Audrey Hepburn Velp

Ghosts—Part 2

Note: Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II will be released in the United States by GoodKnight Books on April 15 and in Italy by Piemme in June. The Polish (Albatros) and Dutch (Overamstel) editions will follow, with others hopefully being announced soon.

Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II by Robert Matzen

The Stadsschouwburg in Arnhem. From the first row of the balcony, known as the Queen’s Circle, Adriaantje watched her first ballet performance in December 1939. Within a few years she would be performing as Audrey Hepburn-Ruston on this stage as Arnhem’s most famous ballerina.

I’m not one who sees ghosts, but I sometimes can feel them, or simply the weight of history hits me—understanding what happened in a place and how the people felt who lived it. Following the WWII trail in and around Arnhem as background for writing Dutch Girl, there were many occasions when I felt the gravity of the war and those who experienced it, or in some cases, affected the course of history.

I felt it in the streets of Oosterbeek where the van Heemstras lived in the 1930s and years later SS Panzer troops fought to the death with British Airborne house to house and room to room in one of the most savage melees of the Western Front.

I felt it in the Diogenes command bunker at Deelen Air Base just a few miles from Audrey’s home in Velp. Diogenes was a massive concrete building that served as German fighter central command for all the Netherlands. It was so formidable a structure it couldn’t be destroyed during or after the war. It stands today and always will, and down in the bowels of Diogenes where Luftwaffe staff worked for years, there are said to be ghosts and I don’t doubt it for a moment.

I felt it in a hangar of the air base that had been disguised as a Dutch home and is now a farmer’s barn. Inside, warning signs remain painted on the walls in German: RAUCHEN—VERBOTEN! SMOKING—FORBIDDEN! And the place still smells of petrol after all these decades.

I felt it in the corridors and stairwells and balconies of the Stadsschouwburg—Arnhem’s City Theatre where Audrey performed from 1941 into 1944.

I felt it at Kasteel Zijpendaal where Audrey’s grandfather Baron van Heemstra lived from 1939 into 1942 along with Audrey’s Aunt Meisje and Uncle Otto. Audrey’s presence is there on the grounds by the lake where she communed with nature and read her books during a short and happy time before the war became personal.

I felt it at the site of the Arnhemsche Muziekschool, the most important building in Audrey’s world until it was blown to bits by German tanks to root out British paratroopers during the battle.

This was one of only two photos I could find of Audrey’s beloved Muziekschool at Boulevard Heuvelink 2 in Arnhem, not far from the bridge. Not much remained after German tanks and self-propelled guns were through with their work ferreting out British paratroopers from the area. (Courtesy Gelders Archive)

I felt it in the streets of Velp, at the site of Villa Beukenhof, the van Heemstra home; at the site of the Velp hospital, center of Resistance activities where Audrey volunteered; and at the site of the Rotterdamsche Bank that had been converted into a prison in 1944. It was from there that Audrey heard the screams of Dutchmen being tortured.

I felt it as I walked the route she took along back streets from Villa Beukenhof to the hospital, a walk of just a few minutes that had to be tension-filled for a 14-year-old girl with German soldiers always present.

I felt it at St. Michielsgestel where Audrey’s Uncle Otto was imprisoned. I was fortunate to be able to stroll the halls of the seminary building, a spooky old building, and walk the forest where Otto met his fate. This man and his four companions are national heroes who unfortunately have been, in a sense, lost to time as the Dutch tried to move on from the war. There’s still a commemoration at the 15 August 1942 site every year, but the attendees are aging and growing fewer. My hope is that Dutch Girl will shine a new light on The Five and bring them back to a prominence so richly deserved.

For me the immersion in Audrey’s history was total, and on many occasions I felt myself going back in time, aided by eyewitnesses, to a history in Velp shared with all the van Heemstras, especially the Dutch girl.

The title of the book reads Audrey Hepburn and World War II for a reason—it’s not just her story. She lived in a place and time affected by so many external factors that to understand what she went through, one needs to understand a global situation. Why did she work for the Resistance, and why would Resistance leaders rely on a 14 year old? Why did the British try to take Arnhem from the Germans? Why did the battle go the way it did, with devastating results for Audrey and her family? Why was Velp so critical to the Western Theater, causing the battle line to harden in that spot? Why did the food run out? How did the food start flowing again? As my friend Tom would say, “It’s all connected, maaan.”

I sit here writing this on the last day before Dutch Girl’s official release on April 15—the very next day, April 16, is Liberation Day in Velp, which is still remembered with a ceremony every year. The first time I met and interviewed Rosemarie Kamphuisen, who was Audrey’s contemporary in Velp, I thanked her for agreeing to lend her time to the project. She squared her shoulders and said, “I am happy to! After all, you are our liberators!” Imagine.

Each year the people of Velp gather at the statue of a small Jewish onderduiker to commemorate Velp’s Liberation Day, 16 April. The moving ceremony culminates with each attendee laying a tulip at the feet of the little girl.

For his New Books in Film podcast, Joel Tscherne had interviewed me in past years for Fireball and Mission, and the other day for Dutch Girl. After hearing me talk about the experience of writing it, he said, “This sounds like your most personal project of all.” He’s right; it really is. I wrote the book that was in me about my now-close-friend Audrey Hepburn. It’s backstory that explains who she became and why she lived the life she did. It’s a very human tale constructed with the help of many wonderful people in the Netherlands and it honors all of them for what they surmounted—so much so that I dedicated Dutch Girl to the people of Velp.

Long Live Oranje!

The massive Diogenes Luftwaffe command bunker just north of Arnhem. Those blotches on the wall are patched bullet and shell holes.

Inside Diogenes, German staff workers known as “blitz maidens” shine light beams on a sophisticated, wall-sized glass map of the Netherlands to note the locations of bomber formations during 1943. Now the interior of the bunker is silent and the lower level is said to be haunted.

Note the painting to resemble curtained windows for what looks from a distance to be a Dutch farmhouse–the Germans did this to confuse Allied bombers. In reality this is a hangar for a German fighter aircraft, either a Focke Wolf 190 or a BF-109.

Inside, warnings in red remind German airplane mechanics not to smoke in a room that after 75 years’ use as a barn still smells of petrol.

One-way Mission

Jamie Dornan as Jan Kubis and Cilian Murphy as Josef Gabcik, two heroes of Czech history.

Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II covers Audrey Hepburn’s life under Nazi rule in the Netherlands from May 1940 through April 1945. We’ve all grown up with movies and TV shows depicting the Nazis and what they were like, but such a lifetime bombardment can only desensitize the viewer. Yes, the Nazis were terrible and yes, they committed unspeakable acts upon millions. We know that; can’t we move on? Well, no, let’s not. Let’s never truly move on because we had better learn from this history so we never have to repeat it. Hate whipped up against innocents must never again point a democracy toward extremism that puts the free world in peril.

Friday night I watched a feature that you probably missed, detailing the attempt to assassinate a German high commander you probably never heard of. The picture is Anthropoid, which sounds like science fiction but details Operation Anthropoid, the Allied mission to take out Reinhard Heydrich, the number three Nazi as of 1941 and Hitler’s SS executioner known as “the butcher of Prague.” Heydrich was key to implementation of the Final Solution—when Hitler admires you for your ruthlessness, that’s saying something.

Late in 1941 a group of Czech special ops soldiers parachuted into their country on a top-secret mission to kill Heydrich. Anthropoid isn’t the first picture to cover this mission, but I’m not sure I need to see the others—I’m still recovering from this one. As I watched, I kept thinking, this was Audrey Hepburn’s world, living in a Nazi police state where civilians must not so much as make eye contact with the occupier, where no one was trusted and everyone might be a betrayer, where locals heard random gunshots echoing off the buildings as their neighbors were murdered. The only difference is that Anthropoid depicts life in Prague, Czechoslovakia, rather than in the Dutch city of Arnhem and its neighboring village, Velp. Both countries were occupied by the Third Reich.

I spend quite a lot of time in Dutch Girl discussing the Nazi regime because everything they did mattered to everyone in the countries they had invaded. It so happened that the village in which Audrey lived with her family for the worst part of the war, Velp, was the same village used in the latter part of the war as headquarters for the top Nazi rulers in Holland. In fact, the Reichskommissar of all the Netherlands was Audrey’s neighbor. As in, can I borrow a cup of sugar? He lived that close by.

This intimacy with evil and with death permeates every frame of Anthropoid, which displays a few sentences painting a picture of the butcher of Prague and devotes all its run time to putting us in close quarters with the heroes sent on what they have to know is a one-way mission. When they reveal to local Prague resistance leaders why they are there and who they plan to kill, the reaction is equal parts anger and fear. Even aiming a bomb or bullets in Heydrich’s direction will mean the deaths of thousands of innocent Czechs whether the attempt succeeds or not. This action will start a war of annihilation no matter the result.

With stakes so high, no one can be trusted and moment to moment we wonder where and when the plan will break down, when the Germans will come bursting in with guns blazing or worse, when they will take prisoners. German torture was very real and we see it in Anthropoid. Audrey told a chilling little story of walking along the street in her village and hearing screams coming from a building that had been turned into an SS jail. Her mother explained that men inside were being tortured. Do me a favor and take a moment to let that sink in. Your gentle humanitarian heard the screams of neighbor Velpenaren being tortured (and believe me, she endured much worse than that during the war).

An elegant gingerbread turret marked the Rotterdamsche Bank in Velp. In 1944 it became an SS prison and Audrey heard screams from within as she walked past.

Anthropoid pulls no punches; even this extraordinary trailer packs a wallop that’s true to the picture. The war is presented as the war really was, and this mission is recreated down to the names of the patriots who participated and the floor tile in the apartment where the plot was hatched. The attempt to kill Heydrich plays out in human terms, with no computer-generated assist and no one defying the laws of physics. The fate of the assassins is depicted with gut-wrenching clarity, and we see what real heroes looked like and what they sacrificed in this war. I salute you, Sean Ellis, writer, director, and cinematographer, for the searing vision you presented in this, a motion picture I will never forget. Shooting it in Prague using Czech actors and crew as much as possible injected extra adrenalin into the proceedings.

One last thing: As the story of Anthropoid unfolded, I thought of Audrey describing how in the darkest times gallows humor got her family through. She remembered bombs falling, tanks droning past, and the rat-tat-tat of machine-gun fire—as she, her mother, aunt, and grandfather cracked jokes and giggled in the cellar of their besieged home. That spirit triumphed over Adolf Hitler and all his hate, and it remained within Audrey as she made the transition from actress to beacon for peace.

As the assassination attempt unfolds, and immediately goes wrong, Reinhard Heydrich (Detlef Bothe) stands to shoot a patriot blocking the road ahead. At left, Jan Kubis attempts to toss a bomb at the car. Actor Jamie Dornan had portrayed Christian Grey in three films based on the erotic “50 Shades” novels. Let’s not hold that against him because in Anthropoid, he’s quite good.

Friends

Young pre-Hollywood Audrey.

I’m done. The fun part is over—the fun part being sitting alone night after night, figuring out the story and writing it. If you commit to 1,000 words a session and understand that some of the words will be good, some bad, and some indifferent, before too long you get a book. Following that process, along with three trips to the Netherlands and a year associated with Dutch researcher Maddie van Leenders, Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, is written and weighs in at about 103,000 words. Release is set for April 15, 2019. As a workaholic introvert, I have enjoyed the experience of spending two years alone with Audrey Hepburn more than I can tell you. She’s been very pleasant company; in fact about the pleasantest ever, right up there with George Washington.

When you work on a biography that long and get so deep inside the heart and soul of your subject, he or she invariably becomes a friend, or at least a “work friend.” When I produced the three documentary films on George Washington, we became pals and I still miss him after more than 10 years.

I would call Errol Flynn a work friend at best because here I was working in the same office with a tortured soul for two books and along the way finally figured out what was going on in his chaotic, complex mind. Just yesterday I watched his finest acting job, in Elizabeth and Essex, and because I know him so well, my heart broke at the heroic effort this generally lazy hedonist put into one very tough job, to make sure the powers trying to defeat him would not prevail. Then there was the leading lady of his lifetime, Olivia de Havilland, who I had to figure out for the book Errol & Olivia (BTW, Belated Happy Birthday this past July 1, OdeH). We had been correspondents for a long time, and I studied her from Saratoga, California, on; in fact it was there in the concrete driveway of the Fontaine home that I laid my hand over the tiny handprints of Livvie and her little sister Joan. They must have been six and five at the time they pressed them into the cement, but it’s as if these two future Academy Award winners were already performing their own Grauman’s Chinese ceremony. I think in retrospect Livvie’s the most interesting person I’ve ever tackled. She remains at age 102 a closed book, a loner, and 100% pure badass. I have come to admire her tremendously.

Loner Olivia de Havilland and complicated Errol Flynn.

I’ve documented Carole Lombard on these pages as well as in Fireball so I won’t bore you with more, except to say hers is a lively spirit to spend a couple of years alone with. There were a number of surprises on that project. Among them was Clark Gable, an interesting guy and, I concluded, an OK guy despite a flawed character. But then most of us are flawed characters one way or another. The second surprise involved the 15 Air Corps pilots on Lombard’s death plane who wanted their stories to be told. Who knew? One of these fellas even showed up a couple years ago, which introduced me to a new friend, Felicia Borla of the Clark County Coroner’s Office.

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

The lively Lombard and her cat-who-ate-the-canary smile.

Jim Stewart and I came to an understanding over the course of Mission’s development. During his lifetime, two things were sure about Jim: 1) he would not talk about his WWII combat career, and 2) he hated biographers. So what did I set out to write? His combat biography. You’d suppose that on the other side he wouldn’t be happy with me, but in describing Stewart in combat I put a spotlight on the great group of guys he commanded in battle. Those men deserved the kind of attention that their proximity to Jimmy Stewart the actor would have promoted, and Mission made that happen. So now Jim and I are OK; not tight, but OK.

And now we come to Audrey Hepburn. Audrey’s another tough cookie for a simple reason: She had secrets she felt could not be revealed, which led her to turn down several seven-figure offers from publishers to write her memoir. Then she died much too soon, and biographers went to town writing about her life and they’re still at it, and now I’ve done it too.

My book’s different from the others because I went right after the secrets, and had to hack and slash through a lot of false leads, inaccurate reporting, myths, and subterfuge to get at the truth, or at least what truth can be determined when files have been intentionally destroyed. I’m not going to give you any spoilers here, so you’re going to have to wait and read Dutch Girl to find out what the secrets are and if she makes it out of World War II alive.

I wanted to use this photo on the cover of Mission but got overruled.

Like always there was a get-acquainted period with Audrey, and I came to see her as a pretty fierce introvert. Well, to be precise, she wasn’t an introvert as a ballerina, which is all she ever wanted to be. It was the acting and particularly the speaking that gave her the shakes. We got along very well and the good vibes grew, and now I’m associated and sharing information with her son, Luca Dotti. Luca’s now in the process of adding some pretty incredible details to the narrative, things only someone inside the family could.

There’s nothing like the experience of positive energy aligning on a great project, and that’s what Dutch Girl has been—the most enjoyable adventure of my career thanks in large part to a wonderful group of Dutch people who love history, or lived it, or knew Audrey, or had some sort of expertise they were willing to provide to a clumsy American. They include Maddie along with Gety, Annemarth, Clan, Rosemarie, Ben, Herman, Patrick, Johan, Dick, and Robert, Luca in Rome, and Marina and Ann, my stateside researchers. They all have made collaboration a joy—even for a guy who likes nothing better than to sit alone and write.

In June 2017 with the help of Dutch historian and author Gety Hengeveld-de Jong, I interviewed Ben van Griethuysen, Annemarth Visser ‘t Hooft, and Rosemarie Kamphuisen, who lived in the village of Velp with Audrey during World War II. All provided information critical to the Dutch Girl narrative.