CNJ+ April 2023

Audrey Hepburn ACTRESS AND HUMANITARIAN - OFFICIAL SPOKESPERSON FOR UNICEF By, Pam Teel

British actress, Audrey Hepburn, (Audrey Kathleen Ruston) was born in Ixelles, Brussels, Belgium, in 1929. She was born into an aristocratic family; her mother, Ella Van Heemstra, being a Dutch Noblewoman. Her father was a British subject born in Auschitz, Bohemia, Austria- Hungary. He took on one of his ancestor’s surname’s, Hepburn, because it sounded more aristo cratic. The couple wed in 1926 and spent the first three years moving around between Brussels, Arnhem, The Hague, London, and then finally settled in the suburban Brussels municipality of Linkebeek in 1932. Hepburn's early childhood was shelter and privileged. Her multinational background was enhanced through her travelling between three countries with her fami ly due to her father's job. In the mid-1930s, Hepburn's parents recruited and collected donations for the British Union of Fascists. Her mother, Ella, met Adolf Hitler and wrote favorable articles about him for the B.U.F, but soon after, she began to see things differently and changed her mind about fascism. Unfortunately, her husband stayed true to his fascist’s ideals, walk ing out of the family when Audrey was only six years old. Audrey Hepburn often spoke about the effect this had on her being abandoned by her father, who never once came to visit her. That same year, her mother moved them both to her family's estate in Arnhem where Audrey was reunited for a brief time with her two half-brothers. Her father had always wanted her to be ed ucated in England, so in 1937, she was sent to live in Kent, England, where she was educated at a small private school in Elham. After Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, Hepburn's mother moved her daughter back to Arnhem in the hope that the Nether lands would remain neutral and be spared a German attack, but that didn’t happen. While there, from 1939 to 1945, Hepburn attended the Arnhem Conservatory. She had begun taking ballet lessons during her last years at boarding school, and continued training in Arnhem. After the Germans invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Hepburn used the name Edda van Heemstra, her mother’s surname, because an "En glish-sounding" name was considered dangerous during the German oc cupation. Her family was profoundly affected by the five-year German occupation. Some of her own family members were executed by the na zi’s for their resistance against them. Her uncle and her mother’s cousins were among them. Her uncle was not involved with the resistance but was chosen to make an example of due to his family’s prominence in Dutch society. Audrey raised money for the resistance by performing ballet and doing fundraisers in illegal musical performances behind blackened invi tation-only locations. The money went to help those who were sheltering the tens of thousands of Jews and other people in hiding across the Neth erlands. This included performing privately in her own hometown of Velp. Hepburn was also a courier for the resistance, delivering messages for them, and served as a volunteer nurse in a hospital that treated allied soldiers. If she were caught performing or delivering messages, she would have been

killed. In her biography, she recalls the memories she had while living amongst the Nazis. More than once she was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported. Seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon haunted her throughout her life. She also saw young men, who went against the Nazis, lined up and shot on the street. She witnessed how people starved and froze to death as Dutch rations were seized by the enemy. Seeing her own relatives killed by the enemy was the turning point in the attitude of Hepburn's mother, who had flirted with Nazism up to this point, and especially after Hepburn's half-brother Ian was deported to Berlin to work in a German labor camp, and her other half-brother Alex, went into hiding to avoid the same fate. CONTINUED ON PAGE 20...

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APRIL 2023