too late, was too tall for the male dancers of the era, and her constitution had been weakened by wartime malnutrition. She would never be a prima ballerina. She turned to chorus work, then acting -- and in 1952, she landed her first major film role in "Secret People," playing a young ballerina and performing all her own dance sequences. She is pictured here in a still from that film.
Within a year, she was a Hollywood star -- "Roman Holiday," then "Sabrina," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "My Fair Lady." She won an Academy Award at twenty-four. She became one of the most famous women in the world.
But she rarely spoke about the war. The memories were too painful. And there was the complicated matter of her parents -- both had been N**i sympathizers before the occupation. How do you explain that your mother once admired Hi**er, even if she changed? That your father had been interned as a fascist?
So Audrey Hepburn became the woman the world wanted her to be: elegant, luminous, untouchable. She let them see Holly Golightly. She kept Edda van Heemstra to herself.
Then, in 1988, she became a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF.
She was fifty-nine years old. She had largely retired from acting. And now she was walking into famine zones and refugee camps, holding dying children, demanding that the world pay attention.
"I have a broken heart," she said after visiting Ethiopia. "I feel desperate. I can't stand the idea that two million people are in imminent danger of starving to death, many of them children."
She traveled to Sudan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Central America, Somalia. She testified before Congress. She gave interview after interview, trying to make people understand what she had seen. She was not playing a role. She was finally telling the truth about who she had always been.
"I can testify to what UNICEF means to children," she said, "because I was among those who received food and medical relief right after World War II. I have a long-lasting gratitude and trust for what UNICEF does."
Audrey Hepburn died on January 20, 1993, at the age of sixty-three. She had spent her final five years doing the work she said mattered most -- fighting for children the rest of the world had forgotten.
The girl who danced in blacked-out rooms. The girl who carried messages through the forest. The girl who nearly starved. She had survived thanks to the kindness of others, and she had spent her life making sure others could survive too.
In honor of Audrey Hepburn's 97th birthday today, please consider making a donation to support UNICEF's humanitarian aid programs on behalf of children in need worldwide at http://www.unicef.org/
Adult readers can learn more about Audrey Hepburn's little-known WWII story, including her work with the Dutch Resistance, in the riveting book, "Dutch Girl," at https://www.amightygirl.com/dutch-girl
There are also two inspiring picture book biographies about Audrey Hepburn's life as an actress and humanitarian, we highly recommend “Just Being Audrey” (https://www.amightygirl.com/just-being-audrey) and Audrey Hepburn: Little People, Big Dreams (https://www.amightygirl.com/audrey-hepburn-little-people-big-dreams), both for ages 5 and up
For books to inspire kids to make a difference in the world -- both locally and globally -- check out our blog post “Making an Impact: 40 Mighty Girl Books About Charity and Community Service” at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=10983
For many books about girls and women living through the WWII period, including numerous stories related to the Holocaust, visit our "WWII & Holocaust" section at http://amgrl.co/2ry9Ccu
