09/05/2020
Something else to think about besides Covid19. We're big fans and wow, what an amazing woman ❤️
At a refugee camp, she saw a 14-year old boy lying on a dirt floor with acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema, due to malnutrition.
It brought back horrible memories.
She was born on May 4, 1929.
"During five years of N**i occupation, [her family] suffered greatly. The N**is executed her uncle and a cousin of her mother because of their efforts in the resistance movement, and placed her brother in a labor camp. 'There was always a cloud of fear and repression,' she said years later.
At the time, she was known as Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston.
"When Holland was liberated, relief trucks were one step behind. But malnutrition had left [her], then 16, suffering from acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema -- swelling of the limbs," according to the Los Angeles Times.
Just like the young boy she saw at the refugee camp in the Sudan.
After the war, she, her mother and her siblings moved to Amsterdam, where she worked as a cook and housekeeper to support her family. She wanted to be a ballerina, but she was told that her height and weak constitution (the after-effect of wartime malnutrition) would make the status of prima ballerina unattainable.
She then moved to London, where she started acting. She would eventually make her way to the United States, as an immigrant.
In 1953, she won her first role. Originally, the producers wanted Elizabeth Taylor opposite Gregory Peck, but director William Wyler was impressed with her screen test.
The movie was titled "Roman Holiday", the film that would launch Audrey Hepburn's career.
Although she would become known around the world as the beautiful actress who starred in such memorable films as "Breakfast at Tiffany's," her war time experience continued to haunt her.
When she was offered the lead role in an adaptation of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” she turned it down.
"Years later she told an interviewer that the idea of playing Anne Frank overwhelmed her because she felt too much kinship with the girl whose family was ultimately discovered and killed by the N**is," according to the Los Angeles Times. “I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both 10 when war broke out. . . . I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it . . . and it destroyed me,” she told Lesley Garner of the London Sunday Telegraph in a 1991 interview.
“I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. . . . We saw reprisals. 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. If you read the diary, I’ve marked one place where she says, ‘Five hostages shot today.’ That was the day my uncle was shot.
“And in this child’s words I was reading about what was inside me and is still there. It was a catharsis for me. This child who was locked up in four walls had written a full report of everything I’d experienced and felt.”
“I believe Audrey felt survivor’s guilt,” author Robert Matzen said. “She survived. Anne Frank did not.”
She also revealed later in the book “Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II,” by Matzen, there were aspects of her early life that she wished to forget. Her Dutch mother, the Baroness Ella van Heemstra, met Hi**er in the 1930s and wrote admiringly about him in British fascist publications — but changed her mind during the brutal N**i occupation of the Netherlands from 1940 to 1945. (By contrast, the continuing N**i sympathies of van Heemstra’s English ex-husband, Hepburn’s father Joseph Ruston, kept him jailed throughout the war)", according to the Times of Israel.
Hepburn herself "displayed heroism on behalf of individuals in danger. Volunteering for the resistance, she aided Jews in hiding, raising funds through dancing to keep them safe," Matzen said.
Hepburn finally found the courage to help tell Anne Frank’s story, when she served as narrator in a special concert tour of the London Symphony Orchestra to raise funds for UNICEF.
After she retired from acting, she would become a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, to provide help and aid to children who were suffering from war, like she did.
That's when she saw the young boy in the Sudan, according to the Audrey Hepburn web site.
“That was exactly the same way I finished the war--that age, with those three things [acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema].
As UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, she visited "a polio vaccine project in Turkey, training programmes for women in Venezuela, projects for children living and working on the street in Ecuador, projects to provide drinking water in Guatemala and Honduras and radio literacy projects in El Salvador. She saw schools in Bangladesh, projects for impoverished children in Thailand, nutrition projects in Viet Nam and camps for displaced children in Sudan," according to UNICEF.
Hepburn received the United States' highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in December 1992. During that year, though ill with cancer, she had continued her work for UNICEF, traveling to Somalia, Kenya, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, France and the United States.
She would say of all her achievements in life what she was most proud of was how she helped millions of children as UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, helping impoverished children in the poorest nations, bringing them much-needed food, medicine, and clothing, just as she received when she was a child.
According to a 2019 article in People Magazine, "Hepburn, who died in 1993 at age 63 from abdominal cancer, spent the last four years of her life as an ambassador for UNICEF. Even more than her beloved films, she found in her mission to call attention to the suffering of the world’s children, her true calling."
"There is a moral obligation," she would say, "that those who have should give to those who don't...We have a debt to each other, to humanity. Maybe some people don't feel that way. I rather pity them. I think people like that live such an isolated life and don't have the joys of helping, of changing the world little bit."
As Matzen said, “here is a woman who, as a girl, experienced horrible things, and channeled them into beauty and positivity, spreading messages of peace and survival.”
Photo courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery London
