As a teenager growing up in the Netherlands, the Oscar-winning actress bravely conveyed the messages of the Dutch resistance movement during the Nazi occupation.
On a BBC Radio 4 podcast The youngest heroes of history, Nikola Koklan presents incredible stories of rebellion, danger, and the astonishing power of youth through the stories of young people who changed the world.
The latest episode is dedicated to Audrey Hepburn, who became a film and fashion icon in the 1950s and 1960s.
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She was nominated for five Oscars and won this prestigious award for best actress in 1953 for her role in the film Roman Holiday.
But, during World War II, as a teenager she played a very different role - holding ballet performances in secret to raise money for the Dutch resistance movement during the Nazi occupation.
Hepburn was born in Brussels in 1929 to Dutch Baroness Ella van Heemstra and British-Austrian businessman Joseph Hepburn Ruston.
In London, her parents became supporters of Oswald Mosley, leader of the violently anti-Semitic British Union of Fascists (BUF).
Van Heemstra wrote an article for the BUF magazine in which she described what she considered the grandeur of Nazi Germany.
Hepburn Ruston left the family when Audrey was six years old.
He was later arrested as a "collaborator with foreign fascists" and was held in British prisons during the war.
“Even when she was a little girl, you know, she was extroverted, laughing, playing, acting.
"My grandfather called her 'the devil,'" the actress's younger son, Luca Dotti, told Robert Macen, author of Dutch Girl, about Audrey Hepburn's life during World War II, in an interview for the show History's Youngest Heroes.
"Audrey's mother felt that England, and especially Kent, was not a place for Audrey to grow up because of the danger of the Germans invading England through France," says Matzen.
Van Heemstra took her daughter from a British boarding school, and they moved to the family estate in the Netherlands.
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Audrey enrolled in dance school under the more Dutch-sounding name, Adrijantje van Heemstra (when she started acting, she changed her last name to Hepburn).
Her mother still admired Adolf Hitler and believed that he would never occupy "her" country.
“Moving to the Netherlands didn't mean coming home.
"She didn't speak Dutch."
"She had to go to Dutch school, and she didn't understand a word, and the kids at school made fun of her," says Dottie of his mother's experience in the Netherlands.
Hitler nevertheless occupied the Netherlands in May 1940.
"It was so hot on the Eastern Front that there was a constant need to deliver men and equipment. The Germans needed food, they needed clothing for their soldiers, and they were taking everything from the Dutch and other occupied countries," says Mezon, describing the circumstances at the time.
Audrey Hepburn's uncle, Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, took a principled stand against the Nazis.
In 1942, a group of Dutch resistance members attempted to blow up a German train near Rotterdam.
Although Van Limburg Stirum was not involved, he was arrested because he was a prominent opponent of the Nazis.
The Nazis took him and four others to the forest, shot them, and threw their bodies into unmarked graves.
Hepburn loved her uncle, whom she viewed as a father figure, and was heartbroken when he was killed.
"It became known throughout the country and became a motivation for the resistance of the people in the Netherlands," says Matzen.
As the Nazis took away food and other supplies from the Netherlands, the Van Heemstra family, although privileged, began to starve.
When Hepburn turned 15, she was ordered to join a Nazi artists' association called the Reich Chamber of Culture, or stop giving dance performances.
She decided to give up performing.
"Through dance she could dream, she could fly, she could forget."
"It was her escape from reality," Dottie says of his mother's passion.
To avoid detection, Hepburn danced in a safe house, behind closed blinds and by candlelight.
During the performance, soft music could be heard from the piano, but there was no applause.
At the end of the performance, money was collected for the resistance movement.
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From ballerina to spy
In the spring of 1944, Hepburn volunteered to be an assistant to physician Hendrik Wieserthoft, who was a member of the resistance movement.
Although Audrey Hepburn's mother was considered a Nazi collaborator, Wieserthoft desperately needed help for the thousands of people hiding from the Nazis.
He had enough trust in Audrey to hire her.
Hepburn was in church on September 17, 1944, when the church hymn was interrupted by the hum of an engine.
Operation Market Garden, a plan by Allied forces to capture nine bridges on the Rhine River, began.
When she ran out of the church and looked up at the sky, she saw thousands of Allied paratroopers.
Unfortunately, two heavy Nazi armored divisions had regrouped in the area, and Nazi tanks arrived in front of her house.
The battle lasted nine days, and Hepburn and her family were hidden in the basement the entire time.
When they came out, they learned that the Nazis had won the battle.
She heard screams from the building where the Nazis were torturing and killing members of the Dutch resistance movement.
When Allied airmen heading for Germany had to crash-land in the Netherlands, Wieserthoft sent Hepburn into the woods to meet a British paratrooper and deliver a coded message she had hidden in a sock.
After completing her task, as she was leaving the forest, she saw the Dutch police coming towards her.
She quickly got the hang of it, picked some wildflowers and flirtatiously offered them to the police.
They were enchanted and did not question her further.
After that, she often conveyed messages from the resistance movement.
"She deeply believed that there was a struggle between good and evil and that one had to choose a side," says Dottie.
"The Germans didn't take children seriously. 'Just get out of my way, child,' they would say things like that."
"The Dutch realized that children, because they were not suspicious of the Nazis, could carry messages, do key things for the resistance movement, and the children loved it."
"It was exciting, it was dangerous, and they became heroes of the resistance," adds Macen.
By February 1945, it was reported that 500 Dutch people were dying of starvation every week.
Hepburn and her family, like many other people, were in desperate need of food.
She became seriously ill - she developed anemia, jaundice, and edema (abnormal accumulation of fluid in the body).
Due to fierce fighting that flared up again outside her house, Hepburn and her family hid in the basement for three weeks.
The fighting finally ceased on April 16, 1945.
She smelled the smell of tobacco, which was absent in the Netherlands during the war.
When she climbed the stairs and opened the basement door, she saw five Canadian soldiers smoking cigarettes and holding machine guns pointed at her.
She immediately addressed them in English.
One exclaimed: "We have not only liberated the city, we have liberated an English girl!"
Hepburn later told her son that she never forgave her mother for being sympathetic to the Nazis.
After the war, she received a scholarship to the Rambert Ballet School in London.
Although she was talented, the years of starvation had a lasting effect on her constitution, and she did not have enough strength and endurance to become a ballerina.
Instead of dancing, she devoted herself to acting.
She received minor roles in London's West End theater and films such as The Lavender Hill Gang.
Her first leading role was in 1953 in the film Roman Holiday.
The film was extremely successful, receiving praise from both critics and audiences, and in addition to the Oscar, Hepburn also won Emmy, Grammy, and Tony awards.
Throughout her career, she has been involved in charity work, especially as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund.
She passed away in 1993 at the age of 63.
"Because of the war and everything she'd been through, Audrey had keen instincts, and that experience helped her play all these different characters," says Macen.
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