Did you know that Audrey Hepburn helped the Dutch resistance during the Holocaust?

Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels, Belgium, on May 4, 1929. Her mother was a Dutch noblewoman and so she grew up in the Netherlands, mainly in Amsterdam. When the Nazis invaded Amsterdam, Audrey went by the name “Edda van Heemstra” as having an English sounding name was dangerous under occupation.

In 1942, her uncle was executed by the Nazis and her half brother was deported to a concentration camp. Her other half brother went into hiding shortly thereafter. Audrey witnessed the horrors of the Holocaust from the outside. After the war, she said: “more than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. 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, and he stepped on the train. I was a child observing a child.”

After the things she had seen and what had happened to her family, she and her mother began supporting the Dutch resistance. Audrey would perform secret dance recitals to earn money for the resistance, pass messages in the resistance, volunteer at an underground Dutch hospital, and even hid a British paratrooper in her home.

After the war, Audrey said: “We saw young men put against the wall and shot, 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 Nazis. It’s worse than you could ever imagine.”

Audrey and her family were greatly affected by the Great Dutch Famine during the winter of 1944-1945. Audrey nearly died of starvation during this time, and resorted to eating tulip bulbs. She suffered from jaundice, anemia, oedema, and a respiratory infection.

Audrey and her family survived the war, and Audrey became the iconic movie star you now know her as. She declined the chance to play Anne Frank in a movie, as she found that the subject was far too personal to relive again. She died in Switzerland in 1993 at age sixty-three.

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