A Fashion Icon in the Resistance
Audrey Hepburn was an icon of both fashion and the silver screen. Before she rose to fame and fortune, a teenaged Hepburn had helped the Dutch Resistance in WWII. She was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston in 1929 in Brussels, to a British father and a Dutch aristocratic mother. Her parents divorced, and in 1939, ten-year-old Audrey, her siblings, and her mother, moved to Arnhem, in the Netherlands. Hepburn was enrolled in a conservatory, where she learned ballet. Unfortunately, the Germans invaded on May 10th, 1940, and forced the Netherlands to surrender within four days. Like the rest of the Dutch, Hepburn and her family suffered great privations under Nazi occupation. In 1942, the Germans executed her uncle in retaliation for sabotage by the resistance, even though he had not been involved.
Hepburn’s half-brother was deported to Germany to toil for the Nazis as a slave worker, and another sibling had to hide to avoid the same fate. Hepburn had trained as a ballerina and dancer from a young age, and she put those talents to use to help the Dutch Resistance. She danced and performed in illegal underground recitals known as zwarte avonden (“black evenings”), and donated her earnings to the resistance. This despite her enfeebled physical condition, after the Nazis squeezed the Netherlands hard for resources to fuel their war effort. Hepburn, like many other Dutch, suffered from malnutrition. She still danced, however. As she put it: “it was some way in which I could make some kind of contribution“. She also became a child courier, used because her youth made her less suspicious in German eyes. She carried documents, coded messages, and other items between various resistance groups.
On one occasion, Hepburn recalled: “I had to step in and deliver our tiny underground newspaper, I stuffed them in my woollen socks and my wooden shoes, I got on my bike, and delivered them“. Late in the war, a German blockade of food to the Netherlands led to a famine known as the Hunger Winter. Hepburn and her family subsisted on miniscule food amounts, including tulip bulbs. By the time the Netherlands were liberated, she and her family were close to starvation. As she put it: “We lost everything, of course… but we didn’t give a hoot. We got through with our lives, which was all that mattered“. Soon after the war, she moved to Britain, got her first film role in 1948, and went on to star in dozens more movies. Audrey Hepburn never forgot her wartime childhood experience, and eventually became a special ambassador for United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
